Managing your stress is vital to your health if you want to lessen the heartburn symptoms you endure on a daily basis. Scientists haven’t been able to link stress directly to heartburn, but we do know that there’s an indirect connection.

Stress can cause us to eat too much, choose the wrong foods, lose sleep, and take up addictive behaviors such as smoking or drinking. All of these behaviors add to your misery when they result in heartburn.

If you experience chronic heartburn, then you might want to hone in on what stress factors are currently in your life so that you can eliminate them. Is it your relationships? The workplace? Too many entries in your daily calendar, or not enough money in the bank? Any of these can add to the stress in your life and result in heartburn if the pressure causes you to make bad lifestyle decisions.

As you start to realize the situations that are causing your discomfort, you are in a better position to prevent chronic heartburn by easing your stress levels. Could you go into counseling, or even just steal some time away to unwind and appreciate life?

It’s possible to relieve stress and, by association, get heartburn relief through enhancing key parts of your life. Make time for exercise every day if you aren’t already. You might also lose some weight, which is another major contributor to heartburn.

If you just need to unwind and relax, try meditation or massage. While these may not directly inhibit heartburn, they can make your life less hectic and allow you to de-stress and live the kind of lifestyle that helps heartburn sufferers cut down on the frequency with which they experience heartburn.

Perhaps setting aside time each day to listen to your favorite music will help to relax you and still your mind. This kind of relaxation is helpful in stopping your cravings for food, alcohol or cigarettes. These habits can all lead to a bad case of heartburn.

You might like to exchange your bad habits with a more positive activity, such as laughter. Improve your mood and lose stress by finding things that humor you and help you let go of life’s troubles.

Find ways to reduce stress and prevent heartburn that won’t break the bank. Money problems certainly won’t help your problem, so you need to take advantage of the many no-cost heartburn management techniques that are available.

Tags: acid reflux, GERD, heartburn

We love to hate our sugar.  We want to say goodbye to refined sugar but we are unable.  The sheer magnitude of giving up sugar, entirely, overwhelms us and rightfully so.

Most of us are educated on the many reasons why refined sugar is playing an important part in our health problems.  While many of us are horrified or dismayed at having an alcoholic family member,  it seems we will allow our children and ourselves to become habitually addicted to candy, gum, pop, ice cream, pie, cake, jam and a host of other sugar laden foods.

As refined sugar is permeated throughout almost everything we eat it is very difficult for us to give it up entirely without becoming an outcast to our friends, family and social life.  There are many choices we make in any given day and we can make the choice to try and cut down our sugar consumption.

Refined sugar is not all bad, if you need it for industrial purposes.  According to an article titled “Sugar Cane: Past and Present” written by Peter Sharpe, it is stated “Today, sugar cane has many industrial uses and is one of the most widely used and cheapest domestic products (Jenkins 1966).  Molasses is a by-product of the manufacturing of cane sugar.  The uses of molasses are many.  Starting around 1850 it was often used as a fertilizer for cane soils, however, this use is negligible today.  Its use as a stock feed can be dated back to at least 1911 in Germany.  Molasses, along with cane juice and other by-products can be fermented to produce an alcoholic distillate, otherwise known as rum.  Ethyl alcohol is another alcohol produced from molasses, which in itself has many uses.  The main uses are in:

• vinegar;
• cosmetics;
• pharmaceuticals;
• cleaning preparations;
• solvents and coatings;

One of the future uses of ethanol which is currently being studied is as a gasoline extender.  Still other products produced from molasses are butanol (a solvent), lactic acid (a solvent), citric acid (mostly for foods and beverages), glycerol, yeast and many others (Paturau 1982).  Another useful by-product of sugar production is bagasse, the fibrous residue left after the juices are extracted from the cane. It is the main source of fuel in sugar factories. It can also be used in making paper, cardboard, fiber board, and wall board (Purseglove 1979).  It is quite possible that further uses of sugar cane will be developed in the future, but even now it can be seen that sugar cane is a very important and useful plant crop worldwide.”

Let’s leave the refined sugar uses to the industrial world as much as possible.  Try reducing it from your diet, and your children’s diet, as much as possible.  Refined sugar is not really needed by our body and, in fact, will borrow vital nutrients from your healthy cells to metabolize it within your body.  Nutrients such as calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium are stolen from various parts of your body to make use of this invader..

When you avoid eating refined sugar you can expect more vibrant health together with a much longer life with greater freedom from some of the acute and chronic diseases that have become rampant in our society.

What are you waiting for?  Forget about cutting sugar out entirely, simply try cutting back and wherever possible choose unrefined raw sugar such as evaporated cane juice or unrefined raw brown sugar (not the familiar “brown sugar” found in grocery stores that is simply sugar coated with molasses) eaten in small amounts.  Although honey is a refined sugar it is also a satisfying sweetener that offers some nutritional benefits.

Behind the scenes of your body is a remarkable mechanism for vibrant health that is ready to serve you with the best possible health for many, many years – if you give it the proper care and nutrition that it needs.  Start really living – without sugar.

Tags: Break the Sugar Habit, Live Without Sugar, Refined Sugar, Sugar, Sugar Cane