The 14-Day Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux (GERD): Step-by-Step

The Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux (GERD)

Is an alkaline diet the answer to acid reflux?  The short answer is yes.  An alkaline diet can not only quickly prevent symptoms of GERD, but it can also help heal the esophagus quickly too.

When you switch your diet from more acid-forming to more alkaline-forming (note, not totally alkaline, perfection is not needed!), you not only support your digestive system in the immediacy by reducing the volume of excess acidity, but you also provide it with the nutrient to help heal and re-balance.

But before we get into HOW you can start eating and living a more alkaline diet for acid reflux, let’s take a closer look at what causes GERD and how an alkaline diet can help.

What is Acid Reflux (GERD)?

Acid reflux, or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), happens when the contents of your stomach—including acid and digestive enzymes—travel up into your esophagus, causing a burning sensation in the chest area.  This is more likely to happen when your lower esophageal sphincter (LES) isn’t working properly, allowing the contents of your stomach to rise into your esophagus.

Your LES is a ring-shaped muscle at the bottom of the esophagus that acts as a valve between your esophagus and stomach.  It relaxes when you swallow, allowing food and liquids to pass into your stomach, then closes again to prevent the contents in your stomach from moving back up into your esophagus.

This reflux of acid may cause symptoms like heartburn or gastritis (inflammation of the lining of the stomach).  In severe cases, acid reflux can damage the lining of your esophagus and lead to complications such as Barrett’s esophagus.  Barrett’s esophagus is a condition in which changes in the cells of your esophagus are caused by chronic GERD.

Although it’s common for people with acid reflux to experience heartburn, not everyone does.  In fact, some people experience no symptoms at all, but may still have GERD.

GERD is more common in the U.S. than you might think—around 60% of adults have experienced acid reflux at least once within the last month.  Medications are available to treat the symptoms of GERD, but they actually contribute to making the problem worse in the medium-to-long term, as they actually increase how much acid will be produced by the body ongoing.

However, we KNOW that following an alkaline diet can and will reverse symptoms AND heal the digestive system to make reflux a thing of the past.

The Foundation: Stomach Acid, Reflux, Digestion, and Alkalinity

This is a question I know a lot of people have, and maybe you do too:

“The stomach is so acidic, what is the point in eating alkaline foods?”

It’s a very logical question to ask, because indeed if everything is dropping into this big pool of stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) and turning to a sludge (it’s actually called chyme) then what difference does it make if a food is alkaline or acidic in the first place.

Well, actually, a lot.

Firstly let’s take a step back. There are a couple of points to consider before we get into the mechanics of this early stage of digestion and the role of hydrochloric acid (HCl).

1) we’re not talking strictly alkaline or acidic in the natural state of the food. We’re talking acid or alkaline-forming. This is a key distinction with a few foods. Lemons, tomatoes, grapefruits – these are all acidic in their natural state, but have an alkaline-forming effect on the body. I won’t go into the finer details of why now – but it’s basically to do with their mineral content, which overrides their citric acid content.

2) we have to look at this with common sense before we get into the science (and I promise not to be to science-y) – the alkaline forming foods are ALL of the foods we know are good for us: plant-based, leafy greens, salads, healthy fats, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, things like spinach, cucumber, kale, avocado, tomatoes, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant-rich foods, fresh foods. The acid-forming foods are all processed, man-made, sugary, grain-based, trans-fats, processed-fats, foods like cakes, biscuits, pizza, chips, alcohol, processed meats, fast food, convenience food, microwave meals etc.

This isn’t an ‘out there’ way of looking at diet – it just makes sense.

See Also: The Beginner’s Guide to the Alkaline Diet (How to Get Alkaline)

So with that being said – let’s look at the science of digestion so we can fully understand exactly why pH matters at the point the food enters your mouth.

