by Al Sears, MD

Would you rather have heartburn or a stroke? If you had to make a choice, would you take acid reflux or a heart attack?

Those are the kinds of options Big Pharma offers to people with heartburn. Of course they'd never come out and say it…

But that's exactly what's going on.

Whether you call it heartburn, acid reflux, GERD, or just indigestion, over 60 million Americans have it at least once a month. It's a sour taste at the back of your throat… a burning sensation in your chest… or pain in your stomach.

And while most people would choose it over having a heart attack, if you suffer from heartburn, you know how miserable it can be.

Big Pharma is happy to cash in on your pain. They offer a quick-fix in the form of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). These drugs like Prevacid, Nexium, Prilosec and Protonix are among the most widely used drugs in the world. Annual global sales top $13 billion.

But PPIs are also some of the most dangerous drugs on the market. They've been proven to spike the risk of heart attack by 16 to 21%. And people who take them are 122% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease.1

New research now shows they also lead to strokes.

A six-year study of 245,000 patients in Denmark just proved that PPIs increased stroke risk by 2%. But some PPIs were more deadly than others. Prescription Protonix spiked stroke risk by a whopping 94%!2

PPIs treat heartburn by blocking acid-producing cells in the lining of the stomach. But they also block the production of nitric oxide. That can cause your blood vessels to become stiff and narrow. And that can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

Contrary to what your doctor might say, too much stomach acid is NOT the cause of heartburn.

You see, as we get older, we produce LESS stomach acid. In fact, 69% of adults over the age of 80 actually suffer from achlorhydria, or low stomach acid.3

One of the real causes of heartburn is your lower esophageal sphincter (LES). This small muscle opens and closes to let food pass from your esophagus into the stomach. It also blocks stomach acid from coming back up.

As you get older your LES doesn't work as well as it did when you were younger. Even a slight opening can let burning acid back into your esophagus.

PPIs and other drugs don't get to the root causes of heartburn. And besides heart attack and stroke, they've been linked with a long list of other serious side effects including:

Gastric Cancer
Pneumonia
Bone and Hip Fractures
Cognitive Malfunctions
Diarrhea
Nausea
Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Constipation
Food Allergies
Zinc Deficiency
Vitamin B12 Deficiency
Magnesium Deficiency
Kidney Failure
Kidney Stones
Calcium Deficiency
Myopathies

1. Shah NH, LePendu P, Bauer-Mehren A, Ghebremariam YT, Iyer SV, Marcus J, et al. (2015) "Proton Pump Inhibitor Usage and the Risk of Myocardial Infarction in the General Population." PLoS ONE 10(6): e0124653.

2. "Do Heartburn Drugs Increase Stroke Risk?" Newsmax. November 16, 2016; Accessed December 6, 2016.

3. Segal HL, Samloff IM. "Gastric cancer- increased frequency in patients with achlorhydia." Am J Dig Dis. 1973;18(4):295-9.

4. Ricardo de Souza Pereira, "Regression of gastroesophageal reflux disease symptoms using dietary supplementation with melatonin, vitamins and aminoacids: comparison with omeprazole." J Pineal Res. 2006 Oct;41(3):195-200.

1 Egg lightly beated
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 cup Water
1 cup Sugar
1/2 tsp Ground Black Pepper
1/2 tsp Ground Cloves
1 tsp Ground Cinnamon
2 1/2 cups All Purpose Flour
1 cup Molasses
1 cup Oil
¼ cup Ginger Finely Chopped
¼ tsp Salt
50 gram Icing Sugar
1 tsp Lemon Zest
1 tbsp Lemon juice

Directions

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 deg C)

Step 2: In a bowl mix molasses, sugar, oil and make smooth mixture

Step 3: In another bowl mix flour, cinnamon, black pepper, salt, baking powder and cloves well

Step 4: Boil the water in a pan and add molasses mixture to it, then add ginger and mix well.

