NOW Foods Supplements, Betaine HCl 648 mg, Vegetarian Formula, Digestive Support*, 120 Veg Capsules

I still have a hard time scientifically explaining how low stomach acid can cause or contribute to acid reflux, but it seems to be that when you eat something you can't digest, it sits in your stomach and the pressure causes the lower esophageal sphincter to malfunction and allow food and gastric juices, which includes acid, to be refluxed back up the esophagus as all too many of us are familiar with, as heartburn, or for the long term, as GERD. Not to mention, that food never gets properly digested leading to irritation, inflammation, altered GI transit time and pH, maldigestion, and malabsorption of important nutrients, and intestinal disorders such as IBS, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (due to change in pH), or intestinal hyperpermeability, or "leaky gut" which I have been told by my holistic doctor that I most likely have. A tip for the acid reflux - I was initially able to get it under control using D-limonene (Jarrow) once a day and within two weeks was almost completely weaned off Prilosec. I had also put myself on a strong, high quality probiotic (Hyperbiotics PRO-15 regular strength "pearls") at a high dose of one three times daily for a month, which made a huge difference with the reflux and how my entire intestinal tract felt. That's when I decided it was time to test the Betaine Hcl with Pepsin. I don't eat big high protein meals, so I started off with one or two before a meal. When I ate larger meals with more protein, I upped it to three or four. I always kept adding a couple after I ate if I felt food sitting there. This worked great for a week or two then I gradually I got a mild gastritis and an occasional reoccurring of reflux. I figured out that for me, and the small meals I needed to eat, it worked much better to just take one or maybe two and definitely after I ate not before, and not try to fine tune it. I just have to take it after everything I eat, even just snacks. There had been too much time elapsing when I took it first before the food, I realized, and I felt it burning in my stomach, which I knew wasn't right. But I knew in my case it didn't mean I didn't need it, which it could mean in someone else's situation.. The day I started the Betaine Hcl it is the day I stopped the Prilosec completely. I just needed to fine tune the timing of taking it to what was right for me. (seems like some others even make it a point to take it on an empty stomach before meals, which I would never do due to the burning. I do think I have a more recent onset mild case of low stomach acid, and my small low protein meals are a factor. I have a lot of other supplements that I take, usually with meals but before, and I was just taking these in with the mix, Once I switched to taking both the Betaine Hcl and the digestive enzymes I take (NOW Ultimate enzymes and Gluten Digest) immediately after eating, and eased up on trying to titrate so exactly to my meal, things have been going well. I still take the D-limonene daily after dinner to keep the reflux at bay. I think I have much more than low stomach acid - I think I have intestinal hyperpermeability or "leaky gut" and so I added to my regimen licorice root (Nature's Way - non DGL), aloe vera gel (NOW) and slippery elm (NOW) along with L-Glutamine (Jarrow) all which are soothing and healing to the entire GI tract including the stomach and the esophagus, helping further with reflux. All I had to do therefore, after feeling the burning and realizing I was making things temporarily worse, was take a week off the Betaine, during which the reflux worsened but the gastritis resolved, Then I started it up again as described, after meals, and I have not felt food sitting in my stomach once since then, never taking more than one or two capsules a meal, but needing to take it even after any snack, whether protein containing or not. I wanted to describe all that was unique to my experience, since it seems to be more complicated than most, in case it helps someone else. I intend to continue the Betaine Hcl along with the other supplements I am on that I have described, for the forseeable future. Leaky gut takes many months to heal, and low stomach acid can be a contributing factor to causing it or to perpetuating it only revealing itself with the acid reflux in my case. I had few other symptoms initially, although I suspect I had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, another sequelae of low stomach acid, based on my phenomenal response to the probiotics, but then things kind of snowballed, I was first diagnosed with a seemingly unrelated autoimmune thyroid condition (Hashimoto's autoimmune thyroiditis/hypothyroidism), which was my first clue something might be wrong with my gut, and is what led to my holistic doctor's diagnosis of intestinal hyperpermeability. It can be a cause or effect of autoimmune disorders, low stomach acid is almost always a component, and the "leaky gut" has to be healed to reverse or effectively treat the autoimmune disorder. The Betaine Hcl is playing an important role in this. Hopefully at some point in the future, I will notice some mild burning even taking it after a meal, that will indicate to me that I have regained my own stomach acid's normal production, and then I will know I may be able to stop it altogether. I am not clear if this happens with everyone or just sometimes. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen with me for a long time at least because of the complexity of the situation. But, regardless and best of all, I've been off Prilosec since starting this, which along with the healing, makes it worth it alone. Prilosec, and other acid reducers, despite being recommended by most doctors, are dangerous drugs to be on long term, because they do the opposite of what you need, reduce stomach acid even further, and impairs GI function, digestion, and nutrient absorption. Anyway, anyone with GI issues especially occasional to severe acid reflux or chronic GERD, especially if you are on antacids or acid reducers, I would highly recommend to try the Betaine Hcl to see if it helps instead and better, because it probably will. There are few if any reviews that state otherwise from those who have actually tried it. If you don't believe it try Googling "GERD and low stomach acid" - that's what I did to convince myself. There are other ways to test, but none so straightforward and directly helpful.as just trying it. It even helps me with my more complex situation, and especially helps me as I feel it is an important component to eventually being well again, however long tha! takes. Having stomach acid is important to proper digestion and being well! I was a little nervous to try it, 'it's the real deal, and can't do any real lasting harm, even to me,with my sensitive situation and system. I intend to keep purchasing NOW brand and taking this product as long as I need it, which is for the forseeable future. Highly recommend and Good luck! Update: A couple months ago I slowly tapered off this supplement along with the Aloe Vera and digestive enzymes, and did very well. I went on a vacation and I think the change in my diet caused mild symptoms of acid reflux to return. I immediately restarted the Betaine, Aloe, and digestive enzymes, along with D-limonene the first week or so, and my symptoms resolved again. I plan to continue all this for a couple of weeks, and then continue the Betaine permanently while attempting to taper off the others again. I have also tapered off the L-glutamine, but I don't think that is related. I have never stopped the probiotics nor do I plan to. I am trying to balance the number of supplements I am taking to make it as minimal as possible while still controlling my symptoms and my disease pathways. I take a number of other supplements too and the cost as well as the annoyance of taking so many pills can get to me, so I am just tryiing to find a balance. I think that balance is continuing the Betaine indefinitely to control the acid reflux, and managing flare-ups with the others (although the idea is to take what is required minimally to prevent flare-ups)