As the food you eat enters the digestive process, it begins to be prepared for digestion immediately by saliva and mucous and a handful of other enzymes in the mouth, throat, and esophagus. As the food hits the esophagus, this triggers the release of gastrin in the stomach, which ultimately begins the release of hydrochloric acid (HCl) in the stomach to take the pH from the stomach’s holding level of pH 5-6 down to pH 4.

At this pH 4 level the food can be broken down and any bacterias destroyed.

A common misconception here is that the stomach is a big pouch of acidity waiting for the food to drop in where it will fizz and sizzle and burn down to nothing.

This isn’t the case. The stomach is very mildly acidic until we eat something, and then the volume of HCl produced will vary depending on what we eat.

And an acidic diet of sugar, grains, processed foods, excessive caffeine, animal protein, dairy, processed fats, junk foods and so on can cause your stomach to become wildly imbalanced and produce way too much acid, or way too little! And both are a big problem.

Wait, how can an eating acidic diet cause low stomach acid?!  

The stomach creates HCl on demand, and the more alkaline a food is, the more stomach acid is produced – because the stomach needs to keep the pH at a strongly acidic pH 4 – so if you eat alkaline-forming foods the stomach will produce slightly more HCl to maintain that pH and not let it get too high.

Is this what we want? The stomach to make more acidity? YES!

This is a good thing. It sounds like a bad thing, but it’s a good thing.

Whenever the stomach produces HCl it also produces a corresponding amount of sodium bicarbonate (NaCOH3).

So, the more acid your stomach produces the more alkalinity it produces in the form of sodium bicarbonate, which is then passed into the bloodstream to help prepare the body for the next phase of digestion in the duodenum and small intestine (among other things).

In other words, eating alkaline foods ensures the stomach produces the necessary amount of alkalinity (in the form of sodium bicarbonate, as a result of increased hydrochloric acid production).

So having an acidic stomach is critical for health, critical for alkaline balance, critical for digestion – but it has to be delicately balanced, which eating alkaline-forming foods ensures.

OK let’s recap:

[+] eat high-acid load foods such as excessive dairy and meat and the stomach produces chronically too little acidity, leading to low stomach acid issues (which I’ll expand on in a moment)

[+] OR eat a lot of sugary foods, grains, processed foods, alcohol etc and the stomach doubles it’s acid production – putting way more HCl into the system than your body can neutralise – both too much and too little stomach acid lead to a destructive imbalance

[+] Both of these can ultimately end up putting you in a state of chronically low stomach acid – if you eat foods that over-produce acidity over a prolonged period and your body is massively overproducing stomach acid the body’s capacity to produce stomach acid fades and you start to underproduce HCl

[+] BUT if you eat or drink alkaline substances (fresh foods, plant-based, healthy oils, nuts, seeds, salads, greens etc) then the stomach reacts to the increase in alkalinity from the foods being digested and produces more HCl to keep the stomach pH to between 3-4 and whenever the stomach produces HCl it also produces more NaHCO3 to balance this acidity

[+] The NaHCO3 enters into the bloodstream to alkalise the blood, neutralise acidity, perform a whole host of important roles – one of which is to help prepare the liver and pancreas as alkaline for the next stage of digestion – as the pancreas secretes bicarbonate to neutralise the acid from the stomach

So eating alkaline-forming foods gently increases HCl which increases NaHCO3 and the food is perfectly prepared to continue on its digestive journey.

This is why eating alkaline is PERFECT for the acidic stomach. The stomach pH is maintained at the perfect level it needs to be to kill bacteria and break the foods down into chyme ready to pass into the duodenum and then the small intestine.

The increase of HCl to balance this state of digestion in the stomach causes the body to also create the NaHCO3 which passes into the bloodstream and into the pancreas where the NaHCO3 is used to increase the pH of the food with pancreatic juices (and a lot of other enzymes which we don’t need to go into in too much depth here) to keep the food moving through the digestive process at the right pH.

