3 Natural Steps to Treat Digestive Issues

Scott: What is indigestion?  Is it just a general term for not feeling great after you eat or, specifically, what is going on when you have indigestion?

Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum: Indigestion is poor digestion.  If you're not able to digest your food properly, it sits in your stomach and you get all this acid rumbling around.  And then the acid starts regurgitating or refluxing back up and you get burning in the chest.  Or the food's sitting there and it's just irritating in your stomach... so it's poor digestion.  What do we do medically for that?  We turn off stomach acid.  Now if... that's kind of a stupid thing to do if you think about it.  Because there's three main keys to digestion: stomach acid, digestive enzymes, and bile from the gallbladder, from the liver.  Those are the three key things to digestion.  So people that have poor digestion... as if somebody has a flat tire and their car is wobbling, so the doctor says we'll take care of that and shoots out the other tire.  (laughs)  And it's crazy because, the thing is not just as make digestion worse, you're stool's still going to be brown, all it takes it bile.  You can be totally non-digesting your food, it's going to look brown at the other end.  People are like, oh, it must be digested.  uh-uh.  So the key is healing digestion, and then the indigestion goes away.  It's not that hard to do.  

Scott: How is it done.  I mean naturally, how can people get back on track in terms of digestion?

Teitelbaum: Well, think about the three key things.  And one is stomach acid.  Most people with indigestion have too little stomach acid.  Now you turn off the stomach acid, you decrease the symptoms, but you drive the poor digestion wild.  Not just that, the acid blockers are addictive.  If you take people with a totally healthy digestive system, and give them the acid blockers, the purple pill, those guys, after six weeks they will have horrible indigestion and won't be able to come off the medicine.  It's addictive.  Very profitable that way.  So stomach acid.  You can get natural stomach acid several ways.  2 tablespoons of vinegar.  Make a salad dressing with apple cider vinegar for example.  Health food store you can get betaine hydrochloric acid.  So those are simple ways to get acid.  Because most people make less stomach acid as they get older.  So that's step one, add some cider vinegar, don't drink it straight, but make a dressing with it.  Or take the betaine HCL.

Step two would be the digestive enzymes.  Because those are necessary to digest the food.  And normally, in medical school we're taught, oh, your pancreas and salivary glands make the digestive enzymes. Eh!  The digestive enzymes come in the food that you eat.  The same enzymes that ripen a food, or that are necessary for life cycle processes like in animal products are the same things that digest a food when you eat it.  Why do we have an epidemic of indigestion?  The food processors learned, about 30 years ago, that if they destroy the enzymes naturally in the food, that it doesn't ripen so that means you get a long shelf life.  So you think about an ear of corn, shelf life, three days.  Corn flakes, shelf life three millenium.  But the stuff looks good but it becomes indigestible.  So here's the key for digestive enzymes.  They have to be plant based or they won't work.  That's because the plant based works across the entire acid/ base spectrum.  I like products like Completegest, that one's an Enzymatic Therapy product.  But really, any digestive enzyme product, as long as it says 100 percent plant based.   Another nice way to get your digestive enzymes?  Eat a papaya, or just a slice of papaya, or just some pineapple.  Chock loaded with digestive enzymes, and taste good with your meal.

And then, part three.  Bile.  Don't worry about that, you've got plenty of that.  So those are things that refuel digestion, but in the interim, the question is what do you do to take care of that pain?  So, what I'd like to give you is just a three step program that people can do.  

Number one, when you're taking an antacid, people who take calcium antacids like Tums, the problem is that calcium taken by itself has been shown to increase heart attack deaths by 31 percent.  That's big time.  So we see that in the studies for osteoporosis.  But when people are chewing Tums all day or other calcium antacids, that scares me to death.  There's a simple solution to that.  Which is you add magnesium, vitamin d and vitamin k, and all of a sudden you can knock out that increased risk of heart disease and it becomes heart healthy.  So there's a simple product, instead of a Tums or chewing calcium, it's called Immediate Heartburn Relief.  That's a chewable antacid from Europharma.  Heart healthy.  Enjoy it, you can have all you want.  So that's for what you do right now to turn off the pain.  

Then DGL licorice, or mastic gum.  There's a product called Gut Soothe, which is a DGL licorice that you don't have to chew it.  The problem with the old DGL licorice is that unless you really like the taste of licorice, it gets kind of (yuck).  But the Gut Soothe works without having to chew it.  So you take the Gut Soothe, as effective as the prescription acid blockers, but you want to give it a month to work.  Then there's something called Advanced Heartburn Rescue... um.. Advance Heartburn Relief, which is a Limonene product, that also helps your stomach and digestion to heal up.  So taking those three together, and that information you can find... if you go to my website Vitality101.com, and you'll see Health A to Z, you'll see a dropdown box with over 100 conditions.  Just click on heartburn, and this is all laid out there free for people.   But you heal digestion over 4 to 6 weeks, and then your stomach is feeling great, you're able to ween of acid blockers.  And then you do the simple thing of making sure your stomach acid is ok, digestive enzymes are ok, and your stomach is going to be feeling really, really good.