‘Gaviscon is the Devil’
I’m sitting at a café in a small town somewhere in south west England.
At the table across the way there are five people who look like they’ve just been doing something like a boot-camp workout in a nearby park. Three are male and two are female. Two of the men are twenty-somethings and may be the PT instructors of the group. I am making assumptions however. These two men are tall and muscled and fit. One of them has a singlet on that says ‘never quit’. He is wearing a baseball cap backwards.
One of the women is quite overweight. They are all joking about someone called Tom and his ‘crazy ideas about nutrition and health’.
“Tom says that Gaviscon is the devil!” laughs the overweight woman. And the others all snigger at Tom’s belief that there is something wrong with this neon-pink, over-the-counter formula for relieving the symptoms of indigestion and acid reflux.
“Because Tom and his mates know sooo much more than the scientists at GlaxoSmithKline,” says the tallest and most muscled of the small group. He’s being sarcastic.
DROWNING OUT THE CRIES
Let’s brush aside the fact that I am shamelessly eavesdropping on this unsuspecting group of clearly nice people for a minute because this is fascinating to me for a number of reasons. First, I agree completely with Tom, whoever he is. Gaviscon is a terrible thing to put in your body. It masks the symptoms of acid reflux, it damages your delicate microbiome and suppresses the one thing that your system really needs… stomach acid for digesting whatever junk you’ve put in your system.
Ironically, people who suffer with acid reflux usually have too little stomach acid rather than too much. By pouring substances like Gaviscon down your throat, you’re essentially drowning out your body’s cries for help.
According to this group, Tom is also to be ridiculed for believing that everyone is “allergic to pasta”. Now, I think that what Tom really meant was that modern-day white flour is such an inferior product to what it was, say, a couple of centuries ago because it has been tampered with and bleached to such an extent that it now has little nutritional content and the gluten is now double what it was and modern-day manufacturing methods do not allow the time for that gluten to be processed properly so yes, the resulting product is like glue in our systems and can do all sorts of damage to our delicate villi – the little tiny teeny ‘fingers’ on our intestinal tract. So what Tom meant was ‘everyone is intolerant to modern-day white flour used in processed and mass-produced products like pasta’.
Again, I completely agree with this wise and mysterious Tom.
Eat too much of this cheap white pasta over a length of time and chances are you’ll be reaching for that bottle of pink Gaviscon. But I think that these young, muscled men simply aren’t old enough for any damage to their systems to be showing up yet. Their intelligent and healthy bodies are so far managing to cope with and adapt to whatever these young men put therein.
Why else is this little group and their conversation fascinating to me? Second, because of the trust they put in the credibility of a company like GlaxoSmithKline. The belief that the ‘expert scientists’ at this company know more about nutrition and health than the average woman/man in the street and the assumption that these experts only have the health of their customers at heart – as opposed to the profits of the multi-national corporation that pays their salaries. I think that’s what happens when we, the general populace, believe that television advertisements with a ‘sciencey’ feel to them, someone in a lab coat for example, are completely truthful. We view them more as tiny documentaries rather than advertisements cleverly created to sell us something by sticking a white coat and black-rimmed glasses on a good-looking actress or actor.
I believe that GSK doesn’t want anyone to stop eating the junk that’s giving them indigestion. They want us to believe that it’s our basic human right and completely fine to continue eating that meat pie/ sausage roll / pastry / pizza… whatever… that gives us indigestion because a swig of Gaviscon will take away the pain.
DOG EAT DOG JUNK FOOD JUNGLE
I believe that companies like GSK don’t want anyone to stop eating the junk that’s giving them indigestion.
They want us to believe that it’s our basic human right and completely fine to continue eating that meat pie/ sausage roll / pastry / pizza… whatever… that gives us indigestion because a swig of Gaviscon will take away the pain.
Never mind what other damage is being done on our insides of which the symptoms of acid reflux are attempting to warn us. Never mind that the low stomach acid we have may be the result of some other issue, like Crohns disease, or a problem with your pancreas.
When did something as basic as eating get so freaking complicated?
Tom, whoever and wherever you are, these people might not agree with you but you have my complete support and backing. May you live long and prosper and continue to point out to whoever will listen that indigestion is not something that we should consider a ‘normal’ and acceptable part of modern-day eating.
And my apologies to those people in the café for eavesdropping on your conversation. You seem like good people. I just think you’re wrong to put your faith in the folks who peddle neon pink anti-acid formulas.
I think the biggest lesson to be learnt from all this though is that you just can’t trust the other people in the café when you’re chatting with friends.
Tam x