The pH Levels of Each Stage of Digestion

Here are those pH levels so you can see the journey and why the digestive process isn’t just the stomach melting everything in acid (as most people believe):

• Throat/Esophagus: pH 6.8
• Stomach: outside of digestion pH 5-6, upon digestion pH 3-4
• Duodenum (Small Intestine Phase I): pH 7-8
• Jejenum/Ileum (Small Intestine Phase II & III): pH 8
• Large Intestine (Colon): pH 5.5-7 – and the chyme as it remains here during excretion has a pH of pH 7-7.5

So you can see that the stomach is not strongly acidic outside of digestion, but upon foods being registered, it secretes the HCl to bring the pH to between 3-4 and the NaCOH3 is also produced to neutralise this acidity as soon as it reaches the sphincter between the stomach and the duodenum to get the pH to 7-8.

As the semi-digested food (the chyme) is moved through digestion it requires alkalinity – which is gained from the alkaline enzymes, pancreatic juices, additional NaCOH3 and potassium, chloride, zinc, iron and more throughout the various stages.

Eating an acidic diet disrupts this process significantly – and all of the problems start in the stomach phase of digestion:

There are two possible scenarios here that we’ve already touched on:

1) too much stomach acid: consumption of sugars, processed foods, chemical-laden foods (additives, MSG, ‘natural’ and artificial colourings and flavourings, stabilisers etc), gluten containing grains, processed fats (trans-fats, hydrogenated fats, margarine etc) and so on more than doubles the production of stomach acid. The body cannot manufacture enough NaCOH3 quickly enough to balance this out, and the result is the food passes into the duodenum in a far too acidic state for proper digestion, damaging the duodenum, and more critically – damaging the microvilli in the Jejunum and Ileum.

Over time too much stomach acid will exhaust your body’s capacity to produce HCl – especially as you get older – and you will start to massively underproduce HCl leading to too little stomach acid.

2) too little stomach acid: can be a chronic condition if there is an overconsumption of high-acid load foods such as excessive animal protein and dairy and/or the situation described above. When the stomach produces too little acid – two problems occur which are the foundation of many other problems:

1. there is not enough stomach acid to properly digest the food and the food passes, half-digested into the duodenum and is a direct cause of leaky gut, where the food causes tiny tears and holes in the small intestine, allowing undigested matter to re-enter the blood stream. This rapidly causes auto-immune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s, Raynaud’s disease, Crohn’s, Type 1 Diabetes, Grave’s disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, hepatitis, and more.
2. there is not enough NaCOH3 produced to neutralize the toxic acidity of these undigested acid-forming foods and a low level of chronic acidosis can quickly occur within the body that has been implicated in research to be at the root of many cancers, depression, elevated cortisol-based hormonal imbalances, insulin resistance, hypertension, Alzheimer’s and more.
3. And of course, an acidic imbalance in the stomach is going to have a very detrimental effect on those  100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms (good and bad bacteria) in our gut that we want to be in the correct balance.

Summary: Stomach Acid, pH and the Alkaline Diet

To recap – one of the big questions people have about the merit of eating ‘alkaline foods’ is that the stomach is acid so what’s the point. Eating an alkaline-forming diet is the best thing you can do to maintain the correct balance of stomach acidity, period.

In this section, we’ve discovered that the stomach is only very mildly acid (pH 5-6) until the food is consumed and passed in from the esophagus, at which point the stomach secretes hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium bicarbonate (NaCOH3) in balancing proportions.

The HCl is used to break down the food into what’s called ‘chyme’ and also destroy any bacteria in the food. The NaCOH3 passes back into the bloodstream to help alkalize, maintain the blood pH of 7.365 and undertake a whole host of tasks including supporting the pancreas and liver in creating the pancreatic juices and enzymes used in the next phase of digestion (after the stomach) which occurs in the small intestine (the duodenum, then the jejunum and ileum) where the pH increases first to 7 and then to 8, before the digested, nutrient-extracted chyme finally enters the large intestine (the colon) and the pH drops to 7 as the food is prepared for excretion.

