Heartburn and Acid Reflux

The first thing to know here is that heartburn has absolutely nothing at all to do with your heart - or anything even close to your heart.

Heartburn also has other names. Some people will call it acid reflux and yet others will call it GERD which is the short version of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. They're all the same thing when it comes down to brass tacks - just a few different names for the same problem.

What causes heartburn is a valve in your stomach which controls your stomach acid doesn't work properly or your stomach is too full and stomach acid "leaks" out of your stomach and back up into your throat.

This valve is called the lower esophageal sphincter or LES for short.

Your stomach makes an acid to dissolve all the food you eat so that your body can absorb all the nutrients it needs from the food you eat every day.

This particular type of acid is called hydrochloric acid and just happens to be a very, very strong acid.

How strong? You can use hydrochloric acid to dissolve metal if you wanted to. The marvels of your stomach lining prevent it from causing you any damage.

But when you have an attack of heartburn/reflux/GERD> your stomach acid leaks back up into your throat and causes intense pain.

This pain is caused by the fact that your throat has no protection against hydrochloric acid so that burning feeling you get is the tissue inside your throat being severely burned by the acid from your stomach.

Left untreat this acid can cause long term damage to your throat and can lead to other far more worrying health problems.

Why not try out a natural remedy for heartburn?

Attack of acid reflux are quite painful so it's normaly for people to wonder what kinda of damage is being done to their insides on an ongoing basis.

In the big picture of things acid reflux is harmless to the body. It just causes pain and discomfort to the person having the bout of heartburn and makes mealtimes miserable.

There is, however, a condition called Barretts Esophagus that can cause a type of cancer to develop in the throat as a direct result of damage to the tissue from your stomach acid.

This condition is quite rare but if you think you're suffering from severe acid reflux then it's worth a visit to the doctor. Your doctor can perform an endoscopy (put a camera inside your throat) to check for damage from acid reflux attacks.

Prevention is always better than cure with these things so instead of waiting and wondering what will happen why not take steps to actually cure your heartburn once and for all?

You'd be silly not to...

A major part of the digestive system is the acid in your stomachs. This acid is called hydrochloric acid and is extremrely powerful. How powerful? Well it's strong enough to corrode most types of metal. Yup. Really.

This acid is usually called gastric acid by most people and it's job in the body is to break down the chemical bonds in the food that you eat - it literally disintegrated the food into smaller chunks of protein which the enzymes in the stomach can then start working on.

Stomach acid is necessary to allow us to digest the various foods we eat each day - without it our bodies simply would not be able to function and the realty of it is that we'd starve to death because our bodies wouldn't be able to absorb any nutrients from food.