Step 5: Add dry ingredient, mixture and beated egg to above prepared mixture. Mix them well until combined and make smooth batter

Step 6: Pour the batter into cake pan and bake it for 1 hour or bake it until tester comes out to be clean. Cool it on the rack

Step 7: To make icing mix lemon zest, icing sugar and lemon juice well. Drizzle icing over the cake in any pattern

by Brent Rinehart

My wife and I have known each other for more than 25 years, and we've been married for more than 11 of those. While we know each other pretty well, our marriage is still a work in progress. Neither of us are marriage experts. I consider myself more of a marriage student, trying to see where I'm screwing up and what I need to do on my end to make it work better.

Just like your growth as a Christian, marriage is a process. If we are doing it right, we are continuing to be pruned and shaped into the husband or wife we are meant to be. Just as a plant becomes fuller when pruned, our marriages–and lives–become fuller when we strip those things that take away from our relationship and focus on the things that add to it.

There are a few things that come to mind that are "must-haves" for any successful marriage. These are things that many of us don't do well. It's not because we lack the know-how or time, it's that we simply lack the focus on being intentional in our marriages. Despite realizing these traits of a successful marriage, I still find myself falling down in many of these areas. Just like the apostle Paul, in my marriage, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15). That being said, the first step to improving is identifying pitfalls and potential problem areas.

Communicating.

Any successful relationship is built around communication. Unity, just as Paul writes to the Ephesians, involves "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). If something is bothering you in your marriage, don't share it with your best friend without talking to your spouse about it directly. It may be difficult to discuss, but trust in true love. After all, "love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).

Don't forget the importance of listening. You've heard it said that God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. If your spouse comes to you with a problem, be quick to listen and slow to speak. "If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame" (Proverbs 18:13).

Speaking Her Language.

There's another aspect of communicating that is essential–speaking your spouse's love language. Maybe you haven't read Gary Chapman's "The Five Love Languages" or taken the steps to figure out the love languages for yourself or your spouse. (If you haven't, I'd highly recommend you do. It's eye-opening.) Regardless, we can all agree that we need to understand what makes our spouse tick and then act accordingly. We need to make the extra effort to do things in our marriages that make our spouses feel loved.

I fall into the bad habit of trying to show love to my wife in the way that I'm most comfortable. For instance, I feel loved when someone does something–an act of service-for me or spends quality time with me. As a result, I find myself trying to express love in the same way. I try to do things for my wife to show her I love her. That's fine and good, but she doesn't receive love that way. She feels loved most when she is hugged or if I reach out to hold her hand. Speaking your spouse's language puts you on the path to a closer relationship.

Praying.

According to FamilyLife, which has surveyed thousands of participants at its Weekend to Remember marriage retreats, less than 8 percent of couples pray together on a regular basis. Even fewer Christian couples (about 5 percent) pray together daily. And, these are Jesus-loving people who care enough about their marriages to attend a retreat. What would a survey look like among a wider audience? Sadly, it's likely the same or worse. Most of us don't take the time to pray together with our spouses.

My wife and I recently took FamilyLife's 30-Day Oneness Prayer Challenge. The concept is simple. Pray with your husband or wife–out loud–every day for a month. When we were introduced to it, we had sadly only prayed together a couple of times in our decade-plus of marriage. At the end of the 30 days, prayer became a normal part of our marriage. I felt closer to my wife, and she felt closer to me. They say it takes 21 days for a habit to form, but only a couple days to undo it. You have to stay on top of it. Just like those gym memberships and New Year's resolutions, it's easy to let the commitment fade. Since taking the challenge, we haven't always prayed daily, but we have prayed together more often. And, that's a small step to growing closer to God and to each other.

In Shaunti Feldhahn's book, The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, she shares that 53 percent of "Very Happy Couples" agree with the statement, "God is at the center of our marriage" (compared to 7 percent of Struggling Couples). She writes, "Highly happy couples tend to put God at the center of their marriage and focus on Him, rather than on their marriage or spouse, for fulfillment and happiness." There's no better way for God to be at the center of your marriage than to join with your spouse regularly in prayer.