I have been taking famotidine, an over-the-counter acid reducer every night for probably the last 6 years to keep from getting woken up in the middle of the night with that horrible throat-burning reflux. In addition to that, I frequently get heartburn during the day and have to pop a couple of TUMS just to be able to bear the pain. I also had a lot of rules I made for myself about what I could eat, when I could eat and how much I could eat just to try to control the heartburn/GERD. Chocolate was completely out of the question, and I wouldn't even dream of eating anything after 7:30 p.m. or I would be awoken by acid that night. Even taking all of those acid reducers and following all my crazy food rules, I still had occasions when I would have horrible heartburn and reflux. Recently I started worrying about what all this medicine was doing to my health. My fingernails and hair have become extremely dry and brittle and break easily. I have also lost a lot of hair. I'm 31 years old and my hair has gone from very thick and shiny to very, very thin and fine. After tons of research, I discovered that being on acid reducers for long periods of time can create nutrient deficiencies because you're not digesting your food properly and absorbing the vitamins you need. I decided I had to get off the acid reducers for good. I read about Betaine HCL and decided I would try it. I was nervous about quitting the acid reducers cold turkey, but I knew I had to. Since the HCL supplements acid, I would just offset the effects of it if I took a TUMS or acid reducer. Shockingly, the very first day I took the HCL, my acid reflux was gone. I barely slept that night because I kept thinking the GERD was going to have to strike soon, but it never did. I had very minor heartburn and some stomach pain for the next 3 or 4 days, mainly when I hadn't eaten or taken the HCL in a while. I read about drinking homemade chicken broth to help heal your stomach lining, so I made some homemade soup and ate that for lunch all week. I've been taking it for about 2 weeks now, and I have had zero heartburn or stomach pain/burning this week at all. When I eat, I don't feel like it's just sitting in my stomach. I even ate a chocolate bar as a test. In the past, eating chocolate would have me up all night with reflux. I had no reaction to the chocolate bar at all when I ate it with an HCL pill. I have not had any acid reflux at all since Day 1 of starting the HCL. It has been a miracle supplement for me. I'm hoping that now that I am healing my digestion, I can cure any lingering vitamin deficiencies and restore my good health. I have been taking 1 pill with each meal and usually 2 pills with dinner. If you don't eat a lot of protein with a meal, don't take as many because you don't need as much stomach acid. You have to experiment and find out how many pills is right for you. Some people say they have to take 6 or 7 to get effects, but I have not needed nearly that many. I will update this review in a few months and let you know how it's going. UPDATE 6/2014: I have been heartburn free for months now! It is such a miracle. I still stand by my review that this is a great product. However, I sometimes have to take up to 3 of these at each meal. I ordered Doctor's Best instead of NOW brand on my last order, and I believe they are superior to this NOW brand. I only have to take 1 pill with dinner and have even gone a couple of days without taking anything with the Doctor's Best brand. With NOW, I had to be careful to get the dosage high enough. I highly, highly recommend trying betaine HCL if you have acid reflux or GERD, but I would go with Doctor's Best instead of NOW. UPDATE 10/2015: It's been over a year and a half since I first started taking betaine HCL. I am extremely happy to report that I still have no heartburn. I don't even take the betaine HCL anymore. Even eating my previous trigger foods does not give me heartburn. This product and the Doctor's Best brand of the betaine HCL literally changed my life. I can sleep at night. I haven't been woken up choking on acid in a long, long time. When I wake up, I don't have a disgusting acid taste in my mouth. In the comments, some people wanted to know if my health changed. My fingernails did get a lot better after I stopped the acid reducers. The aren't flakey and brittle anymore. My hair doesn't seem to grow in thick like it used to, but it is definitely shiny and doesn't look lifeless like it used to. I feel 100 percent better than I did when I was trying to struggle through each day on a mix of eating restrictions and acid reducers.

