Total Health Systems | February 11, 2013 (updated December 18, 2018)

Total Health System Discusses Heart Burn

Hello, it’s Dr. Aaron Lundgaard and I’m a clinical director at Total Health Systems. Today I’d like to discuss a topic with you that has been coming into our clinic quite a bit lately.

First, a little description of the clinic- we are a multi-disciplinary health care facility. We address a wide variety of problems utilizing our medical team, our chiropractic team, physical therapists, massage therapist, and we have an expansive nutrition program, as well. That is really going to be our topic for today is a little bit of nutrition. Specifically, one of the most common conditions we’re seeing now a days with our patients is heart burn or reflux, GURD. These are all the same Gastro esophageal Reflux is GURD. But more commonly everybody knows it as heartburn. The common prescriptions that are out there in the common traditional medical solution for heartburn it’s that little purple pill or an over counter Zantac or Tums, or Pepto-Bismol; these types of things that’s been the traditional medical approach that is not our approach.

The medical approach really deals with the symptoms associated with this condition of heartburn and in that medical approach they’re saying that hey, your stomach is full of acid, the acid is gurgling up into your esophagus. That’s what causing that burning sensation and really causing, you know, the heart burn. The different approaches that they might use to reduce that acid are possibly to put in a basic solution into your stomach. Right? That’s where Tums comes into play. Tums is sodium bicarbonate. It increases the pH in your stomach and by increasing your pH it reduces that burning sensation. It gets the juice more towards neutral. The other concept and most of the prescription concepts are called Hydrogen or H2 blockers. What that’s doing is blocking the, the production of certain cells in your stomach to produce hydrochloric acid. So instead of instead of just minimizing the burning sensation, you’re actually stopping the stomach from producing acid in the stomach. There are still fundamental problems with that approach, when you start blocking production of acid in your stomach that can cause some long-range problems. The first thing it’s going to cause is improper digestion. Your body produces acid in our stomach for a reason. We have to drop the PH in our stomach down to about 2 or 3 at minimum in order for us to properly digest protein. The reason why is we have an enzyme in our stomach, it’s called pepsin. And when pepsin is mixed with acid it turns into an enzyme called pepsinogen. That enzyme unfolds and digests protein in our stomach. Imagine if our PH is above 3 we don’t digest proteins, so I eat a nice big steak and what happens? That steak sits in my stomach. And the body’s trying to break it down, but the pH isn’t low enough. All that acid is gurgling and bubbling up. It’s sitting in my stomach for hours on end instead of the half hour it should be in there. All that bubbling goes up into my esophagus and that’s what I’m feeling. That’s where I get that burning sensation from.

So it’s not the acid itself that’s the problem. It’s improper digestion. If we can get that food flowing through our stomach fast enough, there’s not going to be a problem with acidity in the stomach. Acidity in the stomach is normal. The other big problem with blocking acid is we are not going to be able to kill all the bad bacteria that we typically eat. When that bad bacteria gets into our stomach and it makes it through the stomach because the acid didn’t kill it, it’s going to start to populate in our large and small intestines. And that can cause a lot of problems, indigestion, gas, bloating, all those fun things that go along with our reflux. So the approach, what we should be thinking about is not reducing acid in the stomach it’s about getting that food moving though the body quicker. We can do that though using digestive enzymes. Specifically, instead of reducing acid, what we want to do is prime that pump and actually give the body a little bit of acid. We use a hydrochloric acid type of supplement. That’s going to prime the pump, get that food ready to be digested. It’s going to move right through. We’re going to bolus some. It uses other digestive enzymes along with the hydrochloric acid by providing that and moving the stomach or moving the food through the stomach fast, we can eliminate those heart burn symptoms and really get you off some of those long term prescription medications like Nexium, like Prevacid and the like so that really the goal and the approaching. We carry those types of products here. We do consultations for you on that type of condition to make sure that there is nothing else going on. If you have this problem, or know somebody who does, definitely have them come on in, and do a nutritional consultation with us at Total Health Systems. And we can talk about it for you.