I've heard this analogy used before: a marriage is like a garden or field of dirt. It's always changing and growing something. Even if left untouched, it's still going to sprout up weeds. But, if tended and tilled, the soil is ready for planting and growing beautiful or useful flowers or plants. We have a choice. Leave our marriage untended or work at it. The result of doing the latter will make it all worthwhile.

A Prayer for Your Marriage:

Father, help me to be the [husband/wife] you have intended me to be. Show me where I need to improve. Help me to be a better communicator, help me to love my [husband/wife] better, and help us both to grow closer to You and to each other in this new year. In Jesus' name, amen.

About The Author:

Brent Rinehart is a public relations practitioner and freelance writer. He blogs about the amazing things parenting teaches us about life, work, faith and more at www.apparentstuff.com.

by Dennis and Barbara Rainey

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity! PSALM 133:1

At one point, both our sons, Benjamin and Samuel, were students at the same university. One evening Samuel called home to talk, and he was interrupted by a young lady who came through the room and asked Samuel to let her talk to us. She said, "Did you hear what happened at the Campus Crusade meeting the other night?"

"No," we answered.

"Well," she started in, "first of all, Benjamin got up and shared how he was going to be taking a year off from school to go volunteer as a missionary in Estonia. Then, after he finished talking and sat down, Samuel stood up and told everyone what a phenomenal brother he had - how much he loved him and admired him, how much of a mentor he had been to him as a younger brother, how he had helped him make his way around as a freshman at college. Then Samuel sat down next to Benjamin, put his arms around him and just hugged him. It was so cool."

It was one of those moments when you sit back, take a deep breath and go, "Thank You, Lord! It has all been worth it."

These were the same sons who argued and fought each other so often that we often threatened to draw a line down the middle of their bedroom and declare each side a foreign country, off-limits to the other person. Barbara and I had our moments when they were teenagers when we wondered if they would ever get along.

If you find yourself in a similar situation - with children who fight like competitors in the World Federation of Wrestling - I want to encourage you that there is hope. Pray and ask God to knit their hearts together. God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly beyond all that you ask or think.

DISCUSS

Talk about your children's relationships with one another. Write down one developmental action step that you want to train each of your children with.

PRAY

Pray for perseverance and wisdom as you continue training and teaching your children.

by Bob Proctor

A number of years ago I had a two-hour layover in the Los Angeles airport. I still had 14 or 15 hours of flying time ahead of me so I decided to pick up a good book. Fortunately, I selected a classic. It is a release published in hard cover by Pocket Books written by Shad Helmstetter, titled 'Choices'.

Helmstetter writes about choosing not complaining. I quote:

"Imagine the incredibly powerful, productive moments, minutes and hours of the days and weeks of our lives that we could complain or not - simply by our own choices. I doubt that we could accurately calculate the amount of additional productive time each of us would have in one year if, for that year, we turned every moment of complaint into a moment of choice to do something better instead.

Imagine what we could do in our homes, with our families and in our personal lives if we made the choice to replace complaining with positive belief. Imagine what you could do with those extra moments and hours of your life if you made the choice, right now, to never complain - and at every opportunity from here on out to replace even the most minor complaint with the positive energy of your own potential.

Imagine never again complaining. Could you still be a strong person, a person of conviction and opinion? Would you still do everything you need to do to make change in your life, or to deal in a clear and effective way with the obstacles and problems that come along? The answer is that you would be more effective, as you would be concentrating on positive actions to improve situations".

By Vivek Wadhwa

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Here are six:

1. Anything that can be digitized will be.

Digitization began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music. We also moved complex business functions, medical tools, industrial processes and transportation systems into the digital realm. Now, we are digitizing everything about our daily lives: our actions, words and thoughts. Inexpensive DNA sequencing and machine learning are unlocking the keys to the systems of life. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors are documenting everything we do and creating rich digital records of our entire lives.

