If your stomach acid levels are too low, you won’t be able to fully digest your food. You are at more of a risk for low stomach acid if you have a food sensitivity and eat that particular food. A food sensitivity means that particular food causes inflammation in your body. In other words, it’s an inflammatory food for you. And inflammatory foods inhibit stomach acid production over time and low stomach acid inhibits your ability to fully break down those same foods. The result is continued damage, inhibited digestive processes, and continued release of undigested food particles into the blood stream. Which is another way to say, you have leaky gut or an unhappy gut microbiome. So the key to minimizing inflammation is maintaining healthy stomach acid levels.
We want a healthy stomach and digestive system that can fully break down foods so the nutrients can utilized by our cells, and not leak food particles into the blood stream. If you are not fully digesting your food or have food sensitivities, you may want to supplement with Betaine HCL with pepsin to increase your stomach acid along with adding a good digestive enzyme so that you can fully digest your food. You’ll noticed increased energy, less bloating, and an overall improvement in your well being.
Here are some other ways you can maintain healthy stomach acid levels:
Ginger
Ginger is one of the best things for improving digestive juices. It can also reduce inflammation. Ginger all helps in movement of food through bowels, thereby preventing the formation of gas. And if that wasn’t enough, ginger is one of the best-known remedies for relieving cold symptoms. It can actually kill the rhinovirus that causes a cold. Plus, it’s been known to help with motion sickness and to calm an upset stomach.
Fermented Foods and Drinks
Fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, pickled ginger, etc. all contain organic acids, enzymes and probiotics which help to improve digestive juice secretions and help you to have a healthy stomach acid level. If you are eating a heavy meal, it could be really beneficial to eat something fermented with or before the food that is the most difficult to digest.
Fermented drinks such as apple cider vinegar, coconut water kefir and lemon water (not fermented) contain organic acids that have an anti-microbial effect. So these help to reduce the bacterial load, especially the bacteria in the stomach such H Pylori. It is important to keep H Pylori levels down to that the body can produce enough stomach acid.
When and When Not to Drink Water
Drinking lots and lots of water is almost always good. But not before a meal. You should cut off drinking water at least 30 minutes before the meal unless you need to take a supplement. In that case, use as little water as possible – around 2 oz should do it. This will reduce any potential dilution of the gastric juices and allow for better digestion.
Drinking lots of water away from meals is important when you have low stomach acid. Your body needs the fluids for maintaining healthy stomach acid levels. In addition, good hydration will help activate bowel motility which will help push contents through the digestive system which and reduce microbial fermentation and toxicity in the body.
Consider Liquid Nutrition
When you are in the process of balancing your stomach acid levels, it can can be helpful to make at least half of your meals in a liquid form such as a protein shake or green smoothie. This is because they are very easy to digest and do not depend upon hydrochloric acid (HCL) production. If you have low HCL you might try 1-2 protein shakes each day to enhance amino acid absorption and reduce stress on the GI system. This is very important to helping you in maintaining healthy stomach acid levels.
Eat Heavy Foods First and When You are Relaxed
The stomach will begin churning out its stomach acid when you begin eating, especially when you are consuming protein. So even though it is common to have salad before a main course, this doesn’t work well for your HCL production. It is a much better idea to eat your protein with the salad or veggies.
It is also important to be relaxing before your biggest meal of the day. That’s because in order to produce adequate stomach acid, your body needs to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. If you are stressed out and on the go, you will be in fight or flight which activates the sympathetic nervous system. If you struggle with low stomach acid, this is not going to allow you to produce anywhere near enough.
I hope this gives you some ideas on ways you can begin maintaining healthy stomach acid levels. If you found it helpful, I’d greatly appreciate it if you commented and/or share it on social media.
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