7 ways to prevent and manage heartburn

The burning pain of heartburn can make you dread mealtime and severely impact your life.  These steps will help you prevent and manage heartburn symptoms.

Most of us eat the way we do everything else — too fast! When you eat too fast, you take in more air with your food, which can distend your stomach and lead to belching — which can also force stomach contents upward.

Try this:

Take a bite, put your fork down, swallow, talk to your dining companion for a minute or read a page of your book, then pick up your fork and take another bite.

A bonus:

You'll eat fewer calories because your body has more time to sense fullness, even though you've eaten less food.

Persistent backflow of digestive juices can damage the esophagus, possibly leading to a condition called Barrett's esophagus, a potential precursor of esophageal cancer. If your heartburn has moved beyond the usual discomfort and is causing a chronic cough, nausea, vomiting, or wheezing, see your doctor.

When you're upright, the contents of your stomach stay down, so walk instead of lying around after eating, raise the head of your bed with bricks to keep stomach acid flowing downward, and even consider eating while standing if it helps. This isn't just a folk remedy; Stanford University researchers evaluated more than 2,000 studies on treatments for heartburn or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and found that "gravity" solutions worked to prevent that burning feeling.

The closer you are to a "normal" weight, whatever that is for you, the fewer symptoms of heartburn and GERD you'll experience. Why? The primary reason is probably that extra weight increases pressure on your abdomen. Also, overweight people are more likely to develop a hiatal hernia, which occurs when the top part of the stomach protrudes into the abdominal cavity, increasing reflux.

It's been found that carbonated beverages and the most widely prescribed class of sleeping pills — benzodiazepines like diazepam (Valium) and lorazepam (Ativan) — can lead to heartburn during the night, disrupting your sleep. And no, you don't have to swallow them together to get this result.

A study by Australian researchers found that applying very light stimulation to the wrist area with electrical acupoint stimulation (a needleless version of acupuncture) reduced relaxation in the lower esophagus — a contributor to GERD and reflux — by 40 percent during the stimulation compared to no change with a sham procedure.

A sleep specialist for GERD? Yep. It seems that the same treatment used for obstructive sleep apnea, in which you stop breathing multiple times during the night, can help with nocturnal GERD, or severe nighttime heartburn. The treatment is called continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). You sleep with a mask over your nose that's attached to a machine that delivers pressurized air to maintain an open airway.

It appears to work for GERD by increasing pressure in the back of the throat and preventing stomach contents from coming up the esophagus, much the way a blowing fan keeps draperies pinned against a window. Since GERD and obstructive sleep apnea often occur together, that visit to the sleep specialist could be more worthwhile than you think.