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Smoke fills the air as you blow out a puff from a freshly lit cigarette. The stress of having experienced another heartburn has led you to go through half a pack in the last hour. You don't know why they keep coming, but they do – in spite of you sticking to more than one credible natural remedy for heartburn.
After all the effort you've put into prevention, you're at a loss of what to do. You've kept active; made yourself an athlete thanks to training in the gym. You've made sure to get enough sleep at night, knowing that you need the shut-eye to keep focused throughout the day. You've verified the foods that cause heartburn and done away with them in your diet. You've felt the positive effects of each natural remedy for heartburn, yet you still suffer.
You mull over your plight, lighting another cigarette as you do so. Why?
The answer lies between your fingertips.
Obesity, stress, alcohol, and especially foods that cause heartburn are all known triggers for that painful and all-too familiar fire in your chest, but then again, so is smoking. By going through as many cigarettes as you do, you've made yourself as vulnerable to heartburn as the other triggers could have made you.
Though you may not immediately make the connection between smoking and heartburn, there are actually several ways a pack of cigarettes can wreak enough havoc to your body to make you a prime target for heartburn. These are why quitting the habit is a widely recommended natural remedy for heartburn.
One of the ways smoking exposes you to heartburn is by weakening your lower esophageal sphincter (LES). The LES is the band of muscle that separates your stomach from your esophagus, preventing gastric acid and the contents of your stomach from finding their way back to the esophagus in a process called reflux. Should the LES fail to work as it's supposed to, then there is a greater chance of reflux, and consequently, of heartburn.
What's more, smoking also triggers a rise in the production of stomach acid. You can just imagine what an abundance of acid coupled with a malfunctioning LES could result in. Pain. Extreme pain. And a lot of it, too.
As if these weren't enough, smoking causes an imbalance in the body as well, resulting in more aggressive stomach acids. Regular acid is brutal enough, but compared to the smoke-powered super-acid, it's remarkably tame.
And the effects of smoking don't end there. It isn't satisfied with attacking your stomach, it affects your mouth as well – your saliva, in particular.
What does smoking do? Nothing much really; it just slows down saliva production. Why does this matter? Saliva is one of the body's notable lines of defense against refluxed stomach acid. Your saliva has the ability to counter the sting of the acid and flush it back down to the stomach.
So smoking not only puts you at risk of heartburn, it jump starts the production of stomach acid, boosts this acid's potential harm, then slows down one of your primary defenses to ensure maximum pain and damage.
Though you may not notice how smoking affects you or feel its effects as quickly as any of the foods that cause heartburn, it does take its toll. That said, you may want to consider this simple, natural remedy for heartburn: quit it.