dealing with low stomach acid.

[Lolinda]

Also, from my understanding the pyloric valve might stay shut if it detects that whatever is in the stomach is not acid enough.

I never really new if this is true. but hoped for it as this essentially says "acidify your stomach and pylorus will open more easily". Reading your lines made me look up some research and I found:

the following paper states that stomach acid is a signal for opening the pylorus, but it equally cites a list of papers that did not find this. does anyone find a newer, more definitive paper on this?
http://ajplegacy.physiology.org/content/108/3/683.short

does betaine hcl indeed increas stomach acid? I do know that it does increase my own stomach acid production in the long run, over weeks ( but at my present crisis rather months ) because sometimes my stomach acid goes away and then I need to take it to make it return. I dont believe that but I measure that via the alkaline tide method, which is validated. but if it has a short time effect on the concrete meal? it is unlogical, because its a salt and salt is neutral. now, this research proves that indeed it strongly acidifies:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/mp4003738

 

[Lolinda]

my pain is probably not acid/alkaline burns

what do you mean by acid alkaline burns? I am interested, sounds like sthg I could have

 

[MacGyver]

what do you mean by acid alkaline burns? I am interested, sounds like sthg I could have

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/acid-alkaline-burns-could-they-cause-leaky-gut-syndrome-other-gi-
issues.26277/

Basically your intestines become burned by either the acid from the stomach; in which case bile is insufficient/hasn't got the ability to neutralize the acid OR you get alkaline burns because the stomach doesn't provide enough acid and the alkaline bile results in alkaline burns. There's a bit more to it in case bile isn't able to be squirted in the duodenum and it backs up etc. I didn't look into it further once it dawned on me that it was the betaine part that was making me worse, not the HCL.

I think that, apart from official studies, enough people have benefited from taking Betaine HCL that you can be sure it does what it is supposed to. Only thing that matters is how much you need specifically. I see 6-7 650mg capsules might be needed for some people.

Well, there are probably several reasons why the pyloric valve wouldn't open, stomach acid only being one of them. I can see how the fight-or-flight response would have impact too since if you're in a very dangerous situation it doesn't make a lot of sense to sustain digestion at that point. So if your neurotransmitters are off your body might always tend towards that state. But that's my own reasoning

Have you had success with methylation supplements? What else makes you worse/better?

 

[Mary]

I searched a few threads here and most talked about betaine hcl.

I am dealing with very low stomach acid. 16 hours after eating a meal with 3000mg betaine HCL im burping the taste of the meal.

Now i could increase betaine to 5000mg but its not practical. Its overloading me with methyldonors.

Is there a better way? I use bulk betaine powder combined with the pepsin in my enzymes. I wish i could get bulk pepsin easily.

I feel i really need to bandaid my HCL as low HCL causes way too many problems.

Cheers

I had similar digestive issues some years ago. The burping so many hours after eating a meal sounds like what happened to me when my gallbladder was not functioning very well. I would feel full for hours after eating, it was like the food just sat in my stomach. My chiropractor who does muscle testing found that my gallbladder was inflamed and he gave me AF Betafood by Standard Process - it helps produce bile and was wonderful for my gallbladder. I had to take it for several weeks.

I think ox bile extract may do something similar - I took that also at one time.

And eventually I learned I had to take betaine HCL with pepsin with meals. My gallbladder has been good for a long time now but I still take the HCL with pepsin (http://www.swansonvitamins.com/swanson-premium-hydrochloric-acid-pepsin-250-caps

For your possible clostridium problem, you might try kefir. I had the opposite problem for several months - my bowels were liquid, I had SIBO test and other stool tests, all were negative, and I tried several different probiotics with no results. And then I started taking Trader Joe's kefir and within a week was much better. So since your problem started after ABX (I think mine did too), it sounds like your gut flora are all off.

 

[Lolinda]

blood pressure too. I have to relief my body of dealing with both at the same time: 45 minutes after I have eaten a meal I have to lie down. Only then will my stomach empty and will digestion begin in the next part of the intestine (duodenum incl. liver and gall bladder). So: stomach acid and digestion is related to the stress your body is under. This can even be the daily stress of providing enough blood pressure. You can help your body by lying flat when your stomach and liver need to do their thing.

I liked your long post a lot as it relates much to my issues. May I ask how low your BP is? And for how long do you need to lay down? Compared to other people, is your skin more warm than their's? Or do you have a low spo2?

 

[Lolinda]

Basically your intestines become burned by either the acid from the stomach; in which case bile is insufficient/hasn't got the ability to neutralize the acid OR you get alkaline burns because the stomach doesn't provide enough acid and the alkaline bile results in alkaline burns.

can one diagnose alkaline or acid burns?

