One of the bonus pieces I picked up at the Blood Chemistry seminar was a way to fix hypochlorhydria. What’s that you ask? It is low acid production in the stomach. It is the real cause for acid reflux. It is also the starting point for most digestive disorders like gas, bloating, and leaky gut. Until this little problem is fixed, nothing else you try to do will have any lasting effect.
But everyone has been convinced by doctors and the drug industry that they have too much acid. In reality 95% of the time this is not true. Occasionally you will find too much acid as a stress response to life, but very rarely. Getting heartburn feels like excess acid, but it is actually just the opposite. How is that? Good stomach acid is supposed to be 10,000 to 100,000 times more acidic than plain water. If your proper stomach acid levels are reduced by 90%, what you have left is still 1000 to 10,000 times more acid than water. But the weaker stomach acid fails to signal the valve at the top of the stomach to close and also fails to signal the valve at the bottom of the stomach to open, so your food just sits in the stomach and starts to ferment. This forms gas which creates bloating and pushes that 1000 strength acid into the throat where it burns. This is where acid reflux comes from most of the time.
What are some other signs of hypochlorhydria?
1. You have lost the taste for meat.
2. You get belching or gas within an hour of eating
3. You get bloating or cramps within an hour of eating
4. You have bad breath even after you brush your teeth
5. Your sweat is really stinky
6. Your fingernails chip, peel, or crack easily
7. You have signs of poor mineral absorption like anemia or osteoporosis
8. You get sleepy after meals
9. You are not hungry for breakfast, or hungry all the time
10. You have undigested food in your stools
11. You have Leaky Gut, SIBO, or colitis that does not resolve
12. You have lots of food sensitivities
13. Chronic constipation or diarrhea often result
14. Dry skin, hair, acne, or eczema, hair loss in women
15. Chronic fatigue, asthma, or allergies
16. Osteoporosis or any Autoimmune disorder
A while back I wrote about a simple test for hypochlorhydria you can do at home. Simply drink a glass of water with 1 tsp. of baking soda in it on an empty stomach. If you have too much acid, the baking soda will immediately react with the acid and cause you to start belching. Normal acid levels will cause belching in three to five minutes. If you have not belched within seven minutes, then you have hypochlorhydria.
So what causes this problem? A common cause these days is vegan diets or longer term vegetarian diets. There are two reasons for this. One is that these diets do not need as much acid for digesting proteins. The other is that these diets have no natural source for vitamin B12, and B12 is essential for forming stomach acid. Zinc deficiencies can also create this problem, which can be a bigger problem for vegans due to their higher phytate consumption binding up the zinc.
Another common cause is an H. pylori infection – a little spiral bacteria that burrows into your stomach lining and shuts off your acid production. I learned that the most common source for this infection is dogs… kiss your dog and kiss your stomach goodbye if they are carrying the infection. You can actually get it from kissing or sharing food with anyone who has this infection. So when treating this infection, you have treat everyone including the dog. The best test for this infection is a hydrogen breath test. Blood tests are not accurate.
Chronic stress is an ever popular cause for low stomach acid. Stress puts us in fight or flight mode which is a sympathetic dominate state. To digest we need to be in exactly the opposite state to turn on the parasympathetic nerves which in turn stimulate proper digestion. This is the reason eating while being on the go is a bad choice. Eat and run is a sympathetic dominate state that shuts down digestion. I wrote a newsletter a while back about how to increase you parasympathetic nerve outflow for this very problem.
Using NSAID drugs like ibuprofen or Tylenol lower stomach acid production, as do antacid drugs like proton pump inhibitors. Antibiotics also mess up the works.
A funny one you would probably not think of is drinking anything during your meal. Anything you drink will dilute your stomach acid making it weaker. So only drink before a meal and not again for a couple hours after the meal.
The last big reason is a tough one to beat – age. By the time you reach the age of 45 your stomach acid production starts to decrease. Once you reach the age of 50 you probably should supplement your meals with some hydrochloric acid tablets.
Okay, so now you know what low stomach levels can cause and a bunch of reasons why you might have it. You even know how to test for it. So what can you do about it?
The answer lies in the design of the stomach lining. It contains two types of cells that work together – mucus cells and acid cells. As the stomach produces acid to digest your food, it also produces a special acid resistant mucus that coats the lining of the stomach to keep the stomach from digesting itself. When hypochlorhydria happens for whatever reason, the mucus cells also stop producing mucus. This allows the lining to become irritated and raw. This then signals the acid cells to stay turned off so that they do not eat a hole in the lining of the stomach. When this signal gets messed up, you get a stomach ulcer. This is called a positive feedback loop. The low acid produces lowered mucus, which makes the lining more sensitive, which triggers even lower acid, which triggers even lower mucus production and so on.
The solution is to reverse this positive feedback loop. We can do this by taking hydrochloric acid tablets in a specific manner. By supplying more acid than is needed, the stomach will be stimulated to produce more protective mucus. Once more mucus is in place, then more acid will be produced when asked for.
So how does this look in practice? Start by taking one HCl Prozyme tablet with your first meal. You are feeling for a gentle warmth in the stomach indicating that you have just a touch more acid than you want. If you feel nothing, then in the next meal take two tablets. With each meal increase your tablets until you feel that gentle warmth. Once you get that feeling, back off one tablet and stay at that level for the next several meals until the gentle warmth comes back. The return of the warmth indicates that your stomach has started producing some acid and it is adding to the acid you are taking by mouth. Reduce your tablet count by 1 tablet again and continue until the warmth returns. Continue this process until you are no longer needing to take any tablets of HCl at all. Success, you have just healed your hypochlorhydria!
If you are over 45 and find that you never get down to 1 tablet able to produce a slight burn, you now know how much regular supplementation with HCl you need at each meal. That level is 1 tablet less than the last amount that was able to produce a slight burn.
If by chance when you started this process just 1 tablet produced a lot of stomach burning, then this says your stomach lining is really inflamed, and you will have to heal that inflammation first. This might occur if you have an ulcer forming, or a bad H.pylori infection. These situations would need to be addressed before trying the hypochlorhydria cure process. We have products to do this – Gastro ULC for stomach inflammation and HPLR for H.pylori infections.
This is such a common disorder, and this simple fix was enough to make the whole 3 day weekend in class worth it all by itself.