Are you eating too fast?

Study: Acid reflux more common among speedy eaters

By Linda Carroll
Special to MSN

Most days, Mike Stepler wolfs down his lunch in less than 10 minutes. And most days, Stepler, a surveyor from Elsinboro, N.J., ends up with heartburn.

Stepler wonders if it’s what he’s eating. Sometimes the lunch he chooses is very spicy. But his girlfriend thinks it has more to do with the pace at which the 20-year-old gobbles his food.

His girlfriend may be on the right track. A recent study shows that, even among people who rarely experience heartburn, acid reflux — digestive juices moving backward from the stomach into the esophagus — is more common if meals are hastily eaten.

The study, published in the September issue of The American Journal of Gastroenterology, followed 20 healthy volunteers who were fed a meal researchers thought was likely to trigger a little heartburn: a turkey burger, french fries and a Coke.

“We had them come in on two different days,” says study co-author Dr. Donald O. Castell, a professor of medicine and director of the esophageal disorders program at Digestive Disease Center at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “And we randomly assigned them to eat the meal in either five minutes or in 30 minutes.”

So, people who ate in five minutes one day, ate in 30 the next and vice versa, Castell explains.

Each of the volunteers was fitted with a probe that could detect acid reflux into the esophagus. Researchers found that reflux was much more common when people ate quickly.

Castell says he and his colleagues decided to study fast eating after they noticed that medical students who gobbled down meals tended to have a lot of heartburn. “Over the years, many of them told us that they got indigestion if they ate too fast,” Castell says.

Food for thought
So, what is it about fast eating that leads to reflux?

If you eat too fast, your stomach fills up too quickly, says Dr. David Metz, a professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology, director of the acid peptic disorders program and co-director of the GI physiology laboratory, all at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

When the upper part of the stomach stretches, it causes the vagus nerve to send a message to the brain, which then tells the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) to relax, Metz explains.

The LES is a mostly one-way valve that allows food to pass from the esophagus into the stomach. When it opens the opposite way — from the stomach into the esophagus — acid can seep up, leading to that familiar burning sensation in the chest that we know as heartburn.

If you eat more slowly, the upper part of the stomach has more time to move the food along through the digestive tract, Metz says.

The purpose of these transient relaxations of the LES is probably to allow people to belch when there’s too much air in the stomach, Castell says.

Creatures of habit
What the study doesn’t show, according to the experts, is whether slower eating would be a big benefit to people who regularly suffer heartburn. “We don’t know whether it would be a 1 percent or a 40 percent contribution,” says Dr. Bennett E. Roth, chief of clinical gastroenterology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the UCLA. Besides, says Roth, the habit of bolting down food can be difficult to break.

And these days, most people who come in with heartburn symptoms don’t want to make drastic changes in the way they live, Roth says. “To be frank, they’d rather get a pill than have to turn their whole lives upside down with lifestyle modifications,” he adds.

Still, Metz says he’d like to see a study that looked at the impact of slower eating in people with frequent heartburn.

But, even if it’s proven that slow eating can relieve a lot of symptoms, that won’t help people like Stepler, who says he only has about 10 minutes to eat lunch — which can range anywhere from three tacos to an 8-inch sub — when he’s working out of the office. “I just eat and I’m on my way,” Stepler says.

Linda Carroll is a health and science writer based in New Jersey