We learned that consuming an acid-forming diet of sugar, grains, high carbs, excessive animal proteins and dairy, processed foods, junk foods, chemicals and artificial foods and so on ultimately disrupts this stomach acid production and pH.

The stomach in this state of excess acid onslaught either produces way too much HCl or way too little and both lead to the core of many (if not all) of the most common health challenges we face today.

So we now know that an acidic diet can get us into this mess, so now let’s look at how to HEAL this!

The Alkaline Diet for Reflux: Step-by-Step

The steps I’m about to detail below will get you instant relief, and well on your way to living reflux-free.

Of course, nothing you do for your health should be short-term, with the (maybe subconscious!) intent of going back to how you were before once it is ‘fixed’. LIving this way will simply lead you to yo-yo back and forth, which is super-stressful to your body and frustrating to you.

So I have made these suggestions with a long-term ‘lifestyle’ in mind.

Now, with that being said, my whole belief is that it has to be easy, sustainable, enjoyable, and delicious, and I don’t believe in being ‘perfect’ ever.

If you want to go a little deeper at first to get reflux absolutely 100% GONE for good so you can focus on more fun and positive health goals for your body, inside and out, then I recommend doing my 7-day Alkaline Reset Cleanse as soon as possible.

This will reverse the reflux and heal your digestion very quickly, and give you an incredible platform to reach all of your other health goals rapidly (as you’ll be coming from a base of a perfectly balanced body).

You can buy my book The Alkaline Reset Cleanse here and get over $200+ of extra products from me too!

Now onto today’s steps:

Your 14-Day Alkaline Plan to Reflux-Free Living!

Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux – WEEK ONE:

In the first seven days, there are 3 key steps. If you can follow these, it will do a huge amount towards repairing the acid balance and digestive function, while creating some breathing space for your digestion to heal and rebalance.

At the end of this week, you will notice symptoms will have decreased greatly, and then we can step into week 2 where healing is the main priority.

Step One: Limit Sugar & Gluten

This is my only ‘remove’ step. And I am usually very strict about first steps only being about ‘adding the good stuff’ rather than there being a focus on removing the bad stuff. But for reflux, so much of the damage is done by sugar and gluten, that it’s worth keeping in here, even if just for these first 14 days.

You don’t have to completely give it all up, cold turkey, but the more you can reduce and remove, the better.

It doesn’t have to be too taxing either. In my working with thousands and thousands of people specifically to remove sugar from their diet in my Alkaline Base Camp coaching membership (register to join here)https://energiseross.lpages.co/abc-closed-page/ I have consistently seen that 80-90% of the sugar people consume is coming from just a very small handful of products or meals, and the vast majority of time these are products or meals that can easily be swapped, dropped or replaced.

Consider your own regular diet/food intake. Jot down a quick food diary from your past few days or just consider it now: what handful of items contained the MOST sugar in your diet this week?

When you realize what they are, you will find you can very easily swap them for something with less sugar, or remove them completely.

For example:

• Big flavored coffee things: simply go for a regular latte or cap. It doesn’t need to have whipped cream, sugar, syrups, flavours, toppings etc.
• Breakfast cereal: these are usually laden with sugar. Swap for oats cooked at home for the next couple of weeks.
• Jams etc. on breads: swap for avocado!
• Sodas & Fruit Juices: swap for herbal teas, water, green juice
• Condiments: go for fresh, natural alternatives – use things like hummus or avocado instead of ketchup and mayo.

But really, to keep it simple, to start cutting sugar the very best thing you can do is follow the advice of ‘Just Eat Real Food’ (JERF!). One of the more interesting facts from my digging around in the sugar data is that sales of actual sugar (as in sugar as a raw ingredient in bags) has dropped year on year since the 1970’s – yet our sugar consumption has sky-rocketed. We are not actually buying sugar and adding it to our foods – it is just present in abundance in every pre-packaged, processed, shop-bought food we buy!

