By Dr. Matsen

Is acid reflux burning you up? Does it feel like there’s lava in the pit of your stomach which then flows up under your sternum to your throat? Is it worse at night, making a good sleep impossible?

You may be surprised to learn that acid reflux is not necessarily a stomach problem. Your stomach is more likely reacting to irritation from your bile, which is made by your liver. When you eat, bile enters the base of your stomach at the duodenum to help digest fats. The more fatty food or spicy food that you eat, the more bile is secreted to aid digestion. If your liver is overloaded and has dumped toxins into your bile, this toxic bile irritates your duodenum and stomach. The stomach, being a muscle, reacts by spasming, which means that it shortens. This shortening of the stomach muscle can force the upper valve of the stomach open, thus allowing the acid and bile to reflux up into the esophagus, which has little protection against these harsh digestive juices and can get severely irritated.

For many people, the immediate reaction is to calm down the stomach acid with antacids, but for a long-term cure, you need to get to the root of the problem and concentrate on improving your overall liver function.

Toxins are always present during the digestion of food. Many parts of the body—the brain, nerves, joints, arteries and DNA—are delicate and can be easily damaged by these gut toxins, so every drop of digestive fluid must be filtered by the liver and neutralized of toxins.

Put simply, liver detoxification uses a two-step process, involving Phase I and Phase II enzymes. Phase I enzymes add oxygen to fat-soluble chemicals as the first step in making them water-soluble. However, in so doing, deadly peroxides are created that are up to 50 times more toxic. This production of peroxides is a normal biochemical step; Phase II enzymes should quickly neutralize the peroxides.

Tobacco, alcohol, and coffee stimulate your Phase I liver enzymes to make deadly peroxides, while refined foods (such as white sugar and white flour) and metals (such as thimerosal, the mercury preservative in vaccines) can dramatically interfere with your Phase II enzymes’ ability to neutralize these deadly peroxides. The net result is that your liver spills these peroxides into your bile. So to help your liver to work more efficiently, avoid (or at least limit) tobacco, alcohol, coffee, refined foods, and thimerosal in vaccines.

If you experience a decrease in your acid reflux symptoms when you take acidophilus capsules, you probably also have a yeast and/or bacterial intestinal overgrowth that is putting pressure on your liver to make more deadly peroxides.

There are a few things that might relieve the immediate symptoms of acid reflux:

• Decreasing your consumption of fatty foods and spices will require less bile to be secreted, thus decreasing the stress on the base of the stomach.
• Licorice is known to strengthen the stomach membranes thus blocking the effects of stress and coffee on these valuable defensive membranes.
• A folk remedy that some people find helpful is to consume dill pickle juice: start with one tablespoon per meal and see how your stomach responds.
• One remedy with a long history of success is mastic gum, a resin from a tree of the pistachio family found on the Greek island of Chios. The Phoenicians included it in their repertoire of wares that they peddled around the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago. It was promoted for gastritis and indigestion. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (December 1998) showed that two 500 mg capsules of mastic gum at bedtime could also kill H. pylori (the bacteria associated with ulcers) within several weeks.