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Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

Note that there's also a less known type of Acid Reflux called Laryngopharyngeal Reflux (LPR), also known as Silent Reflux, which doesn't manifest with "usual" symptoms like heartburn or a sour taste in mouth, but instead with symptoms like sore throat or hoarseness. For a long, long time I didn't understand why so often after eating my throat was full of phlegm and I had to constantly clear it, I thought it has something to do with paranasal sinuses because I rarely experienced symptoms commonly associated with Acid Reflux, but after some research I found out about the Silent Reflux so I modified my diet and the symptoms mostly disappeared.

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I battled what I believe to be silent reflux for years. For me it started out as a weird persistent sore throat. Then after months I started getting bouts of nausea and a feeling of swelling in my ears and throat. After a lot of doctor visits (who kept repeating GERD) and various medicines, I totally gave up coffee. It wasn’t immediate but after a few months I felt better and after a year I was totally back to normal.

In case someone out there is searching for a success story.

It was really hard because nothing worked immediately. I still can’t be completely sure it was the coffee but I feel better now and will never go back to try again.

I have a little bit of silent reflux, and it will cause me to gag occasionally. I definitely attribute it to coffee + alcohol. While I've cut alcohol down dramatically, I've also tried lowering the acidity of coffee, using darker roasts, adding more water, seems to help a little.

Lots of internet recipes to add baking soda to each cup of coffee or even your batch of coffee powder, to improve both taste and acidity.

Ugh, I’ve had this for over a decade. It’s a real bummer. Unfortunately, neither diet nor medicine seems to help mine, so I just constantly feel like I have a mild cold, even if I’m not eating anything.

I had (have?) this, too. I went to my doctor because I was clearing my throat all the time. This was the diagnosis. This actually scares me, because I believe it's likely (I'm not a Dr, so this is a guess) that having silent reflux for a long period of time could cause esophageal cancer.

I understand there's lots of caution in this thread about about this paper/post. It's definitely worth a try and it seems like there couldn't be much of a downside.

I’m pretty sure I’m suffering with that. Sore throats so bad I can’t sleep. Mucus feeling at the back of my throat.

It seems to goes away if I use Gaviscon, have my last meal at 5pm and avoid spicy/fatty foods.

> Mucus feeling at the back of my throat

This is a textbook GERD symptom for me... took me a long time to recognize it as such, because I thought it was just a post-nasal drip, but it was so bad it would wake me up in the middle of the night.

Drinking a couple sips of Alka-seltzer always fixes that choking feeling and lets me fall back asleep.

Ive been wondering if I had this, since i get cold symptoms and my gf that i live with never seems to catch them.

How did you modify your diet?

Diet in GERD/LPR is a quite tricky and complex topic, when you start reading what types of food and drinks should you avoid it can easily overwhelm you, because besides obviously unhealthy stuff there's also a lot of healthy stuff (including many vegatables and fruits) that you should avoid and a lot of "basic" things that many people will find hard to eliminate like chocolate, coffeine, milk, cheese, butter, pepper, mint and many, many more. The thing is that there are certain types of food and drinks that will most definitiely cause acid reflux in anyone with GERD/LPR, but there's also a lot of stuff that possibly could cause acid reflux, but you must check yourself if it's good for you or not. Personally in my diet I have heavily reduced stuff like whole milk, cheese, eggs, pepper, chocolate, onions, lemons, oranges, tomatoes (including ketchup), anything spicy or fried, soft drinks - at first avoiding all that stuff is burdensome, but with time you get used to it.

How long does it take for you to realize if cutting something off your diet helps?

Since I feel like some foods can take days to affect my GERD it can be difficult to tell what helps and what doesn’t.

I've started changes in my diet with an "acid reflux detox" for a month, which meant eating a very limited group of foods that most definitiely shouldn't cause acid reflux and drinking pretty much only water, after that I've started slowly introducing stuff that potentially could cause acid reflux and observing how I feel, in my case I get acid reflux almost immediately after eating something that I shouldn't, so it's quite easy to eliminate.

Some of the complexity (I think) is that there are at least two different things going on:

Some foods might increase the extent to which the contents of one's stomach end up in their esophagus.

Some foods might increase the extent to which it is unpleasant if or when the contents of one's stomach end up in their esophagus.

One thing people can do is to never eat chocolate or take ibuprofen (and many drugs like it) before laying down. These things relax the sphincter at the bottom of your esophagus. If you pay attention, you'll often notice an immediate burp when you eat chocolate.

I restrict chocolate to nothing after 2pm (ish).

My gastroenterologist told me to treat my stomach like a hot cup of coffee. When it is full, be very careful to tip it over, otherwise you will get burned.

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