So if you want to get sugar out of your life, simply stop buying packaged, processed foods.

A good case in point is pasta sauce. When you make it at home you don’t add any sugar – yet a jar of store-bought pasta sauce has 12-15g of sugar in it!

Imagine making a stir-fry at home. How much sugar would you add? None I expect, but this so-called ‘healthy’ chicken stir fry from the frozen meals section of my grocery store has 12.3g of sugar per serve. WHY?!

A big part of the reason, which we touched on before, is that as a population we’re still so obsessed with low-fat that when the food companies take all the fat out the food loses all of it’s flavour and so they have to pile sugar in to make it taste nice again. And given how little Government ‘health ratings’ care about the sugar we eat, they can really pile it in – like the meal above – and still get a ‘health star’ rating of 4 or 5 out of 5.

So the #1 easiest, fastest, clean cut way to get the sugar out is to JERF.

And it’s similar for gluten!

The vast majority of the gluten in our diet comes from:

• Pasta
• Bread
• Breakfast cereal

These are easily swapped!

Pasta: use gluten-free pasta, or better still, spiralized zucchini or other veggies

Bread: use gluten-free bread, wraps, etc. Also go ‘naked’ and instead of a sandwich have it as a salad. Use lettuce for wraps. Have sushi, or rice paper rolls at lunch instead of a sandwich.

Breakfast cereal: go for gluten-free oats, or a N’Oatmeal like this if you want to keep carbs low.

And after that, it’s the same JERF advice!

Step Two: Daily Green Juices or Smoothies

This is, without question, bang-for-your-buck, the most effective and efficient way to restore proper pH balance. If you want to go alkaline for acid reflux, this is the fastest way to do it.

It sounds a bit of a pain, but really it’s 10-minutes out of your day. Chop, juice, wash. It’s as simple as that.

Please do not include fruit in these, especially the juices, as the concentrated fructose will contribute more acidity to the body, but if you HAVE to, maybe 1/2 an apple to a juice, or a small handful of blueberries to a smoothie. And just until you get used to the taste, and then taper it off.

In terms of recipes, I have a few 😉

• Alkaline Detox Green Juice
• Cleansing Fat Flushing Juice
• The Triple-A Juice
• Adrenal Healing Alkaline Juice

Give these a try!

Step Three: Proper Hydration

Proper hydration is vital for your digestive system. Most of us are walking around each day fatigued, foggy and ready to fall asleep – but the reality is for a lot of people they’re just dehydrated, chronically so!

Whenever I do a quick survey on hydration (which I’ve done about 14 times in the past 12 years) to help people to understand their current hydration levels and realise how slack they’re being(!) – when answering honestly the average is 2-3 glasses of water per day (coffee and regular tea don’t count). That’s SO LITTLE.

It’s no wonder we’re turning into a world full of reflux, IBS, clogged-up people.

You simply HAVE to get properly hydrated if you want to cleanse the digestive system, get everything working optimally and re-gain the energy you deserve.

How Much Is Enough Water?

For most people this works out at between 2-3 litres (66-99 fl oz) per day. It sounds like a fair amount if you’re used to drinking a couple of glasses a day, but in reality, if you give it a little effort you’ll quickly realise it’s quite easy.

And to work out your magic number here’s the equation:

1 litre (33 fl oz) of water per 40lbs (18k or 2.85stone) of body weight

For example, 12st = 4.2 litres per day (142 fl oz)

And if you stick to this, every day, I promise you there will be a massive increase in your health, energy, mental clarity and vitality.

This has been much debated in the mainstream media in the past twelve months.

Certain ‘experts’ have been playing down the need to drink water! Even 8 glasses a day (which is just under 2 litres or 64oz) is too much for these guys.

