PART 2: "Should I eat a bland diet to heal my acid reflux?"

Respectfully, quit the nonsense.

Welcome back to The Acid Reflux Workshop, a 3-part Substack series to heal acid reflux and GERD from the Root.

Today, we’re navigating food triggers– all with the end goal of not living in restriction for much longer. If you haven’t already, read PART 1 before continuing because in there we covered:

• The real root cause of acid reflux

• The lowdown on stomach acid

• Your top priorities for healing

Introducing… The Acid Reflux Solution Workshop

PART 1: No, you don’t have too much acid

Ok so by now we’ve established that going overboard with garlic bread or eating too many tomatoes isn’t the reason why you got acid flowing up your throat– but it sure does something, doesn’t it? After all, symptoms happen after eating.

Think of trigger foods as a new pair of selvedge denim– you love them, but can’t wear them if you recently scraped your knee after a silly little fall. Certainly, the jeans aren’t to blame for your lack of balance, but having them on, rubbing against an open wound just makes everything more painful– and it prevents adequate healing from taking place. That’s what trigger foods are doing to your gut.

Two crucial takeaways for PART 2 of the Acid Reflux Workshop:

1. →Avoiding triggers is helpful because you can’t heal while you’re actively flaring.

2. →Avoiding triggers isn’t enough to heal. We need to facilitate repair.

If a specific ingredient or dish directly triggers acid reflux for you, to temporarily remove it is almost always a good idea. But the problem is that most of us don’t even know what our triggers are. We follow big scary lists that outline anything from french fries to peppermint tea, leaving us with zero options. If you were to avoid every single trigger that exists, you’d be left eating ice and air.

All in all, that the most important aspect about NOT causing further harm to your gut is by knowing exactly what triggers YOU specifically. For better or worse, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all.

Your triggers are INDIVIDUAL. There’s no need to avoid every food out there. For example, if you don’t react to coffee, you may approach it as you would a yellow traffic light: proceed, albeit with caution.

Here’s a non-comprehensive list of trigger foods categories:

1. Foods that delay digestion and absorption: the more fiber or fat a food has, the slower digestion becomes. Here’s where you never thought that salads and donuts could be clumped in the same category, but both are slow to digest and absorb. These are your fibrous veggies, fried foods, and naturally high-fat foods such as coconut milk and animal fats.

2. Red meat: this is not because steak is “bad” for you, but because it requires a significant amount of stomach acid for its digestion– and if you read PART 1, you know that acid reflux is a condition of ‘not enough stomach acid’ to begin with, making the digestion of meat, well, hard.

3. Foods that RELAX the lower esophageal sphincter (LES): These are onions, garlic, chocolate, peppermint and coffee. The LES is a muscular valve that relaxes to let food in (ingestion) and contracts at digestion. Foods that naturally relax this sphincter, as well as poor esophageal strength can prevent the LES from effectively contracting, allowing stomach acid to travel up the esophagus during the digestive process.

4. Acidic, bitter and spicy foods: like rubbing alcohol on an open wound, acidic and spicy foods typically cause the most pain because of existing inflammation and irritation of the stomach and esophagus.

Two ways to approach trigger foods:

1. ❌ Eliminating all acidic, bitter and spicy, all meat, all fatty, fibrous, and LES-relaxing foods. Leaving you with nothing to eat = a recipe for frustration and malnutrition.

2. ✅ Finding out your unique triggers. We do this by running teeny experiments on our body, with lots of patience and the right attitude.

Let’s dive into #2.

HOW TO ESTABLISH SAFE VS. TRIGGER FOODS IN 3 STEPS

Take a look at the list of common triggers below. You’re going to place food into one of the following three categories: