The Right Recipes for GERD Video Transcript

Participants

, Timothy Harlan MD

Summary

Can you eat the foods you like and still prevent acid reflux? A new cookbook offers tips for a guilt and GERD-free diet.

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: If you have acid reflux disease, or GERD, some of your favorite foods can leave you feeling sick to your stomach. But GERD doesn't have to ruin your meal. Dr. Timothy Harlan has written a cook book to help his patients eat what they want and still feel good afterward.

TIMOTHY HARLAN, MD: This cookbook has those recipes that you love to eat, it has french fries, fettuccine alfredo; it even has a tomato sauce recipe that's a low-acid tomato sauce. This can be one of the big things that a lot of my patients will complain about. Spicy foods can be another one, so there's a recipe in here for chicken fajitas, some little tricks and tips to help you cook recipes and still enjoy the foods you like but not provoke the reflux

ANNOUNCER: The cookbook provides more than just recipes. It contains a wide range of tips on how to make every meal friendlier on the stomach.

TIMOTHY HARLAN, MD: The first thing that I try and get patients to do and the first thing that Cooking to Reduce the Burn works with people on is to eat smaller meals. And the book is set up to take you through a typical day, eating a smaller breakfast, a little midmorning snack, a small lunch, mid-afternoon snack, and then a small dinner. If you do that five times a day, you always a little something in your stomach.

ANNOUNCER: One important point is starting off with the right breakfast. Dr. Harlan explains how you should begin your day.

TIMOTHY HARLAN, MD: Breakfast, I think, is the most important meal of the day. You have not had anything in your stomach usually from dinner, and you want to get a little something in your stomach. The cookbook has recipes in it for smoothies, and they're really easy to make. One of the nice things about these smoothies is that they use less acidic juices and low-fat yogurt, which is going to be calming for the stomach, put a little something in your stomach in very important.

This is a big bagel. You only really have to eat half of that bagel with some low-fat cream cheese for breakfast. Now, cereal's a really good choice, and there's a lot of very healthy cereals on the market. Choose, again, a low-fat milk like 2 percent or 1 percent milk: great breakfast. Just a little bit, though. You don't want a big heaping bowl of cereal.

ANNOUNCER: Medications can help reduce symptoms, but in the end, it's the right diet and lifestyle choices that will help you beat GERD.

TIMOTHY HARLAN, MD: There are a lot of treatments on the market and when patients come in to see me, I always talk to them about lifestyle. It's number one. I talk to them about how much coffee they might drink, how much they might smoke, changing their diet, losing weight: these are all really important things.

ANNOUNCER: And as Cooking to Reduce the Burn shows, you don't have to sacrifice good taste to feel your best.

*The recipes can be downloaded for free at drgourmet.com.

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