An excellent product. All excessive belching, flatulence and regurgitating of acidic stomach contents subside from the very first day of use.

this is the single supplement that has most improved my quality of life. most supplements don't really do anything for me. it's the supplement that has improved my heartburn. it doesn't completely eliminate heartburn, especially if you eat a triggering food, but it helps with reflux from eating more than you should, by speeding up your digestion. things seem to take less time in the stomach and upper intestines. i take about 2 to 10 depending on the size of the meal, amount of protein, and amount of water content. for me, it's never felt like i've taken too much. EDIT: Pepsin is activated by acidity, and is a protease, meaning it digests protein. You're largely made of protein. Silent reflux or LPR is a disease caused by reflux, and mostly involves acid and pepsin together damaging tissue higher up near the larynx+pharynx. Pepsin can lodge into the tissues of the pharynx and be very difficult to eliminate, and takes weeks or months to heal. Look it up (e.g. Jamie Koufman, MD.) If you see any capsules that are broken, and I have with multiple bottles from this brand, I recommend complaining about it and not using the remaining bottle. You might also smell the acid + pepsin powder if you get closer to the bottle and give it a little wiff, although I only recommend doing so very slowly and carefully. If you smell any powder, especially after a small shake of the bottle, I recommend immediately switching over to another brand or formulation that has no pepsin. Horbååch is a brand on Amazon that has one without pepsin, but there are others.

Works great for me! I have no gallbladder and have become highly restrictive dietary wise to a lot of different foods. This has helped me to enjoy food again without painful consequences of trying to eat healthy. I also appreciate the vegan friendliness, cost effectiveness, digestion, and ease of swallowing! Give it a try!

