A List of Foods You May Want to Avoid with GERD!

 This list of foods to avoid comes from the Mayo Clinic website.

 Everyone has specific triggers (and they may not all be triggers for you). Common triggers such as fatty or fried foods, tomato sauce, alcohol, chocolate, mint, (cilantro), garlic (raw), onion (raw), (peppers and cucumbers), (spicy foods), (carbonated beverages), (citrus fruit, except lemons), (fruit juice, except apple juice sort of) and caffeine may make heartburn worse. Avoid foods you know will trigger your heartburn.  (That's sometimes difficult to do!)

My comments in that quote are in parenthesis and bold letters. You may not be able to tolerate peppermint but you may be able to tolerate spearmint which is in the photo above.  Spearmint seems to work better for me.  My master gardening friend and I were discussing why most antacids are peppermint flavored.  I have no idea.  I have to get fruit flavors if I take antacids at all and you know I do.  I also have trouble with cilantro, both raw and cooked.  That's a big problem because The Herbal Husband makes something called Seco with meat, potatoes and cilantro and it is delicious but I always have to take something extra when I have it.  That's just between you and me!

The other food that pains me (pun intended) to avoid is tomato sauce.  I can have a bit of tomato in a salad or on a sandwich but I can't eat pizza with tomato sauce or a big plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce!  I make my own sauce and I can't eat it!  I sometimes have a little bit of sauce and drink a big glass of milk with it.  I know Tyler Florence does a Spaghetti Bolognese sauce that has milk in it, but can you can it?  You see over the years when at the end of the season I have canned whole tomatoes and then as our stash of canned sauce has dwindled, I have tomatoes that I can make into sauce.  I just googled the question and my thought is that I can add it to the sauce when I'm heating it in the microwave for me after the sauce is canned without it.  Does that make sense?  If you have added milk to homemade spaghetti sauce and canned it successfully, please let me know!

Again this is my food list to avoid if you have GERD.  You may or may not have these items on your avoid list.

The wind has picked up here.  We are supposed to get snow.  Not a lot but enough to interrupt our dinner plans for this evening.  Hope you are having a great day.  We'll  talk about foods that are good for GERD in my next post.  Talk to you later.