(its not so simple to look into the small intestine after the duodenum, let alone the question if one would see anything. But if there is such a burn I guess there should besome marker such as some damaged cell constituents. for example if there is a real burn on the skin, there some blood markers go up (I think it was heat shock protein).

Many people on the thread you quoted (thanks!) and me too, we all are guessing...

 

[Lolinda]

Have you had success with methylation supplements? What else makes you worse/better?

The important thing imo is to find out if you have too much or too little. Its is easy (or at least doable with some experimentation) to increase it.

you ask what made me worse. for example vitamin b2. it is said in many threads here that it increases methylation. I didnt read that... i just took some b2. i lost so much potassium (which happens when methylation increases) that I got a full body crampiness that I could not run any more a simple small round of 500m! (running increases potassium loss which increases crampiness even further). there was zero effect on stomach acid, I measured that almost every day.
(remark: years ago, however, I was undermethylating. increasing methylation saved me from the worst of cfs. I was really at the end. lacking the supplements and being in dire need, I invented an even more simplified version of Rich's methylation protocoll. An hour or two later I was fine)

you ask what made me better. better than methylation: meditation!
my favourite is "holidays meditation" for more parasympathicus -> better digestion

do you have experience with meditation? let me know, I can be more detailed in what you should do.
in brief: go into deep relaxation and strongly imagine a past holiday yourney at a time you were healthy, in which you were totally free of duties, nobody demands nothing of you, no constraints, peace and beauty. you should feel that you are really there, fully immersed. this will activate the parasympathicus more than any breathing technique, listening to slow music, sitting in nature or anything like that. the trick is that you reactivate a past state in which you actually were. and you need a very strong activation in case of you should have chronically elevated sympathicus. do you have that? if so: its very difficult to break out of something that is so normal that one does almost not or not at all notice it any more. and here is the second difficulty: how does one find out then if one has sympathetic dominance? let me know if this sounds interesting and exactly where I should give more details.

 

[Tammy]

16oz of celery juice on an empty stomach in the a.m.every morning is the best way to raise your HCL. The mineral salts in celery juice are amazing. HCL tabs never worked for me. I had to start out with 4 oz of the juice and work up.

 

[kangaSue]

In fact, my gastric emptying has been investigated and it is delayed. more interestingly, I asked the technician to show me the video of the gastric scintigraphy. it showed clearly how the stomach does substantial movements to empty itself, but nothing or little comes out. -> closed pyloric valve. the measurement results also reported some diminuation of gastric contraction amplitude and frequency.

So do you have a diagnosis of gastroparesis? This can be from a loss of acetylcholine signalling. The vagus nerve, as a nicotonic acetylcholine receptor, also acts to open and close the pyloric valve too. Some people find boosting acetylcholine levels help with slow motility. (Parasym Plus springs to mind which comes up in this discussion http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/pots-relief-could-it-be.42775/ )

A premature breakdown of acetylcholine is sometimes the problem, the same as found in Myasthenia Gravis and similarly, Mestinon can help with stomach emptying and slow GI transit.

But I like the argument that it is related to blood flow. blood flow is poor

I know the reason why my intestinal blood flow is poor and I have such xcessive norepinephrine standing: too much blood flow s directed to skin (I have unusually warm skin, very well perfused, receiving most of blood flow. science says it can take up to 60% of blood flow of the heart!). I wish I would know people with the same problem! essentially, it is that my body behaves as if it would be 40°C. many people get orthostatic issues, high noradrenaline or have issues with food at such temperatures.

Are you saying excessive norepeniphrine causes you poor blood flow or is it something else?

Poor blood flow to the bowel is thought to be a major part of the reason why I have chronic GI dysfunction (Gastroparesis, Small bowel Pseudo-obstruction, Intestinal Ischemia, Hypomotility/hypermotility of the bowel). This has been diagnosed as Chronic Mesenteric Ischemic (in the form of Non-occlusive Mesenteric Ischemia) where blood flow to the bowel is not adequate for digestion through the mesentery artery microvascular network likely because of spasm in the small vessels due to low blood pressure.

The whole thing looks to be an issue of autonomic dysfunction also affecting the vasodilation/vasoconstriction response as the low blood pressure problem was not considered to be part of the problem by my so called "GI experts" until autonomic function testing I had been pushing to get for a couple of years was finally agreed to and come back showing cardiovagal and sudomotor (abnormal sweat response, greatly reduced) dysfunction.

