How to Prevent Heartburn: Foods
There are two things you can do with your food choices in order to prevent heartburn: choose certain foods and avoid others. Two of the best foods you can eat to help prevent heartburn are pineapple and papaya. These two tropical fruits contain powerful digestive enzymes which can help the body break down protein. This may aid digestion and help reduce acid reflux, especially after eating meat or plant proteins.
Protein in general tends to be a good food for preventing heartburn. When protein enters the stomach, the Lower Esophageal Sphincter (LES) gets tighter. Heartburn or acid reflux occurs when the LES loses tension, as this muscle is what constricts to keep what belongs in the stomach in the stomach.
Additionally, you can help prevent heartburn by avoiding certain foods. Some of the top foods that are known for their ability to cause heartburn are tomatoes, coffee, chocolate, spicy foods, and alcohol. For a full list of foods, check out our article on acid reflux foods to avoid.
How to Prevent Heartburn: Lifestyle
There are actually a lot of things you can do aside from changing your diet in order to reduce heartburn, including losing weight, cooking differently, and kicking bad habits. Losing weight is perhaps the best way to prevent heartburn, as no matter what your genetic background is like it seems that obesity is the only constant among heartburn triggers for all people.
Another thing that may help you is by changing the way you cook. Try making sure all your vegetables are cooked (steamed or boiled), as this makes them easier to digest than raw vegetables. Additionally, try cooking meat in a crock pot or marinading with vinegar or red wine, as this helps break down the meat as well.
These cooking alterations are especially helpful if you take a proton-pump inhibitor or H2-blocker to reduce stomach acid. The reduction in stomach acid can make digesting foods harder, so cooking vegetables and meat more thoroughly can make digesting them easier.
Another thing that is important is chewing your food. People who have acid reflux are much more likely to inadequately chew their food. Chewing your food gives more surface area for digestive chemicals in the stomach and intestine to work on, making digestion much faster. This is another reason why thorough cooking can reduce heartburn as it makes it much easier to chew.
Taking a step away from food, bed wedge supports which will raise your the head of your bed by 4-6 inches can be very effective at reducing heartburn as well. These allows you to lie on a slight incline when sleeping which will help keep acid down in the stomach. You can use something as simple as wood blocks or stacked up magazines to put under the bed posts at the head of your bed to put it on an incline.
Finally, you want to make sure that you drop the bad habits that are drinking alcohol and smoking. While there are some studies that suggest that drinking a glass or two of wine a night might be helpful for heart disease, it is certainly not helpful for heartburn. Try to limit drinks to a night or two a week and when you do drink, avoid having more than a few drinks at once.
How to Prevent Heartburn – Heartburn Remedies
There are also a few special tricks you can use to help prevent acid reflux. If you have been on this site before, you know that we are big advocates of using chewing gum. This helps stimulate saliva production (the body’s natural defense against acid reflux) and promotes digestive motility. After eating, chew on a stick of gum for 10-15 minutes and you will be surprised at just how effectively it can prevent heartburn.
If you need some extra heartburn-fighting firepower, try taking a spoonful of vinegar immediately prior to eating. This helps stimulate a large flow of saliva and can help digest your food. This is not something you want to do every day, but if you are about to go to a bull roast or buffet and know you are in for heartburn later, this can be an effective tool to use.
Another good option for the same situation as vinegar would be a supplement which contains papain (papaya enzyme) or bromelain (pineapple enzyme). Both of these are powerful digestive enzymes can help promote digestion which may help reduce heartburn, particular heartburn that is the result of eating too much.
You now have access to a lot of simple ways to prevent heartburn. Whether it is changing your diet, losing weight chewing your food, raising your bed, or adding in some good heartburn remedies, there are a lot of effective ways to prevent heartburn that do not rely on costly treatments.
If you are still experiencing acid reflux two times per week or more even when following these tips, you will want to see a doctor and let him (or her) know about the symptoms you have been experiencing.
