The analysis
What the data has turned up so far
Each of these starts with the same log: every meal, symptom and daily habit, recorded the same way for months. Some ask what the numbers say. Others ask whether the research agrees. They're listed oldest first, so you can read them in the order I worked things out.
Was it the food, or the day?
FlagshipI expected trigger foods. Instead, the two factors that predicted a bad day were stress and how sedentary I'd been. Food categories showed no significant effect.
Why does stress trigger reflux?
EvidenceStress nearly doubled my odds of a bad day. The research says it isn't extra acid, it's a lower threshold for feeling it. Eleven studies, tested against my own 564 meals.
Which kind of movement helps reflux?
EvidenceMy most sedentary days had triple the symptom rate of my most active ones. The wider evidence agrees moving helps, but not all movement does: weightlifters reflux far more than cyclists.
I found a trigger food. It was fake.
MethodSweets looked like they cut my reflux almost in half, and the result survived every correction I applied. It was still wrong: my sugar intake was downstream of how much I'd moved that day.
My reflux ignores the night shift
EvidenceI sleep on an inclined bed, on one side, eight hours a night. Three of my 95 symptom events happened overnight. The other 92 clustered around meals, which is the more common reflux pattern and the one nobody writes about.
More analyses will follow as the data grows.
If you want to run the same thing on your own reflux, the methodology page covers exactly what I log and how.
Get the free tracking template