The Betaine HCl Challenge: How to Test Your Stomach Acid at Home

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mikell Suzanne Parsons, founder of the Natural Path Health Center, and we are talking about what happens when you're not making enough stomach acid. I've talked a lot about this, so make sure you watch previous videos, but there's a way that you can challenge your physiology to see: do you need to be supplementing with some hydrochloric acid? What I have people do is start with breakfast, for example. Now, what we're talking about is betaine HCl. Literally, it's stomach acid. So you're going to take one capsule for breakfast, halfway through the meal. If you feel heartburn, stop. Experiment over; you do not need hydrochloric acid support. But if you take one halfway through breakfast and you do not feel heartburn, for lunch you will take two. If after taking two, about halfway through the meal, you don't notice anything, then for dinner you are going to be taking three. Now, when you get to three, you're going to take one at the very beginning of the meal, one halfway through, and one at the end, because we are trying to reproduce what your body is not making as far as stomach acid. That stomach acid is needed to break down your proteins, and those proteins are needed because they're the building blocks and the foundation for everything in the body, including repair. So if you take three at that meal and you do not feel heartburn, the next morning for breakfast you're going to take four. Now, let's say with four you feel heartburn. Yay, that's good news. But you don't want to keep taking four with each meal. You want to drop it down to three, and you'll stay at three until you feel heartburn again, which could happen the next day, or it could happen several years down the road. It just depends on how deficient your body is and how long it takes your body to actually start to make its own hydrochloric acid. Now, let's say you take four and you don't notice anything. For lunch, yep, you got it: you're going to take five. I know it's a lot. If you take five and you do not have heartburn, for dinner you're going to do a total of six: two at the beginning of the meal, two halfway through, and two at the very end. Now, if with six you feel no heartburn, that's pretty significant, because that means every time you've eaten a meal, you have not completely digested your protein. That means you don't have the amino acids, which are building blocks for everything, including hormones and neurotransmitters and your body's ability to repair. It also means that you're not killing off the yeast, bacteria, viruses, and parasites in the stomach, so they survive and get into the intestines, and they throw a big old party, and now you've got a jacked-up gut. And if you don't have enough stomach acid, you don't absorb your minerals well. For a lot of you who are drinking a lot of water but you're not hydrated, because it's not getting into the cells, it's because you can't absorb your minerals, because you're not making enough stomach acid. So this is so foundational, and it's the root problem for so many people that I see. If you're having digestion problems, if you're losing hair, it could be because you're not digesting your protein. I could go on for days. So this is a basic test. If I've directed you to watch this video, it's because you're supposed to be doing this challenge. Hopefully it's one and done, but if not, go through this process. Now, don't do what my sister did years ago. She wanted to see how high she could go as an experiment, and she got up to like 17 in one meal. No heartburn. You don't need to do that. Taking six capsules every meal is a burden, but it's critical for your health. I hope this serves you well. Let me know what you found with your experiment, and I'll see you soon. Bye.