Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet Cures GERD in European-American Women

Looks European-American to me, but who knows?

European-American? I guess that’s American women who are of European descent rather than Asian, Eskimo, African, etc.

“Low-carb, high-fat” in my headline is often referred to as LCHF.

GERD is gastro-esophageal reflux disease, i.e., frequent or severe heartburn. GERD is the most common reason to use a proton pump inhibitor drug like Prilosec. It’s expensive. I often run across patients who have taken it every day for years.

Dr. Michael Eades has a great post about GERD and the potential drawbacks of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs):

The scientific literature has shown long-term PPI therapy to be related to the following conditions:

Anemia
Pneumonia
Vitamin B12 deficiency
Impaired calcium absorption
Impaired magnesium absorption
Increased rate fractures, especially hip, wrist and spine
Osteopenia [thin brittle bones]
Rebound effect of extra-heavy gastric acid secretion
Heart attacks

Moving on to the study at hand:

“GERD symptoms and medication usage was more prevalent in European-American women, for whom the relationships between dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and GERD were most significant. Nevertheless, high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet benefited all women with regard to reducing GERD symptoms and frequency of medication use.”

Source: Dietary carbohydrate intake, insulin resistance and gastro-oesophageal reflux disease: a pilot study in European- and African-American obese women. – PubMed – NCBI

Pay attention and follow all the links and you may be able to see the entire journal report. You just can’t wait, right?!!

Another study showed improvement in heartburn with a low-carb diet a few years ago.

All of my diet books offer low-carb high-fat options except for the original first edition of Advanced Mediterranean Diet from 2007. In 2009, I learned that low-carb high-fat eating wasn’t dangerous.

Steve Parker, M.D.