Acid Reflux Isn’t Too Much Acid: Heartburn Root Causes Most People Miss | Dr. Daryl Gioffre

In 2014, Dr. Daryl Gioffre’s father was driving 70 miles per hour on I-91 when he passed out from undiagnosed esophageal cancer. The car hit a concrete divider. His mother grabbed his father’s leg off the accelerator. Three days later, a top specialist at Sloan Kettering told the family the cancer was likely caused by too much stomach acid. Gioffre, a functional nutritionist who had built his career around the alkaline diet, was wearing a shirt that said “Get Off Your Acid” when he heard that. He spent the next three years researching, and what he found turned the conventional story upside down: the root cause of most reflux is not too much acid, but too little.

The Low-Acid Trap

The standard medical story about heartburn is that the stomach is producing too much acid, and the solution is a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) to shut acid production down. Gioffre argues this gets the physiology backwards. As we age, the stomach naturally produces less hydrochloric acid, not more. The real problem is hypochlorhydria—too little stomach acid. When acid is low, food sits in the stomach undigested, ferments, and creates gas pressure. That pressure forces whatever acid is present upward into the esophagus, which was never designed to handle it. The result is the burning sensation people call heartburn, but the root cause is poor digestion, not acid overproduction.