Instead they’d rather you just have a couple of glasses and be done with it.  Let’s look at it this way, and I urge you to do this if you’ve got any doubts.

FOR THE NEXT 7 DAYS DRINK ONLY 2 GLASSES PER DAY. SEE HOW YOU FEEL. THEN FOR THE 7 DAYS AFTER DRINK THE AMOUNT THATS RIGHT FOR YOU FROM THE BELOW METHOD AND SEE IF YOU FEEL ANY BETTER…. I ALREDY KNOW YOUR ANSWER, BY THE WAY…

Staying ultra-hydrated by drinking 3-4 litres of clean, filtered water per day will dramatically improve the way you think and feel.

If you stick to these three simple steps for seven days, you will already be feeling amazing…and then build on them into week 2 for a huge improvement with your reflux and digestion.

Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux – WEEK TWO:

While continuing your new habits from week one, I now want you to add these three steps to the mix! This will continue to rebalance the proper pH of the digestive system, while now also aiding repair, restoration, and rebalancing throughout the entire gut.

Step Four: Adding Healthy Fats

In terms of stuffing up your digestive function, there are few more harmful things than bad fats. We’re talking trans-fats, hydrogenated and partially-hydrogenated fats, cheap toxic oils like canola oil, vegetable oil, spreads like margarine. These harmful, processed fats are especially destructive and so easy to eliminate and replace with healthy fats!

There is no need to use margarine when you can use butter. There is no need to cook with canola oil when you can use coconut oil. There is no need to use store-bought cheap-fat, sugar-laden salad dressings when you can make your own, rich in omega-3.

This is one that is so easy to accomplish, especially if you’re following the JERF principle from the quit sugar section before.

As important as cutting the unhealthy fats, is adding the healthy fats. We don’t have time to go through it all today, but rest-assured, healthy fat does not make you fat. Nor does it contribute to cardiovascular disease. This is proven beyond all doubt.

The fats that we absolutely MUST include in our diet are:

• Omega 3
• Saturated Fat (primarily from coconut)

Omega 3:

When it comes to the omega oils, you want to be having at least a ratio of 2:1:1 of omega 3, 6 and 9, but the Standard American Diet has people at more of a ratio of 1:20:20. And it’s a problem.

By removing processed food from your diet, you will eliminate 80-90% of the 6 and 9, and then you can eat oils like avocado, olive, sesame etc. and eat nuts like almonds and cashews, and get all of their wonderful benefits, without worrying about the ratios.

And then add in omega 3 from sources such as leafy greens, chia seeds, walnuts, kidney beans, flax seeds and oil, and if you are not vegan or vegetarian from oily fish like salmon as well as roe.

I absolutely recommend supplementing too, as it is essential that you get enough omega 3 each day.

My omega 3 of choice is absolutely Alkamind Daily Omega 3.

You want to aim to get 3,000mg (or 3tbsp) per day.

Saturated Fat:

For saturated fats, as I mentioned, plant-based sources are best, and really the main option here is coconut: coconut oil, milk, cream, etc.

You ideally want to be consuming 0.5-1tbsp of coconut oil per day as your baseline.

Add coconut oil to smoothies, soups, stews, cook with it, stir it into your oats…it’s so easy when you give it a try!

Step Five: Anti-Inflammatories

To help assist the repair and recovery of the digestive system, I strongly recommend consuming a variety of anti-inflammatory foods daily.

The most potent are turmeric, and ginger, but you can also look to leafy greens, avocado, asparagus, bell pepper, garlic, beets, broccoli and other cruciferous veggies for an anti-inflammatory hit too.

To ensure you’re giving your body an abundant source of anti-inflammatories each day I strongly recommend starting the day with one of my Turmeric & Ginger teas here.

–> Read More: The Simple Anti-Inflammation Diet to Change Your Life Forever!

