hm, that’s interesting. That doesn’t seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one.
The symptoms I have are really weird… not like what I’ve seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there’s something ‘stuck’ in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there’s nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it’s a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled “alkaline foods” to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it’s reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there’s a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like “lemon” as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.
To test: obtain some HCL pills (they’re pretty cheap). Have some regular, calcium type antiacid on hand when you’re ready to experiment. Take an HCL with food that would typically give you symptoms. If you get massive heartburn within 20 minutes or so, then you do not need HCL (and take the antiacid to restore your stomach’s pH to normal). If nothing happens or your symptoms are slightly better, then you probably do have low stomach acid. You can experiment further to find the correct dose.
My understanding is that the valve that allows the contents of the stomach to proceed through the system is triggered by acidity in the stomach. Hence, if the stomach is not acidic enough, food will just hang out there—and will still be plenty acidic to cause heartburn. Also, I understand that as people age, they produce less HCL.
Generally, doctors will give people with those symptoms acid reducers, which will indeed fix the heartburn by lowing acid to almost nothing—an undesirable state of affairs, as you lose some of the sterilization properties of the stomach. Since an acid reducer fixes the symptoms no matter the root cause, it’s obviously a good thing to test it with some variation of the above method.
Once again, I am not a doctor. I do recommend you go see a doctor if something about your body changes unexpectedly; there are less common and less harmless other things that can cause such symptoms. But I will also add that your description of the sensation is pretty much how I would describe it, esp. the “stuck” feeling. I also think the “alkaline foods” thing is probably mostly bogus.
Everything above is my opinion, based off of reading lots of anecdotal data from lots of different places on the internet, plus someone I met IRL once. I’m sparing you the conspiracy theories as to why doctors don’t generally seem to perform this test; I think it’s pretty easy to explain as a failure of rationality. You can google around if you want to read those. Since I don’t have time to hunt down references, to help you judge how seriously (or not) to take this: I think mainstream health advice is probably quite bad, and the people advocating the “paleo diet” are probably much closer to the truth. I’m not aware of anything else I believe that’s non-standard.
hm, that’s interesting. That doesn’t seem like something I could easily test for at home, but I may ask a doctor the next time I see one.
The symptoms I have are really weird… not like what I’ve seen in adverts about heartburn (no burning pain in the chest, no stomach pains), but they come after eating acidic foods, so I try to avoid those foods. After eating something like chili or pizza, I feel like there’s something ‘stuck’ in my esophagus (the feeling is like when you swallow a pill, and it gets stuck on the way down), but there’s nothing really there. It is accompanied with burping and/or hiccups which last for hours. it hurts to lie down, so i have to stay seated. and it’s a recent development. I never had problems like this before a few months ago. I thought that until I could see a doctor I should just avoid foods that make me feel like this, and googled “alkaline foods” to see what foods might calm my stomach when it does that, if it’s reacting badly somehow to acidic foods. unfortunately, there’s a big pseudoscience diet called alkaline foods which lists foods like “lemon” as being alkaline, not acidic, because of some sort of reasoning that i couldnt quite follow. the signal to noise ratio was so bad that i gave up on googling for this information.
To test: obtain some HCL pills (they’re pretty cheap). Have some regular, calcium type antiacid on hand when you’re ready to experiment. Take an HCL with food that would typically give you symptoms. If you get massive heartburn within 20 minutes or so, then you do not need HCL (and take the antiacid to restore your stomach’s pH to normal). If nothing happens or your symptoms are slightly better, then you probably do have low stomach acid. You can experiment further to find the correct dose.
My understanding is that the valve that allows the contents of the stomach to proceed through the system is triggered by acidity in the stomach. Hence, if the stomach is not acidic enough, food will just hang out there—and will still be plenty acidic to cause heartburn. Also, I understand that as people age, they produce less HCL.
Generally, doctors will give people with those symptoms acid reducers, which will indeed fix the heartburn by lowing acid to almost nothing—an undesirable state of affairs, as you lose some of the sterilization properties of the stomach. Since an acid reducer fixes the symptoms no matter the root cause, it’s obviously a good thing to test it with some variation of the above method.
Once again, I am not a doctor. I do recommend you go see a doctor if something about your body changes unexpectedly; there are less common and less harmless other things that can cause such symptoms. But I will also add that your description of the sensation is pretty much how I would describe it, esp. the “stuck” feeling. I also think the “alkaline foods” thing is probably mostly bogus.
Everything above is my opinion, based off of reading lots of anecdotal data from lots of different places on the internet, plus someone I met IRL once. I’m sparing you the conspiracy theories as to why doctors don’t generally seem to perform this test; I think it’s pretty easy to explain as a failure of rationality. You can google around if you want to read those. Since I don’t have time to hunt down references, to help you judge how seriously (or not) to take this: I think mainstream health advice is probably quite bad, and the people advocating the “paleo diet” are probably much closer to the truth. I’m not aware of anything else I believe that’s non-standard.
Here’s a list of food pH values.