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7 Day Challenge: Do you need to fix your stomach acid?

 

Day 2: Debunking stomach acid myths

 

Mentioned in the video:

(Transcribed below)

On Day 2 of this week long video challenge, we're going to question a few of the ways stomach acid is often framed to us by conventional medical communities, to prepare us for a much needed change in thinking about this important topic.

Yesterday, we left off here: with you being skeptical about this whole stomach acid thing. Probably because of an understanding about conditions like GERD, acid reflux and heartburn, and how the medical community characterizes them.

The implication, with the prevalence of acid-blocking Proton Pump Inhibitor medications like Prilosec, and the staple presence of TUMS in our kitchen cabinets, is that we have too much acid and that this is the root of the problem.

However, this premise doesn't make any sense and here's why:

Given the nature of these types of conditions, they tend to come on with age, this would mean that we actually start to secrete more stomach acid as we age, which is a concept that doesn't gel with everything else we understand about the human body as it ages.

For almost every other kind of secretion, processes begin to slow down and become less efficient as we age, resulting in lower levels being produced. This is well-documented for hormones, sweat, hair and skin oils, mucus, and, actually, digestive secretions?

Yes!

This is a graph showing the results of Heidelberg Gastrotelemetry Equipment when it assessed the stomach acid of thousands of patients. As you can see, production profoundly drops off after the age of 30.

 

The practitioner later published his findings in a book called "Why Stomach acid is good for you" - this book is concise, well-researched and an easy read, I highly recommend reading it (but if you do, do yourself a favor and just go ahead and ignore his suggestions for how to fix it - you won't wanna do that, but it's a great read for background on this topic). I've included the link below.

This condition, where the body has insufficient levels of stomach acid is called "hypochlorhydria". And the practitioner who was responsible for the previous chart estimated that as many as 90% of Americans suffer from it.

Now, he did not back up that statistic with empirical evidence, he inferred it from other factors...but it has been shown in literature that 30% of people over the age of 60 have a condition called Atrophic Gastritis, which basically means their acid producing cells in the stomach have been damaged and stop working.

What's more, we have increasing evidence linking hypochlorhydria to people who suffer from autoimmune or other chronic conditions, which we'll talk about more in later videos.

And, if you recall from the Gut Primer series, 1 in 2 people in America has a chronic illness, Since most chronic illnesses are now associated with gut dysfunction, and most gut dysfunction is associated with hypochlorhydria...

the number may not be as high as 90% like Jonathan Wright estimated, but it could very feasibly be at least 50%, given the prevalence of this relationship.

Confused? Let me try to turn the light on for ya.

Actually, acid reflux and heartburn are most likely the result of too little acid, or acid in the wrong places, rather than too much.

This puts a bit of a damper on the whole Prilosec and TUMS approach...

if you'd like to get a very detailed walk through about what this actually looks like in the body, I'll link to my digestive dysfunction deep dive series below, so you can get a clearer picture of what I mean.

But in the mean time, we'll try to do a big picture summary about everything you need to know right here.

To rehash: It's been shown in literature that acid-related symptoms and conditions tend to come on with age. Yet, we know that most people secrete less acid as they age, or have a higher stomach pH, and about 1/3 of those over the age of 60 - the population most effected by these disorders - sustain structural damage to their body's acid producing tissue.

When we overlay the two trends it would seem that we have something called "an inverse correlation" which would allow us to conclude that as A decreases B increases.

And when we substitute the variable names, we can conclude: "When stomach acid secretions decrease, acid-related symptoms such as GERD, reflux, and heartburn increase." This is not a reach, rather we're just making a very objective observation about the data.

And actually what we'll find in the later videos, is that this conclusion can be drawn for many non-acid symptoms as well, such as fatigue, protein deficiency and anemia, B-Vitamin deficiency, nervous system health, among many others.

And in tomorrow's video we'll talk about nutrient deficiencies most commonly associated with low stomach acid.

See you then!