Your Stomach Acid is Broken and This Recipe Fixes it

Introduction to Gut Health and Digestion 0:00

Are you bloated, tired, sick, or stuck after a meal? Let's talk about which foods you should eat to tackle the most common gut health problems today. Because food is medicine. Do you want to live well? Meaning, do you want to stay well? Not wait to make changes until you're already sick? Well, welcome to my home. Let's go on this journey together. In this section, we're going to be talking about the first step in the digestive process, which is breaking food down. Now, some of the symptoms you might be experiencing if that's not going well for you is bloating, acid reflux, kind of that sour stomach feeling.

pain right after eating, pain underneath your rib cage right here, this is actually where your stomach is, all of those things signal that the food isn't getting broken down very well. So let's talk through this for just a moment. In the perfect scenario, when digestion is working right, you smell food, all of a sudden the saliva starts Building up,

Signs of Poor Stomach Acid and the Baking Soda Test 0:58

it's getting ready for the food to come. Once you've chewed and swallowed, the enzymes in the stomach start to get churning, as does the stomach acid. Now, a lot of times food, particularly proteins, are like Legos. They have all these little bricks stuck together in different ways. Well, when they hit that stomach acid, the acid actually breaks these apart into tiny little pieces that your body knows what to do with. So it churns them around, it breaks them apart. Once it's all broken apart, there's a valve at the bottom of the stomach that opens and allows the food to dump into the next phase of digestion.

If there's not enough acid here for the breaking apart to happen, the food stays. It doesn't get dumped. And if it stays long enough, it starts to ferment. It starts to create gas. That gas builds up. That's what we feel, the burping, the nausea, the pain, and then opens up the valve that comes upward and you get the acid in the back of your throat and you think, oh no, I have too much stomach acid. That's not the problem. The problem is that you had too little stomach acid. The food couldn't get broken apart correctly.

So I want to show you a real quick test you can do at home to decide, is this your problem? I call it the baking soda test. You're going to take a half a cup of water, a quarter teaspoon of baking soda, mix them together and drink it. Now the goal with this is this baking soda should interact with your stomach acid. you're gonna drink this all the way down in one swallow. I'm not gonna do it because what will come next is a burp and we want you burping in two to three minutes. So drink it all down the hatch.

You time to see how long it takes you to burp. If you're burping in two to three minutes, it means that baking soda interacted with the stomach acid properly, you have enough, you're good to go. Your gut issues do not happen up here. That's really what you need to determine. If you don't burp within that two to three minute time, or if you have some of those telltale symptoms, that bloating, gassy,

Using Bitters and Acidic Foods to Support Digestion 3:04

acid refluxy feeling, then this is where you need to stop, or this is where you need to start, because this is the place to work on first. We need to rebuild that stomach acid. It's not about less acid, it's about actually more acid. We need to give the body a reason to turn on that acid process. So a couple of things you're going to do. First of all, we're going to talk about bitters. Now, arugula and radicchio, there's a few things like that that are very bitter, as are even things like ginger.

And then there's foods that are acidic, lemon. sauerkraut, kimchi, apple cider vinegar. These all actually bring their own acid with them. So they're going to help stimulate the acid and supplement the acid in the stomach. So this is a real easy thing to do at the beginning of a meal. First of all, lemon in water. Have you heard of that? A lot of people get lemon in their water. There's a reason for it. That lemon juice actually helps the digestive process. But one key to that is it works better if the water is warm.

When you drink cold water, it actually paralyzes the digestive system a little and it doesn't work as well. So warm lemon water is a fabulous thing to do right before a meal. Then, We're just making a little salad with some arugula. Bitters stimulate the body to create more saliva, which stimulates the body to create more acid. So I'm just mixing a little bit of lemon juice in with some salt. A little salt before a meal will also stimulate more acid production. It just turns the body on, tells it it's time.

So this is a very simple salad. If you don't want a whole bowl of roughage basically, and I'll tell you if your stomach is not digesting well, this is actually really hard for you to digest. So another way to do this is to just saute it. So we're gonna put some of it over here on the stove and cook it with that lemon juice and a little bit of olive oil. We'll put a little bottle of olive oil on both of these. So a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of lemon, a little bit of salt, and Two ways to get those bitters in.

If you don't really like how bitter they are, they'll still work even if you add a little bit of maple syrup. So this salad is dressed with olive oil, maple syrup, a little bit of lemon and salt. Deliciousness. And this is gonna just stimulate your body to do what it needs to do with all the other foods that you eat after this. So this is a great way to get things moving. You'll see this over here is just gonna shrink down to almost nothing. So this is a really great side dish to add to any other thing that you're making.

This will cook down in about three minutes. We don't have to add anything other than just that little bit of olive oil that we put on top.

Golden Milk and Warm Digestive Remedies 5:56

And this sometimes is an easier way to get that bitter green into a meal. So we'll come back to that in just a minute. I also want to show you how to make golden milk. Turmeric, ginger, they're also very good at stimulating acid production. So we're going to add a little bit of your favorite kind of milk, preferably actually not dairy milk, because if you are struggling to digest things, Dairy is a big protein, and if you're not breaking it apart well, your body won't know what to do with it. So I prefer actually almond milk.

We're gonna add the turmeric, ginger, some cinnamon, a little bit of vanilla makes it taste delicious, some pepper. Why pepper? Because pepper actually makes that turmeric work better. And a little bit of honey to make it taste great. So that's all we're doing for golden milk. I'm gonna blend this up and then we're gonna come back and see what this looks like when it's ready to go. We're gonna wanna heat it because remember, hot digests a little easier than cold. So let's go blend this and we'll come back and look at it.

All right, I've gotta blend it up. I'm gonna go put it in the pan and we're gonna heat this up You can see how simple that was. It's delicious. And this is a treat for me. I don't feel like I'm even doing any kind of medicine when I'm drinking this golden milk. You can see how quickly this arugula cooked down and looks almost like there's nothing here. That's really simple to add this as a side dish to anything. And again, this is just gonna stimulate that stomach acid to work a little bit better.

So let's wrap this up. We're going to heat this up just a little bit and show you what we've come up with for all the foods that will help when the problem is up here. Food not breaking down. Okay, we have the golden milk all done. Let's go through what we've talked about today. The first part of digestion is breaking food apart. There has to be enough stomach acid there to actually do the job. If you've taken the baking soda test and there is not enough stomach acid, then you need to either supplement with adding acidic foods like apple cider vinegar,

Recap: Foods That Help Break Down Food 8:20

kimchi, sauerkraut, lemon juice, all of these things will add or You need to add foods that will stimulate more acid production like ginger, avocado, fennel. Have you ever seen these at an Indian restaurant? They often are sitting on the countertop. Why? Because you pop one in your mouth and you chew it and it actually helps you digest better. Fennel is great for that. We made a salad out of arugula and spinach with a little bit of lemon juice. Remember the acid salt, which stimulates acid formation, a little bit of olive oil and a little maple syrup to make it taste good.

We also sauteed those same greens. Warm lemon water. If you drink this before a meal, every meal will digest a little bit better. And then the golden milk. This is a treat. The turmeric, the ginger, the cinnamon, all of those things are actually going to stimulate your digestion, help you digest better. The warm is going to soothe on its way down and help everything work better. So remember, pay attention to what your body is telling you. treat the symptom, it's sharing and you will see resolution of your symptoms and you're going to just feel better.