Heartburn and Acid Reflux – Understanding the Causes

If you frequently suffer from heartburn you’ll know how debilitating and painful it can be, especially if you’re trying to get a good night’s sleep at the time. But you may not know that there are several easy ways of overcoming it and preventing its recurrence.

In this article you’re going to learn about the various causes of it, how it can be avoided by simply changing a few habits.

Whatever the immediate causes of heartburn may be, and there are several, the one distinguishing feature of this complaint, compared to most other complaints or illnesses, is that it is nearly always a voluntary complaint. That is, it is brought on usually by the sufferer’s own activities immediately before the attack.

Let’s consider what’s involved for a moment. Your whole body in general, and your digestive system in particular, is a miracle of nature. It takes the food you eat, in all its forms, and processes it, often under very difficult circumstances. It digests it, removing waste material, and sends the rest of it on its way via your blood stream. It feeds your muscles, your brain and all your other vital organs.

But if you make things a little too difficult for it, then it will complain in the form of heartburn, or acid reflux. And be assured you will most definitely know about it. It can cause so much pain that the sufferer sometimes thinks he is having a heart attack.

So give your digestive system a little more care and consideration and you’ll have little to fear. In order to do this, we’ll take a brief look at what happens in there to cause this most unpleasant pain.

One of the functions of the stomach is to break down the food we eat in preparation for digestion. It does this with the aid of certain naturally produced acids, including the highly corrosive hydrochloric acid. This is only possible because the stomach has a protective lining that prevents these digestive juices, mainly acids, from digesting the stomach itself.

All well and good as long as everything stays where it is supposed to be. But if for some reason stomach acid escapes through the little flap, which is all that separates the stomach from the oesophagus (the tube that connects your stomach with your mouth) then it attacks the walls of the oesophagus, which have no protective lining.

If you’re a sufferer then the first thing you have to do is examine your activities before each attack to see if you can prevent this from ever happening again. The activity that causes most attacks is eating too quickly. Interrupting your meal to carry out some activity, especially one involving some degree of physical effort, is another main cause.

So if you set aside enough time for each meal and take measures to prevent any undue interruption or pressure to finish in a hurry then that will be a big step towards reducing the number of times you suffer heartburn.