Hi there, Eric Bakker.
Thanks for coming back.
We've got lots of questions again to go through, many, many different questions I've got on
my list here.
A common question I get asked so many times by people is, "How can I improve my stomach
function?
If my stomach is flat or low, how can I increase its activity?
How can I get it working better?
I've got heartburn, and I've been reading that it could be attributed to low stomach
acid rather than high stomach acid."
These are things I commonly hear from people.
People looking for real solutions to fix up their upper digestive symptoms, problems that
they've got.
People who are sick and tired of taking acid blocking medications, or what we call PPI
drugs.
These are terrible.
You don't need to be on these crappy kind of medications.
Many people who have symptoms of reflux and heartburn, in fact, as you probably all have
read on Google by now, in fact an under acid stomach, not over acid stomach.
I've been fighting this for 30 plus years, people.
I've been working against this paradigm where when people have this reflux, they think,
"Oh my gosh, I've got too much acid in my stomach.
I've got to reduce the acidity."
When in fact, the opposite occurs, especially when you get older like me.
Your stomach goes flat, and you need to prop it up, get it working better.
So let's have a look at some of the best ways to increase stomach activity.
One of the key things that I want you to understand is actually in not taking things, but in some
lifestyle changes that we need to give you guys to make out there if you want to improve
your stomach function.
I've written down a couple of core things that I want to discuss here that are very
important to get that stomach more active and working.
If you don't do these basic things, you might as well forget watching the rest of the video,
because it's not really going to be of much use to you.
The first tip, of course, to get the stomach working better and to improve the acidity
is to chew food better.
Chewing leads to better ... I won't use the word ... I'll say pooping, so people who chew
better poop better, all right?
Lots of people today don't chew their food properly.
They have dental issues, they could have gum disease, or lack of teeth, or problems with
their mouth.
If you've got an issue, you need to get that checked out.
Especially as you get older.
If you're losing a few teeth, if you can afford to, you need to get that fixed, because that
can make a huge difference towards chewing.
Just by chewing food properly and breaking it down to small particle size, means you're
greatly increasing the surface area of the food, and therefore improving digestion and
absorption.
It makes a lot of sense to do that.
Smaller portion sizes.
Get smaller plates.
You might be eating too much food.
Just get smaller plate sizes.
Most people eat too much food, especially when they get older and they turn into adults,
they eat far too much food.
So smaller portion sizes make it obviously easier for the stomach to work.
Chewing food properly, smaller portion sizes, it's definitely the way to go.
The other thing is to back off sometimes.
Don't always eat food.
If you can, skip a meal, especially on a weekend.
It could be a little bit of an intermittent fast that you could have going on there, but
just basically the point I'm trying to make here is cut the sizes of what you're eating
down a little bit, and also occasionally don't eat food all the time, or eat a lot lighter.
It makes it easier on your stomach.
The fourth part of this equation is stress.
Stress accounts for so much inactive stomach function, it's incredible.
I see this all the time in our clinical practice.
It's never spoken of, but people who are under stress, even long-term mild low-grade stress,
what happens in a fight or flight is that the body doesn't really want to have a lot
of blood supply going to the digestive organs.
It wants to move it to the periphery, so you can avoid stress.
So blood flow's going to increase to the legs, to the arms, to the hands, to the head, but
not to the stomach.
So people under stress, even low-grade but long-term, they will have an unfortunate experience,
and their digestive system will slowly begin to suffer more, and more, and more.
These people also tend to chew faster, and they eat faster, so this is a problem.
So stress could be a problem why you've got an underactive stomach, especially if you're
eating on the run, you've got weird jobs, eating at crazy hours.
These are the things I'd like you to think about when it comes to your health.
Right, now let's look at some other tips.
Taking acid like apple cider vinegar, acetic acid, or looking at good quality lemons, nice
sour bit of lemons, which is the citric acid, both these are good things to take in regularly
if you want to improve your digestive system.
I've been recommending apple cider vinegar now probably since the '80s for people, a
long, long time now, and it's only really just becoming en vogue and in fashion.
These things, these acids, really help to improve your body's ability not just to produce
acid, but to slowly break down food.
They're cleansing, and they have a nice stimulating ability in the upper digestive system.
These organic acids also really improve the pancreatic function if you keep eating them.
By constantly having apple cider vinegar in your diet, and lemon juice, it's going to
reduce your body's ability to produce SIBO, leaky gut, candida, and a whole bunch of other
problems.
So try and do what I do, is always regularly have either cider vinegar or lemon juice in
your diet.
Summer is upon us now in New Zealand, so we eat lemons every day.
These are a good addition to the diet.
So digestive enzymes is another thing that you could be looking at doing.
There are different types of digestive enzymes.
You can get Betaine, and for example, Betaine hydrochloric acid and pepsin.
Hydrochloric acid and pepsin is a common digestive enzyme that many people take, especially for
protein digestion.
Other people will take enzymes which tend to be more diverse and a wider range.
They could be broad spectrum digestive enzyme.
Check out CanXida Restore, the product I made with the green label.
That's got a whole bunch of enzymes in it, and even probiotics, which can seriously aid
digestive health.
Enzymes are especially important if you're under stress, and you're burping, or bloating,
or you've got issues there, and you think you're not digesting food properly.
If the stress is temporary, or you just want to push through something, enzymes can work
quite well for you in that case.
Enzymes help many people recover from poor stomach function.
Check out my other videos on stomach function when it comes to stomach tolerance testing
with enzymes, particularly hydrochloric acid and pepsin, to work out how flat the stomach
is.
You can do that through a simple test.
You can either do it through a bicarbonate of soda test, or taking capsules of enzymes
and increasing quantity until you hit your tolerance level.
But I've done videos on that, so check that out.
There's a lot of talk about Manuka Honey being good for stomach function.
I don't really see that as being a special attribute to Manuka Honey.
Many honeys will improve stomach function, low acid stomach.
I've got several books in my wonky donkey bookshelf over there, older ones from turn
of the century right up before 1960s, and many, many of those older doctors recommend
honey as a great aid for digestive health.
If you get a raw honey, good quality honey, doesn't have to be Manuka, it will still have
antibacterial properties about it.
Honey's great for wounds, it's good for helicobacter pylori in the stomach, but just try a little
teaspoon of honey if you've got an upset stomach, or poor digestive health.
It can help you quite often.
Obviously, if you've got a bad candida problem, or you really react to sugars, you'll need
to be careful.
Many people with low acid stomach do benefit from a little bit of honey, inclusion of honey
in the diet.
The last point is you need to deal with infections, so if you've got helicobacter, or H. pylori,
which many people have, you may have symptoms, and you may not have symptoms.
My recommendation is if you've got a lot of heartburn and reflux, or have problem behind
the sternum, or just some kind of problem burping a lot, get it checked out.
Get a breath test done, maybe a stool test done, to see if you've got a stomach infection.
There's a bacteria that can live in your stomach, and if you've got it in your stomach, it'll
create a lot of problems.
There are different ways to eradicate that, and you can also check out my videos on helicobacter
pylori regarding stomach.
This can often be a problem and underpinning a poor functioning stomach, making you think
you've got an ulcer, or something else going on, when in fact, it's a bacteria that needs
eradicating.
Again, check out CanXida Restore, the product with the red label.
We've successfully used that for eradication of H. pylori.
I hope that covers enough for you people today regarding some good tips on how to revive
a flat stomach, or rather acid stomach.
Be particularly mindful, I'll just say that as a close regarding the stress.
I see this as a big problem for a lot of people, especially as they get a bit older beyond
50, and their stomach function declines.
It could well be a part of your problem.
Thanks for tuning in.