2016 UPDATE below original review----- 2021 UPDATE below 2016 update——- ORIGINAL REVIEW: I'm a young person, late 20s, who has been ill with mystery bowel issues (the unpredictable, potentially uncontrolable kind - ick!) for two years. Doctors can't figure me out. I had a bottle of enzymes sitting in my cabinet that I'd never tried, so as a last resort I used them. After that meal, I didn't have an instant 'urge' and run off to the restroom. I read the ingredients carefully and noticed they included Betaine HCL. It was the only ingredient in that enzyme mix that wasn't in the ones I'd tried before, to no avail. After about a week, I decided to order this straight Betaine and Pepsin supplement. The bottle says to take one pill with a meal, however for dinner and lunch, I require 2. Guess what! My bowel issues are almost unnoticeable!!! Not even daily Imodium and Lomotil could give me this comfort. It's not a complete cure, but I don't constantly feel icky and worried about what my body will do at any moment. If you've been diagnosed with the old "IBS" crapola, then you might consider low stomach acid as your malady. Doctors haver NEVER mentioned this to me, yet all my symptoms fit the bill. If this supplement stops working for me, I'll edit my review at that time. Shipment was quick and received in a timely manner. UPDATE 10/2016: Well, it appears that I've now been enduring this mystery illness for roughly 7 years. Man, the time flies, doesn't it? At any rate, I wanted to offer a status update in regards to my bowel, in case it may help anyone or at least provide a bit of hope. When I wrote my original review, I was having urgent, almost pure liquid episodes several times per day, nearly any time any partical of food (or even water!) would cross my lips. It was an instant response to eating that would have me RUNNING to the bathroom to avoid an accident at the dinner table. Sometimes, even if I hadn't eaten anything recently, the episodes would occur randomly, leaving me in quite a predicament numerous times while out and about in town. I have used nearly every bathroom at the local shopping malls, grocery stores, etc. Not fun, not to mention humiliating. For the second half of my 20s and early part of my 30s, I was living a mostly reclusive lifestyle, barely ever stepping outside the home due to these uncontrolled issues. I saw many, many doctors and specialists of all sorts, had every bowel/digestive exam under the sun, to no avail. Loperamide, cholestyramin, Xifaxin before it was on the market, bentyl, fiber supps, Lotronex, lomotil... Can't remeber all of the prescribed remedies now, but I will say the most reliable for me was loperamide. At one point I was taking 2 mg every morning and 2mg every night along with my Garden of Life probiotics. Though in my worst years it didn't completely solve the problem, it really did take the edge off of symptoms so that I could venture out of the house for hours as long as I didn't eat anything. I tried these pills and had good results until one night when I was on vacation. I had pizza at dinner, which oddly enough was normally 'safe' for me, but that night, despite the betaine, I had a horrible embarrassing night in the hotel room bathroom the day my now-husband proposed to me on a trip. After that I said "F-it, these don't work!!" And I stopped using them that day. I don't think I should have. I found an old bottle in my personal apothecary cabinet (LOL!) and for the past 3 days have been giving them another go. Though my symptoms have magically improved over the last year on their own (???), I still rely on strong probiotics and avoiding many foods to keep symptoms lessened. I have been experimenting by taking one of these pills either in the middle or at the end of my big meals that would normally cause a bit of distress for me each night. I do believe these have been helping again. Though my urgent bathroom needs have abated a lot, I still have messed up movements when I do go. I am definitely not normal like I was in my youth, and I may never be again. In place of the crazy bathroom visits, I now also get horrible painful gas if I eat many of my favorite veggies. I try to be healthy but it harms my love life, if you know what I mean. So, I am happy to say - these have helped!! I have tried the pills with a couple veggies that I rarely eat nowadays, and it has made a difference. So again, I recommend!! Now, here is a list of foods that I've compiled over the the past 7 years that I must avoid at all costs or suffer embarrassing, painful, exhausting, distressful consequences. Maybe my list will help you. I no longer consume onions, garlic, cauliflower, broccoli, apples, pears, grapes, dried fruits, asparagus, whole wheat flour, beans, mannitol, sorbitol, malititol, xylitol, chicory root, inulin, isomalt...I'm pretty certain I'm simply overly sensitive to fodmaps. So altering your diet is highly recommended by ME! I DO eat melons, berries, apple SAUCE, rice, chicken, turkey, fish, cucumbers, spinach, kale, avocado, eggs, white flour, almond flour, potatoes, milks, etc. I basically don't eat from restaurants if at all possible and I cook EVERYthing at home from scratch. The sad thing is, since I've gotten better at managing my symptoms, I've put back on all the weight and more that I may have lost during my initial illness. LOL! Food, glorious food! Amiright?? ;) Another downer - My energy levels are still that of a slug mixed with a sloth, I have no drive to move or exercise (Though I do try) and my hair continues to look like wiry cotton candy that is weak and hasn't shined in nearly a decade. Bummer. Good luck to you! 2021 UPDATE - A couple quick observations for any who are suffering. One of my last gastro docs decided I have diverticulitis and she placed me on antibiotics for 3 weeks just to see if that would help my symptoms. It did. Those three weeks, and for about 2 months after, my bowels behaved better than that had in ten years. Eventually, the effects wore off. I don’t like to be on any prescription meds (all my medical problems have led me to not trust the medical machine...) so I chose to battle on by myself. Now, I made a diet change about two years ago that made a bigger impact on my day to day life than anything else. Firstly, I watched the documentary “Earthlings” on YT. Wow. Changed my life almost instantaneously. After that, I became 95% vegan. What’s amazing is that my stomach got MUCH better when I cut out the meat! I have no clue why. I’d already not consumed dairy since my early 20s. Now I eat fresh fruit, which I had avoided for almost a decade. I eat whatever fruit I want, but I’m careful not to overeat grapes and cherries and pitted fruits that can be problematic for even normal folks when consumed in excess. I also eat any veggie (and salads!!) that I want, though I still get gaseous after white or yellow onions, so I stick to green and purple. And sweet potatoes/yams kill my intestines, so I don’t eat those often. After going animal-free, I went from needing loperamide every day to not taking anything and even having constipation certain days. I had to go back to the doc to make sure I was okay since it was such a drastic turn of events for me. From watery to bulky to even too solid same days. Crazy. One additional note before I go - Certain nuts (especially almonds) can make movements too hard and cause a bit of localized bleeding, like my skin is being cut.. even when ground into a butter. I don’t know what it is about almonds especially, but I avoid those to be on the safe side now, and I eat all other nuts only on special occasions. And I still 100% avoid anything fried. Absolute no no. The saturation of oily fat in fried foods is like an instant laxative. Not good. These are just things have made a difference in my life, to the point I can live again. I’m not saying you have to go vegan or anything like that. Just maybe change the meats you consume or eat meat only twice per week and see if that changes anything. We’re all our own experiment, aren’t we?

After having a stool sample the alternative doc told me to take 2 or more of these HCL per meal. It has kept me regular and digested my food well each day. Love the simplicity of using this daily.

Good quality