Aside from the tea, you can look to get turmeric into your diet in a number of other ways, but the most simple is to build on the juice / smoothie idea from week one and simply add ginger and turmeric to your juices and smoothies!  Keep life simple!

Step Six: Being Aware!

This is less of a ‘step’ and more of a guiding principle that I want you to be aware of. I so often have clients in my Alkaline Base Camp coaching group say, “Ross, I want to follow an alkaline diet for acid reflux, but I just know that lemons (or tomato, or carrots, or something else) triggers such a reflux response for me! Should I try to push through the pain to stick to your plan?”

The answer is a resounding NO!

You should never ‘push through pain’ in order to rigidly stick to a plan! You should adapt, listen to your body, follow your intuition, and remember the most important advice: one size fits ONE!

There are SO many alkaline foods you can use, and everybody is different. Every manifestation of reflux is unique to the individual. Some will be sensitive to lemons, others to tomato, others to who-knows-what!

Remove those foods for now. Don’t eat something that causes discomfort.

You will be able to add it back in very quickly, once your body is back in balance.

Yep, once you’re re-balanced and your digestion is back on track you’ll be able to enjoy all of your favorite foods again without fear!

But the first step is getting the balance back. So don’t force any food in that you know will cause discomfort, just because it’s alkaline. Listen to your body and follow your intuition.

(And for you Alkaline Base Camp members, remember, I can work on your diet with you to make sure you have all the best swaps and workarounds for any of our ABC meal plans – plus there is a meal plan and program specifically for Reflux inside your ABC membership!)

Summary: How to Live the Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux Relief!

• Acid reflux is predominantly an imbalance of the digestive system, exacerbated by the ongoing overconsumption of acid-forming foods and beverages
• The digestive system is not a ‘big pool of acid’ waiting for food to drop in and sizzle away, it is a delicate balance of hydrochloric acid and sodium bicarbonate and does not want to be too acidic or too alkaline
• When food is digested it actually needs to be turned to an alkaline pH before it leaves the stomach!
• Overconsumption of acid-forming foods leads to a vicious cycle of hydrochloric acid imbalance
• To rebalance digestion and reverse reflux we need to remove or reduce the most acid-forming common offenders: sugar and gluten, and add lots more alkaline foods.
• The steps to take are:
  • Remove sugar
  • Remove gluten
  • Add lots of greens
  • Add lots of anti-inflammatories
  • Add lots of healthy fats
  • Super hydrate
  • Be patient with yourself!
• If you want the biggest results, not only with reflux but with all of your other health goals & challenges, consider my 7-Day Alkaline Reset Cleanse book.  Otherwise following these steps will also bring great results.

You’ve got this!

Ross

References: Alkaline Diet for Acid Reflux & GERD

Patients with acid, high-fat and low-protein diet have higher laryngopharyngeal reflux episodes at the impedance-pH monitoring; Jerome R Lechien; Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol; 2020 Feb;277(2):511-520.

A comparative study of the antacid effect of some commonly consumed foods for hyperacidity in an artificial stomach model; Vandana Panda, Priyanka Shinde, Jyoti Deora, Pankaj Gupta; Complementary Therapies in Medicine;  Volume 34, October 2017, Pages 111-115

Potential benefits of pH 8.8 alkaline drinking water as an adjunct in the treatment of reflux disease; Jamie A Koufman, Nikki Johnston; Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol; 2012 Jul;121(7):431-4. (link)

Orally administered L-arginine and glycine are highly effective against acid reflux esophagitis; Kenji Nagahama, Hikaru Nishio, Masanori Yamato, Koji Takeuchi; Med Sci Monit. 2012 Jan;18(1):BR9-15. (link)

Effects of alkaline water intake on gastritis and miRNA expression (miR-7, miR-155, miR-135b and miR-29c); Juliana R Chaves; Am J Transl Res; 2020 Jul 15;12(7):4043-4050. (link)