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If you're a frequent victim of heartburn who enjoys going out with friends for a couple of beers at the end of the week, or hopping from bar to bar as part of a wild Saturday night, then you better make a few changes before your partying allows your heartburn to get the best of you. While you don't have to lock yourself in your room on weekends, you should, at the very least, consider this natural remedy for heartburn: cutting back on alcohol.
At this point, you might be asking what alcohol has to do with heartburn. Can it's effects even compare with foods that cause heartburn, smoking, stress, and other triggers or contributers to heartburn? Hard to say for sure, but let's just say alcohol does a lot. You may not think so, since it's effects aren't readily apparent, but that doesn't mean a glass of red wine is completely innocent. It means you more harm than you know.
So what exactly does alcohol do to you, anyway? And why did cutting back on it earn the distinction of being a natural remedy for heartburn?
For one, it causes an overproduction of stomach acid. This by itself is really no big deal, since the production of stomach acid alone doesn't really play a major role in inducing heartburn. But the effects of alcohol don't end there.
By drinking alcohol, you make your esophagus more sensitive to stomach acid. While this isn't really a good thing, it's not all that bad either, since your stomach acid isn't really supposed to go up the esophagus anyway. But again, if that's the case, then what's with the ban on beer and wine being a natural remedy for heartburn?
Here's the dagger: alcohol also relaxes the lower esophageal sphincter (LES), leaving you open and all too vulnerable to acid reflux.
Now I realize that this may seem a bit technical, so allow me to break it down for you. The LES is a band of muscle whose main function is to separate the esophagus from the stomach. When it functions properly, it prevents the contents of your stomach (acid included) from shooting back up the esophagus. When this can't be prevented, it's called reflux, and it's what brings forth the unwelcome sensation you know as “heartburn”.
Alcohol throws the LES out of whack, causing it to relax when its supposed to contract to stop reflux from happening, setting off a volatile chain reaction.
Once something triggers reflux, the abundance of acid produced by alcohol crosses over from your stomach, past the LES, and back into your esophagus. Since alcohol has made your esophagus more delicate, you suffer a great deal more damage and pain than you would have from a regular acid reflux. Worse yet, the overproduction of acid drowns your esophagus in a flood of this burning acid, taking the hurt to another level.
You may not notice the effects of alcohol, and the fact is you may not even feel them until heartburn strikes. Only then will you realize how much alcohol consumption can complicate heartburn, ensuring that in the event you do suffer one, it'll hurt. And hurt bad.
That said, it's worth saying that alcohol alone is not as prominent a trigger as foods that cause heartburn, but all the same, cutting back on it certainly deserves to be dubbed a natural remedy for heartburn.