How Are Allergies and GERD Related?

If you read Internet forums dedicated to heartburn, you quickly notice that there are a lot of people who suffer both acid reflux and allergies.

Doctors today treat acid reflux as a problem caused by excess stomach acid. They medicate with PPIs, proton pump inhibitors, that seek to reduce stomach acid.

Similarly, doctors treat allergies such as a stuffy nose or asthma, by prescribing medications that treat the symptoms of the allergies rather than their causes. This article explores a common cause of allergies and GERD, and shows what you may be able to do about it if medications aren't helping, or if you choose not to take the medications. Remember to always consult a licensed qualified medical professional -- but this article will contain important information that you will benefit from knowing.

GERD and allergies -- joined at the hip?

In order to see the link between acid reflux and allergies we need to understand a bit about how the body deals with foreign invaders. When we encounter things that our bodies decide are foreign to us, our body sets up a defense against such foreign bodies. Our bodies produce IgE that is specifically keyed to react to those foreign bodies.

Our mast cells contain this IgE on their surfaces. So the next time we encounter the foreign body, that body is keyed to that particular IgE displayed on the mast cells, and the mast cells react to the foreign body and set up an immune response. Foreign bodies include what we breathe in, what we touch, and what we eat. When our bodies react to foreign bodies we breathe in, touch or eat, their immune response is really an inflammatory response.

We are all familiar with inflammation when we bang our knee against something and it gets all red and gets a bump on it. That's an inflammatory response.

What few realize is how we can have an internal inflammatory response. Inflammation inside is the same as inflammation outside, only worse.

Allergies, internal inflammation and your gut

Normally, food is supposed to be broken up into short little molecules of sugar and protein and fat. These short molecules go through the intestinal wall, through the liver, and get processed and sent off to various tissues.

These short molecules no longer are large enough to resemble pork or potatoes. They are generally so short that they do not give our mast cells any sort of immune cues.

But, if we are suffering from internal inflammation, our intestinal wall is inflamed. Inflammation causes the intestinal wall to get bigger, just like when you bang your knee it gets swollen and bigger.

The bigger spaces in your swollen intestines allow bigger molecules to migrate through and into your body.

Before, with a normal intestine, only very short, unrecognizable molecules could enter your bloodstream. Now, with our swollen and inflamed intestines, bigger molecules get through. What you have to understand about big molecules is this. All proteins are made from 20 amino acids. Every bacterium, virus, spinach leaf, piece of pork, or pecan pie in the world has protein that is made from the same 20 amino acids.

One single amino acid is the same as another. The body doesn't react to a single amino acid. A short chain of amino acids, like a few pearls on a string, doesn't get a reaction either because, as we saw, it is not recognizable by the body as coming from a foreign plant or animal. But as you build large molecules with hundreds or thousands of amino acids, the resulting molecules resemble particular pieces of animals or plants and the body reacts against these.

For example, a soybean has proteins that are thousands of amino acids long. A healthy gut should break those down into short pieces of amino acid chains that are unrecognizable except as good food protein. But an inflamed gut will let many of these large proteins through before they have been chopped up into small, unrecognizable proteins. The big soy protein molecules can now enter the bloodstream. There, they trigger a further inflammation reaction.

These bigger molecules shouldn't be floating around in the body. The body recognizes them as being foreign to it and starts to react.

How our bodies react with foreign proteins

The body's IgE spots these bigger molecules that shouldn't be there. It mobilizes a further immune response. Swelling, inflammatory cells migrating to various parts of the body. Just as we saw with allergies.

Even worse, is that these big molecules often resemble molecules naturally found in the body. For instance, one may look a bit like the body's own tissue. The body reacts against this large foreign molecule and since the molecule resembles the body's own molecules, the body also attacks your very own tissue.

This is the source of food intolerances and shows how they lead to auto-immune problems and internal inflammation. Once these food intolerances start, they continue and often get worse because our gut is continually inflamed. The inflammation in our gut allows ever more large foreign proteins through to our bloodstream. These additional foreign proteins also resemble proteins found in the body which causes our body to mobilize further against its own tissue. Our body's immune defense is a form of inflammation like armies of mast cells moving against not just foreign molecules, but the body's own molecules. This of course as we can see just makes the inflammation worse -- not just in the gut, but all over the body.

Scientists have discovered that internal inflammation is the source and possibly the cause of many diseases that afflict us including heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes.

And where does this connect with acid reflux? Simply this. Many of these foreign proteins are known as lectins. Foods such as wheat, corn, white potatoes and beans contain high amounts of lectins. Lectins shouldn't bother a healthy stomach and gut. But they do bother the gut of those who have allergies and acid reflux. That is why allergies and acid reflux are often connected. Lectins can trigger asthma and internal inflammation. And lectins can trigger heartburn.