Have you ever experienced that uncomfortable burning sensation in your stomach or chest after eating? If so, you're familiar with acid reflux, a common digestive disorder affecting more and more people. Unfortunately, I'm no exception and have struggled with this issue since a young age. Through years of personal experience, I've gained insight into the true causes of acid reflux and discovered natural ways to effectively treat it.
So that's my story!
I: Mom! I have bad feelings in my stomach!
Mummy: You know what to do, son. Small hydrochloric acid bottle is in the kitchen. Just add 10 drops and wait a while, it will help.
I: Why me? Why am I the only one in our family with these cramps?
Mummy: I've had them all my life too and so did your grandma, but we know this trick with hydrochloric acid and we just do it every time our stomach burns. We just open the kitchen cupboard, put 10 drops in the glass of water and drink it. It's probably passed on genetically from generation to generation. This is so minor compared to others who have more serious illnesses, be glad you have such a small problem!
So every time I listened to how lucky I am to have such small health problems compared to other children who received bigger health treats from their ancestors...
Daughter: Dad, I have a terrible burning sensation in my stomach again!
I: You know what to do. There is a RENNY in the kitchen drawer. Take it and if it doesn't help then take OMAPREZOL or Mezimforte too... See what's left there. I'll buy more today, don't worry!
Daughter: Why me?
I: You know, you should be happy because other children have inherited more serious diseases from their parents. You are lucky! Smile!
...here I will save you time reading because you know what I will tell my daughter as I still have a good memory and advice from my mother to pass on to the next generations as the family has lived with these problems generation after generation and the modern pharmaceutical industry has helped us to overcome this problem! We are lucky!
It's a conversation we have almost daily in our families???
I started writing this blog in the evening, but at 5am I jumped out of bed like I was struck by thunder!!
When I was a child, I was given an acidic pill, but I gave my daughter a pill that suppresses the acidity, a pill that is alkaline... OMG! This is something strange. Why are there now 2 completely opposite approaches to getting rid of the symptoms of acid reflux?
So here comes the part where it starts to make sense! All my childhood nightmares were swept away in one fell swoop... What happened? Did the pharmaceutical industry create a miracle pill? Oooo... NO!
It's 2017... I'm on a trip to India or we even thought we were on a mission to create a better world. We find that agriculture has gone too far with artificial fertilizers and the soil is completely depleted. Crops and plants are struggling to grow. Plants are attacked by numerous diseases. Pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and whatever else is used to increase yields. Problem that no one really cares about healthy soils! Big FARM (you can read it as BIG PHARM...) has not only made people addicted to pills and drugs, but also agriculture.
So we have a great partnership with Finland and a technology that produces cooking gas for Indians as well as compost for soils by composting green waste. Isn't that a great idea? It is! Everyone was so excited and really supportive as they understood the solution to solving the soil problem.
The task is simple. First build a pilot plant. We have green waste, which is just green mass from fields, like straw, sugar cane residue, leaves, basically anything that has grown but has been left in the field to either just be burned or steamed into the ditch at the side of the field.
So gas plant looks like big compost heap that is in concrete box, covered with membrane and bacteria will take care… bacteria… here is the problem. It is so tricky to import bacteria. We have a headache because we know that it is almost impossible. What to do? First have a call back to Finland and ask their opinion.
We are on the phone describing the problem to Finnish engineer Erkki who is behind the invention and guy listens, but then comes the best part.
He says: “We do not import any bacteria, we get there in India.”
I go: “Where?”
Hey: “Get the Indian’s poop!”
Me: ”What?”
He: “Yes, it is exactly the same bacteria that is thermophilic one and we need local one that will deal with the local green waste.”
Me: “Wow, great solution!”
Our team was on the move again and were calculating how many peoples poop we do need, since we need almost 500 kg of this mass to spray on top of the compost. We were planning to have nice discreet toilets and planned how to collect it. Yes, sounds messy, but we have a mission, to restore the soil, to help farmers…
Morning wasn't as bright as we woke up, but we didn't have ready plan on poop collection.
Call to Finland. Explained the problem, but guy on other side starts to laugh. So what's so funny?
He: “We only need one sample! That's all! “
Me: “What?” How do we get 500 kg? Is it kind of biblical method???”
He: ” Problem is your understanding the metabolism and nature itself. So that is why humanity is so sick, because you do not get basic things about health itself! We just take it and feed it with prebiotics, with soluble fiber. That will speed up the bacteria growing process. It is exactly what is happening in human gut! Same bacteria we have as there is in the soil that is under our feet! That's why you are all so sick, since you are like plants in the pots with lost connection to the soil! “You are like drug addicts living on pills and relying on cures that Pharma will provide to every sickness that comes around.”
So you can imagine that after this long of a monologue from Erkki we started to think and realized that sayings like, you are what you eat, all sickness comes from gut, from soil we come and there we return, are not taken from fairy tales , but truly are basics of nature.
Long story short… we never built a one biogas plant in India, but returned back home with inspiring idea to make a product that would help humans who really want to fix their digestion!
It took us almost four years until we managed to find the way how to make soluble fiber that works as prebiotic and contains large amount of humic and fulvic acids is beneficial to our gut bacteria or as we call it microbiome now-days.
The Black Stuff
What happened to my acid reflux and that of my daughters? Day 1 since we started using the new product in our diet, our reflux was gone! Gone and never returned! Not once!
Now I understand how and why acid reflux happened. I am on a mission to share my story with others too!
Acid in the stomach is not overproduced. It was acid pushing against the closing valve of my digestion, which wasn't closing properly and because of the half-open stage was releasing some acid into the windpipe, which was burning the tissues in the throat as they don't have the same protective layer as the stomach.
Now I can explain. We will pay attention to the entire digestive system. Our digestion begins in our mouth, where teeth and saliva do the first part. Then the stomach, using an acid that is almost pure HCl hydrochloride acid, is supposed to dissolve the food that comes there. The job is to break it down into a pate that is supposed to continue to the small intestine. Our stomach is the size of our fist when it is empty and can expand if we fill it with food several times.
But then comes the part of the digestive system that we usually underestimate in its importance, it is our small and large intestine, which is on average 8 meters long. 8 meters!! This is the part where our microbes live inside us and in symbiosis with us. They have a mass of 2-3 kg. They are a hundred times superior to us in their DNA! This is the universe inside us. They live there and will do everything to live there as long as possible, but our job is to give them the right elements for their life and elements that in exchange for the place, heat and oxygen that we humans provide them, they give us digested elements such as minerals, trace elements, proteins and vitamins from the food we provide them. But for them to work properly and provide for us, they need tools that are these prebiotics and humic substances that we should always get from the soil through proper and organic food. Because our food is overprocessed, purified, pasteurized, and lacking humic and fulvic acids... Our microbiome suffers and so do we.
When microbes are struggling with the digestive process => small intestine does not accept and does not let through food that microbes cannot digest => sometimes it even pushes back and holds undigested food, causing food blockage in the stomach. When the stomach is still full so that we can even feel a heavy feeling in the stomach, there is no other place for acid to go but back into the throat.
The message to anyone struggling with reflux follows. Don't just fight the problem in the stomach by either adding an alkaline pill to reduce acidity or using an extra hydrochloride acid dose to reduce food in the stomach by increasing the amount of acid in the stomach itself. Instead, think as a whole digestive system in complex. Help your microbiome digest food properly and move it down the tube, give them fulvic acid rich food or supplements so they can work the way nature intended for us. It's that simple! That's why Hippocrates said thousands of years ago: All disease begins in the gut! So it means our health starts there too!
Best regards,
Aivis