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.
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.