That is probably why nitrate vasodilator meds given for the pain of intestinal ischemia had an opposite effect with increasing my blood pressure too as well as improving the GI symptoms enough that I could stop tube feeding and return to an oral diet. Alas, that only lasted for a couple of years so I've been on a fruitless search thus far for an antibody cause as can be found with Autoimmune Gastrointestinal Dysmotility.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-p...ces/autoimmune-gi-dysmotility-a-new-direction

 

[Lolinda]

16oz of celery juice on an empty stomach in the a.m.every morning is the best way to raise your HCL. The mineral salts in celery juice are amazing. HCL tabs never worked for me. I had to start out with 4 oz of the juice and work up.

sounds like something easy to do and very effective. do you buy or make it? is it raw or heated? thanks in advance!!

 

[Lolinda]

Are you saying excessive norepeniphrine causes you poor blood flow or is it something else?

KangaSue thanks so much for posting all those details! I am very interested in this topic!!
I opened a new thread to accomomodate this discussion, which may not meet the interest of the people here on the stomach acid thread. the new thread for intestinal perfusion:
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/low-intestinal-blood-flow.45909/

loss of acetylcholine signalling.

What I would be curious to know:
- Can the loss of acetylcholine signalling you describe be the cause also of the low stomach acid?

 

[kangaSue]

What I would be curious to know:
- Can the loss of acetylcholine signalling you describe be the cause also of the low stomach acid?

No, not as far as I aware.
Low stomach acid content can only really be determined by a 24 hour pH manometry test I thought. One way to acidify the stomach is take a high dose of vitamin c just before eating. Some people take up to 2 grams at a time. Bowel tolerance will let you know how much you can take, i.e. it will give you diarrhea if you exceed what your system will tolerate.

 

[Tammy]

sounds like something easy to do and very effective. do you buy or make it? is it raw or heated? thanks in advance!!

I make it. You need to drink it fresh.............and to clarify I am talking about the juice (without the fiber). I didn't like the taste at first but now I do. One of the best things I've done for my digestion.

 

[Lolinda]

drink it fresh.

great! cooked from fresh or raw squeezed? leaves or the root? if squeezed, do you drink the pure juice or dilute it in water to get the 4oz? how much goes into the sueezing? I hope its ok to ask that much detail... I really really want to try this! hcl tabs do work in me, they do make my own gastric juice return but it is extremely extremely slow. for example I currently achieved a 10%. had zero gastricacid and got 10% of the healthy average. and I never get up to that average. and I just love such natural approaches as yours!!

 

[Tammy]

great! cooked from fresh or raw squeezed? leaves or the root? if squeezed, do you drink the pure juice or dilute it in water to get the 4oz? how much goes into the sueezing? I hope its ok to ask that much detail... I really really want to try this! hcl tabs do work in me, they do make my own gastric juice return but it is extremely extremely slow. for example I currently achieved a 10%. had zero gastricacid and got 10% of the healthy average. and I never get up to that average. and I just love such natural approaches as yours!!

Raw celery. I have a juicer and I use almost a whole head of celery for 1 glass. I use the whole stalk except I cut off the leaves because it makes the juice bitter. I cut off just a little of the bottom of the bunch. As you can see I go through a heck of a lot of celery a week. In the beginning I was doing it every day............now I do it about 4 times a week. Great for the liver too!

 

[Gondwanaland]

I have a juicer and I use almost a whole head of celery for 1 glass.

Would a blender work for that?

 

[Lolinda]

Raw celery. I have a juicer and I use almost a whole head of celery for 1 glass. I use the whole stalk except I cut off the leaves because it makes the juice bitter. I cut off just a little of the bottom of the bunch. As you can see I go through a heck of a lot of celery a week. In the beginning I was doing it every day............now I do it about 4 times a week. Great for the liver too!

Thanks so much, @Tammy . I head to the grocery for celery!!

Actually, did you test your stomach acid, so you know if your levels are fully good now? I am happy if I can give you back a little for this great idea. So in case you want a home test, here it goes in the next post. The utility of this can be: People usually want to increase stomach acid to avoid burping, gas, indigestion or to increase appetite. And if these occur, they are happy. But there are less noticeable things: many nutrients only resorb with good stomach acid. And here testing can help to find out if your stomach acid only partially improved, so the noticeable symptoms are gone, or it fully improved and you get the most from your food.

