Live Right Live Well: Digestion By Michael Castleman for Live
Right Live Well The first thing you need to know if you want to
understand heartburn is that it has nothing to do with the
heart, according to Dr. James W. Ostroff, a gastroenterologist
and professor of gastroenterology at the University of
California, San Francisco. It’s called “heartburn” because it’s
a burning pain in your chest, in the same general region as your
heart. But what causes it is actually a malfunction of the
muscle at the bottom of your esophagus, the long, narrow “food
tube” that runs between your mouth and your stomach. How
Heartburn Happens Think of this muscle as a gate between your
stomach and esophagus. When you eat, food is supposed to take a
one-way trip down to your tummy. It starts in your mouth and
travels down your esophagus, where a muscle (known as the lower
esophageal sphincter, or LES) relaxes open so that food can
enter your stomach. Once food is in, the LES is supposed to
close so that stomach acid can’t back up (