Reflux symptoms

Most people think of reflux symptoms as being heartburn in the chest or the feeling of acid coming up the oesophagus into the throat. But, it is not necessary to have those symptoms to have reflux. In this video, I explain what other symptoms might be indicative of reflux and what to do about it.

Transcription of Reflux Symptoms

Welcome to this video. Today I want to talk to you about reflux symptoms. I have done another video on reflux and what foods to avoid, but I want to go again over the symptoms of reflux because so many people don’t know they have reflux. They think that it’s going to be heartburn, that feeling of burning in their chest, or the feeling of acid coming back up into the throat, and those are two of the symptoms, but you don’t necessarily have to have either of those to have reflux.

About 80% of people with IBS have reflux and scientists think it’s the same mechanism in both that causes them. So the possibilities are fairly high that you do have it, even though you possibly don’t have those particular symptoms. Other common symptoms that often are not associated with reflux are a bad taste in the back of the mouth, and that’s because some of the acid has arrived there, even if it hasn’t done any burning on the way up. And different people describe it in different ways. It could be metallic, just a bad taste. So, that might be your only symptom, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have reflux. You do.

Another one is if you’re constantly clearing your throat. You have the feeling of something around your vocal cords that’s annoying you and you need to be coughing. So, in fact, somebody who does a lot of coughing, even little coughs to try and clear the throat, they could have reflux, and that feeling of something on your vocal cords can get worse if you lie down, of course. So if you have any of that, you might just be thinking it’s the classic thing that everybody thinks that it’s dairy that causes more mucus, but it could be reflux, nothing necessarily to do with dairy.

Those are some of the other symptoms you might be having, and that particular one with that needing to cough and clear your throat is called silent reflux because you don’t have other symptoms. The other thing that some people get while getting no other symptoms is just a feeling of discomfort under the rib-cage, and it could be a feeling of bloating or gas being trapped there. That’s also reflux. When we have IBS bloating, it’s normally further down in the abdominal cavity, whereas reflux can be up high just under those first ribs. See if you can distinguish where your bloating is when you get it and it could just be reflux and not IBS, which means that then you simply have to remove those reflux inducing foods. And, as I said, I’ve made another video about that, but I can repeat some of the main ones here. Citrus fruits, tomatoes, bell peppers, they all have to go, pineapple. Now, the other thing that can cause reflux is fat, and it just depends what your tolerance level is with fat, but if you have too much fat, like perhaps in pasta with a pesto sauce, in which, of course, you’ve used garlic infused oil rather than garlic, that could be too fatty for you and you might get some reflux after that, even though there’s no specific food in there that would cause the problem. Obviously, caffeine also causes reflux, caffeine in your coffee, in your tea, in Coca-Cola, they’re all going to cause issues as well. As does alcohol – unfortunately, it will cause reflux. In fact, I was out last night at a cocktail party and over about four and half hours I had two glasses of wine and I did get some reflux from that, and no IBS symptoms because it was spread out far enough, but the reflux remained.

Hopefully that’s given you a little bit more information about whether you might have it or not and how to avoid it if you don’t. Thank you for watching and goodbye.