 

[Lolinda]

VALID MEASUREMENT METHOD FOR STOMACH ACID YOU CAN DO AT HOME

Test instructions

1. buy ph test stripes. it must be a paper that has a graduation of 0.3 and the right range for urine. These papers are sold in pharmacies in every country in big packages of 100 stripes, because patients with kidney stones need them. Do not buy papers with a graduation of 1 or 0.5. thats too inexact. You wont be able to notice when your acid improves slowly day-by-day or even more slowly, week-by-week.
2. discard the first morning urine. measure the ph of the second morning urine right before the first meal.
3. measure the urinary ph 2 hours after the meal. You may want to set a timer - I always forget it without..

Which values are good?

Normal values depend of the food eaten, see below the two papers. Only solid food is useful, liquid food cannot be used as it does not trigger stomach.acid. This test method is only valid for the first meal because after the postprandial acid excretion there comes a base excretion when the alkaline digestive juices in the duodenum are produced. If foods follow each other, these acid and alkaline tides from the differnt meals overlap and annihilate each other.

Is this valid? How can stomach acid be measured via the urine?

This testing method relies on the alkaline tide phenomenon: for 2h after a meal, the urine becomes alkaline. This alkalinity corresponds to the acid secreted into the stomach. This correspondence is so good that it can be used for measurement. The simple reason for this effect is that when the stomach produces HCL, the same amount of a base is secreted into the blood. To maintain blood PH, the kidneys produce alkaline urine.

Paper 1: vegetarian meal

http://www.tropicalgastro.com/artic...-with-postprandial-urinary-alkaline-tide.html
see pdf below

meal:
150g of rice, 20 g sambar and 2 boiled eggs

testing method:
Patients were instructed to empty their bladder the next morning and subsequently a 20 mL urine sample was collected for measuring the fasting urinary pH. Patients then received a standard test meal and postprandial urinary pH was measured in a sample collected after two hours.

normal value:
ph diffence of the two measurements in healthy volunteers: 1.59 ± 0.47 (mean ± SD) = 1.0-2.8 (let's take this as the normal range)
(remark: there was also a liquid test meal. Using that, the ph difference was much smaller)


Paper 2: meal with fish

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bjs.1800731124/abstract
see pdf below

meal:
150g rice (6.8g/100ml protein, 0.5g/100ml fat and 78.2 g/100 ml carbohydrate); 30 g fish (19.5 g/100 ml protein, 2.4 g/100 ml fat, 1.5 g/lW ml minerals); 20 g Dal or Bengal gram (17.1 g/100 ml protein, 5.3 g/100 ml fat, 78.3 g/100 ml carbohydrate); one boiled hen's egg (13.3 g/l00 ml protein, 133 g/l00 ml fat, 1 g/lW ml minerals) and two glasses of water.

measurement method:
same as paper 1, but they let the patients fast until noon.

normal value:
the ph difference of the two measurements in healthy volunteers was 3.1 (mean).
unfortunately, here only the mean value was presented. the range was not given.
This mean value of 3.1 is much bigger than the mean of paper 1, which corresponds well to the fact that meat induces more stomach acid.

Remarks

The following remarks may be of interest only to people who like to think about questions of validity of scientific research.

I can send a dozen of papers in good journals proving that the urinary alkaline tide phenomenon is legit. however, the two papers above did not appear in top journals. so can we trust these measurements? my view: Western doctors do not need ph measurements in urine to determine stomach acid secretion. they have medical devices to do that directly. so while Western researchers may publish on the phenomenon, they wont give you exact details useful for doing home measurements with ph stripes. for the same reason I dont think its very likely that a top journal would accept such research. Here come in the Indians, who did this great and useful research out of the necessity to help out their Indian colleagues, who do not have devices. all in all, I think this is an understandable situation where I do trust the measurements as being as good as it gets. the more relevant question for me is that we are lacking numbers for different and more Western meals. for example what is normal if the meal is a steak or a typical European breakfast, etc.

 

[Tammy]

Raw celery. I have a juicer and I use almost a whole head of celery for 1 glass. I use the whole stalk except I cut off the leaves because it makes the juice bitter. I cut off just a little of the bottom of the bunch. As you can see I go through a heck of a lot of celery a week. In the beginning I was doing it every day............now I do it about 4 times a week.

Would a blender work for that?

It could but then after you blend you would need to sieve it through a cheesecloth because you just want the juice and not the fiber.

 

[Lolinda]

It could but then after you blend you would need to sieve it through a cheesecloth because you just want the juice and not the fiber.

good idea. in fact, I am hesitant too about buying a juicer. my parents have one and it needs a lot of cleaning. the veggie or fruit stuff goes inside the machine where it is churned hacked squeezed and whatnot. all that needs machinery. and all that machinery will need cleaning. I tell you what, the cleaning of that machine is times longer than the juicing...
if there was a juicer that cleans fast, I would immediately buy it...