Food Choices with GERD/Acid Reflux.

I have been avoiding tomato and Onion based foods. It has been tough to figure out what to eat or cook. Everything that I eat has tomato sauce or onion in it. What do you guys eat as your GERD/Acid reflux diet?

On the Kouffman diet, which is designed specifically for people with acid reflux, it is much more important that you limit fats, and balance acid foods with alkaline ones. After doing that, after the two-week induction diet, you can eat smaller quantities of tomatoes and onions if they don't cause an increase in your symptoms.  Following this diet has greatly reduced my symptoms, and enabled me to eat healthy foods that I love.

Post Edited (sunbeam48) : 12/2/2011 4:33:14 PM (GMT-7)

Great! I hope it helps you too. It makes a lot more sense to me than those lists from the docs. I guess tomatoes are on ths list because of their acidity, and its a popular food, but there are an awful lot of other sources of acid in our diets, especially beverages. Kouffman goes into that in her book. After I got home from my doctor's office that day, I thought, why can't I just eat some soda crackers with a tomato? So when I heard of this diet, it made perfect sense to me.

Shhh, don't tell anyone, but I ate a very small piece of LASAGNA today.

My symptoms are very general, usually not related to eating a specific food, but eating in general. So the better I eat, particularly in regard to fats and acidic food, the better I feel. The lists of triggers, all the times I wrote in a food journal, didn't help me as much as finding an actual diet with guidance regarding the kinds of foods I should eat. You are right, we are all different, and that also applies to what strategies will work. This is particularly true for those of us with silent reflux, because we don't get that feedback.

Depends on when you eat it and what you follow it with. None of those are a trigger for me personally, but the oilyness of the egg (because of the olive oil) can be causing you some trouble if you eat it before bed. For instance, pesto doesn't bother me, but because of its fattiness it stays in my tummy sometimes longer than 5 hours (depending on how much I eat).

Don't forget that fatty/oily things (even good fats, like avocado and olive oil) causes higher than normal acid production (and bile as well, if you have gall bladder issues) which can lead to heartburn.

Good luck!
Ashley