2. Your job has a significant chance of being eliminated.

In every field, machines and robots are beginning to do the work of humans. We saw this first happen in the Industrial Revolution, when manual production moved into factories and many millions lost their livelihoods. New jobs were created, but it was a terrifying time, and there was a significant societal dislocation (from which the Luddite movement emerged). The movement to digitize jobs is well underway in low-salary service industries. Amazon relies on robots to do a significant chunk of its warehouse work. Safeway and Home Depot are rapidly increasing their use of self-service checkouts. Soon, self-driving cars will eliminate millions of driving jobs. We are also seeing law jobs disappear as computer programs specializing in discovery eliminate the needs for legions of associates to sift through paper and digital documents. Automated medical diagnosis will replace doctors in fields such as radiology, dermatology, and pathology. The only refuge will be in fields that are creative in some way, such as marketing, entrepreneurship, strategy and advanced technical fields. New jobs we cannot imagine today will emerge, but they will not replace all the lost jobs. We must be ready for a world of perennially high unemployment rates. But don't worry, because . . .

3. Life will be so affordable that survival won't necessitate having a job.

Note how cellphone minutes are practically free and our computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful over the past decades. As technologies such as computing, sensors and solar energy advance, their costs drop. Life as we know it will become radically cheaper. We are already seeing the early signs of this: Because of the improvements in the shared-car and car-service market that apps such as Uber enable, a whole generation is growing up without the need or even the desire to own a car. Health care, food, telecommunications, electricity and computation will all grow cheaper very quickly as technology reinvents the corresponding industries.

4. Your fate and destiny will be in your own hands as never before.

The benefit of the plummet in the costs of living will be that the technology and tools to keep us healthy, happy, well-educated and well-informed will be cheap or free. Online learning in virtually any field is already free. Costs also are falling with mobile-based medical devices. We will be able to execute sophisticated self-diagnoses and treat a significant percentage of health problems using only a smartphone and smart distributed software.

Modular and open-source kits are making DIY manufacture easier, so you can make your own products. DIYDrones.com, for example, lets anyone wanting to build a drone mix and match components and follow relatively simple instructions for building an unmanned flying device. With 3-D printers, you can create your own toys. Soon these will allow you to "print" common household goods - and even electronics. The technology driving these massive improvements in efficiency will also make mass personalization and distributed production a reality. Yes, you may have a small factory in your garage, and your neighbors may have one, too.

5. Abundance will become a far bigger problem than poverty.

With technology making everything cheaper and more abundant, our problems will arise from consuming too much rather than too little. This is already in evidence in some areas, especially in the developed world, where diseases of affluence - obesity, diabetes, cardiac arrest - are the biggest killers. These plagues have quickly jumped, along with the Western diet, to the developing world, as well. Human genes adapted to conditions of scarcity are woefully unprepared for conditions of a caloric cornucopia. We can expect this process only to accelerate as the falling prices of Big Macs and other products our bodies don't need make them available to all.

The rise of social media, the Internet and the era of constant connection are other sources of excess. Human beings have evolved to manage tasks serially rather than simultaneously. The significant degradation of our attention spans and precipitous increase in attention-deficit problems that we have already experienced are partly attributable to spreading our attention too thin. As the number of data inputs and options for mental activity continues to grow, we will only spread it further. So even as we have the tools to do what we need to, forcing our brains to behave well enough to get things done will become more and more of a chore.

6. The controversy over Google Glass showed that society remains uneasy over melding man and machine.

Remember those strange-looking glasses that people would wear, that were recording everything around them? Google discontinued these because of the uproar, but miniaturized versions of these will soon be everywhere. Implanted retinas already use silicon to replace neurons. Custom prosthetics that operate with the help of software are personalized, highly specific extensions of our bodies. Computer-guided exoskeletons are going into use in the military in the next few years and are expected to become a common mobility tool for the disabled and the elderly.

We will tattoo sensors into our bodies to track key health indicators and transmit those data wirelessly to our phones, adding to the numerous devices that interface directly with our bodies and form informational and biological feedback loops. As a result, the very idea of what it means to be human will change. It will become increasingly difficult to draw a line between human and machine.

Excerpted from Wadhwa's upcoming book, "Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future."

About The Author:

Wadhwa is distinguished fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley and a director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke.