Coffee and Gall Bladders

Over time, I have come to the realization that most of my so called reflux issues are more related to poor digestion not reflux. I have always had digestive issues to some degree but my digestive issues were greatly exacerbated after I had my gallbladder removed. Another thing that I learned, as a consequence of having my gallbladder removed, is that surgeons, or medical practitioners in general, are typically not that interested or concerned with what happens to the patient after their health condition has been resolved.

For instance, I had an acute gallbladder attack and the surgeons response was to remove the gallbladder, which is what you would expect a surgeon to do. I later found out that there were alternate strategies to deal with a gallbladder attack but that bit of knowledge was not acquired until long after my gallbladder and I had parted company. At any rate, the surgeon did an excellent job of removing my gallbladder, I suffered minimal pain and the scars disappeared all too soon. I was somewhat entertained by the public reaction to the scars. When I travelled and used the pool in hotels I always received a second, furtive glance at my stomach because the scars looked like three evenly spaced bullet holes that had healed over. For a short period of time I had the air of being a real 'bad-ass". It was amusing  while it lasted. Today, there is no trace of the scars so I can say that the surgeon did an excellent job.

What the surgeon failed to do was to educate me in the fact that the gallbladder was an essential organ when it came to digestion. The gallbladder keeps a store of concentrated bile from the liver so that when the stomach is full of food, especially fatty food, the gallbladder will inject its store of bile into the small intestine to help break down the fatty food and make it easier to digest. 

I am just a layman with a generalist's knowledge of biological science, mostly what I learned in high school. I did not learn very much biology in industrial engineering! But, I know how the gallbladder works and I can safely assume that my surgeon knew way more about the function and importance of the gallbladder to digestion than I would ever know but yet he failed to counsel me, even in the slightest, about how I should compensate for the absence of my gallbladder. Maybe he didn't think of it. Maybe he didn't think it was his place to counsel me in this area. maybe he just didn't know. I am amazed at how little education that medical doctors have in the area of nutrition. At any rate, I was  on my own.

It did not take long before I started to develop issues with eating. Actually, eating was not the problem, at least not in the beginning. The issue was what happened after I ate. I began to realize that it was taking my longer and longer to digest food and I was becoming less and less tolerant of fatty foods. Not eating lots of fatty food is probably not a bad thing but our bodies do need a certain amount of fat to facilitate certain key bodily functions. For instance, fat is the carrier for vitamins as they travel through our digestive system and blood system. So, we do need fat. When I became ill due to working in an unacceptably stressful environment for a horrible boss the stress compounded the issues caused by the lack of a gallbladder and I developed a severe digestive condition that was initially diagnosed as gastro-oesophageal reflux. 

I started to lose weight, a couple of pounds, five pounds, ten pounds and then fifteen pounds. Most people would say that's a great plan and where could they sign up for that! I would not recommend it because I was not only losing weight but my body was not absorbing basic nutrients that I needed for daily living. The situation was not looking good for a long term retirement!

Once I started to understand what the real problems were I was in a position to make some positive changes in my life. The first step was to run away from an unacceptably stressful job as fast as I could. The funny thing is that I have wound up with a much better job with far less stress. Go figure!

The second thing was to educate myself as much as I could about what the problems were with my stomach. Alternative medicine for all the bad press that it gets from pharmacological medicine showed me the way to heal my stomach. 

By the time I got to this point my stomach was in bad shape. My microbiome was not healthy or happy. There were way too many of the wrong types of bacteria and too little of the good types of bacteria in my stomach. I had to take a two pronged approach to dealing with this problem. On the one hand I need to feed my stomach with foods that it needed as much as I could so that I could feed the rest of my body. 

I started consuming as many prebiotics and probiotics as I possibly could. I drink Kombucha everyday, in fact my wife and I make it. I eat sauerkraut, and kimchi, and everything else that I can find that will move my microbiome in the right direction, and...it is working!

The second prong of this strategy is to consume things that will aid in digestion that actually helps to break down the prebiotics and probiotics so that they can be used more efficiently and effectively by my stomach. I have written about apple cider vinegar and bile pills in a previous post but there is another thing that helps, something very common. Something so common that people consume it everyday but most people adulterate it to the point where it actually works counter to the good that it can do. That other thing is coffee.

Coffee can be a double edged sword depending on the health condition that you are dealing with. If you truly suffer from gastro-oesophageal reflux because you actually have too much acid in your stomach, which is not as common as it is diagnosed, then you may want to be careful with my coffee suggestion. For me, because I actually have low acid in my stomach, it works wonderfully. Coffee is a stimulant so it stimulates the body when you drink it, that is pretty straight forward. More specifically, coffee stimulates the production of gastrin and promotes the release of gastric acids in the stomach. All of these events work wonder for me after I eat a meal. 

I learned about the wonders of coffee when I attended a talk about gastrointestinal issues. The speaker, who was a naturopath told us that one of the simplest ways to deal with problems after the removal of a gallbladder or simply dealing with digestive issues was to drink coffee. But, she cautioned, only drink black coffee, no milk and no sugar. I would also add that drinking a dark roast, as dark as you can tolerate has the greatest benefit. For me that was no problem because I love the taste of black coffee. In fact, I cannot think of drinking coffee any other way. Drinking black coffee also lets you know if the coffee that you are drinking is of good quality or not because there is not milk or sugar or anything else that people use to adulterate coffee. There is just the taste of black coffee, for better or for worse. 

When I am home, I can use apple cider vinegar or take my bile pills with a meal. But when I in a restaurant or at someone else's home or traveling I certainly do not have apple cider vinegar available and sometimes I forget to bring my bile pills and if I am traveling for any length of time I could run our of bile pills. But there is no where on this planet earth that I have been and I have been to most parts of this planet, where coffee is not available. No matter where I am, I can always have a cup or two of black coffee after a meal to help me digest the meal .

All I can say is that if you find apple cider vinegar, and bile pills helpful with your digestion issues then you will probably benefit from drinking black coffee after a meal.

Update for 2019 - Apple Cider Vinegar and Bile Salts

I have not been diligent in updating my blog on acid reflux and for that I apologize. I did not realize that it has been a year since my last post. How quickly time goes by. a lot has happened over the past year. with regard to my, so called, reflux, the most important thing that has happened is that I left a job that was causing me a great deal of distress.

Looking back from the perspective of three years I can now see that working in that company, for that manager and dealing with those customers was the root cause of my reflex issue. It has been over a year now since I have left that company and slowly by slowly, I have recovering from this illness and regaining a more normal life with respect to eating and digesting food.

One of the big things that has happened is that I can now eat many of the foods that I was completely unable to eat three years ago. Three years ago I could not eat tomatoes, or any part of a raw salad. Now I can eat salad, a small salad but nonetheless, I can eat a salad which is a major achievement for me. I still have difficulty with anything that has a thick skin that will be difficult to digest, such as the skin on cherry tomatoes if it is too thick of the skin of a pear or even blueberries. My stomach will simply return the skins to my mouth so that I can spit them out as if to say, "I don't know you insist on sending these thick skins to me but they are inedible so please dispose of them". It is true, your stomach does have a mind of its own!

I have developed a few key things that help me to digest food. These are the things that I learned from attending a seminar at Goodness Me in Burlington, Ontario with a local Naturopath doctor. I am sorry that I cannot remember her name but I remember her recommendations. The first one was that I needed to replace the acid in my stomach that was missing because of the damage done to my microbiome and that fact that I had my gall bladder removed which eliminated the stored supply of bile that my gallbladder would hold to help digest food. Most people have their gallbladder removed and they gain weight. I had my gallbladder removed and I lost weight.

Here are her recommendations. 1) About ten minutes before a meal drink apple cider vinegar. That is live apple cider vinegar that has a mother in it because it will provide the acid in the vinegar as well as the nutrients that are created by the mother in the vinegar. The naturopath said one of two things would happen. If you had too much or even a sufficient amount of acid in your stomach you would get the worst reflux of your life. In that case you should not be drinking vinegar. In the second case, if you did not have enough acid in your stomach, nothing will happen when you drank the vinegar. Which is exactly what happened to me. So now, I drink vinegar every morning before breakfast and I try to drink it before lunch as well. The amount that I drink is not large, one teaspoon of vinegar to two tablespoons of water. At first I would measure the amounts precisely with a measuring spoon but now I measure by eye and it works fine. Do not get me wrong, drinking raw vinegar takes a bit of getting used to. It is like downing a shot of whiskey without the beer chaser. It is a bit bracing but for me, it is worth it. It have seen the difference for me between drinking vinegar before a meal and not drinking vinegar before a meal. It is difficult to quantify the difference but I can tell you that my stomach is a lot happier after I drink vinegar.

The second thing that I learned from the seminar I attended with the naturopath was that losing my gall bladder significantly reduced the amount of bile that I had in my stomach. She recommended that I take bile pills. Bile pills are disgusting, black pills that taste like, you guessed it, they taste like bile. You can buy bile pills in any drugstore, supermarket with a health food section. I would try to buy bile bills where they list Ox bile as the first ingredient (Bos taurus). If you take a pill at the beginning of a meal it will greatly aid in your digestion. I always make sure that I have something to drink immediately after putting the pill in my mouth, it is truly disgusting but it works.

All of these things are not really pleasant but it is an old adage that if the medicine is not bitter it is probably not effective!

Three Weeks After My First Appointment With Dr. Chen

After my first appointment with Dr. Chen I started to feel really good. The pain in my right side went away and I was having less problem with reflux. I was confident that Dr. Chen had cured my reflux. Amazing! For the next week or so i got progressively better, then something changed. The pain in my right side slowly came back and my reflux issues came back. It was very distressing. I sent an email to Dr. Chen and asked to go see her. I made an appointment and went to see her that Friday.

After Dr. Chen checked my tongue and took my pulse, she was very unhappy with me and she told me so. She said that I should have gone to see her sooner, my treatment was not complete and now I had relapsed. She gave me a stern lecture about how Western people do not understand how Chinese medicine works. There are no magic bullets or drugs that seemingly make people instantly better. In fact, these things do not exist in Western medicine either but for some strange reason, Western people do believe that these things exists. In Chinese Medicine, you have to stay the course and go through as many acupuncture treatments and take as much herbal medicine as necessary. I listened to her lecture without protest because she was absolutely right. I should have known better because I did know enough about Chinese Medicine to be aware of all of the things that she said. The truth was, I was busy and I felt that the treatments and herbs that she gave were sufficient. One week slipped into two weeks and then three. In truth, the only reason I called her after three weeks was because I could not stand the pain on my right side.

Dr. Chen kept me for almost two hours that evening, by the time I left her office it was past 9:30 PM and she still had another patient after I left. Now that is true dedication! In addition to a thorough acupuncture treatment, she thoroughly questioned me on every aspect of my health and bodily function that anyone could possibly think of. She also did a complete physical examination of my abdominal area. Dr. Chen discovered the scars of my gall bladder operation and realized that I had by gall bladder removed. She seemed to feel that this was significant information and asked why I did not tell her before. I said that it did not occur to me that this was important information. I could clearly see that she was exasperated with me.

She gave me several different medicines to take and gave me explicit directions on how to take them. In Chinese Medicine there is no such thing as off the shelf medicine. Every prescription of herbal medicine is individually tailored to the patients specific illness and condition, so what Dr. Chen gave me and her instructions that she gave me might be completely different for someone else who had a similar ailment.

I felt good after I left her office, it was the effect of the acupuncture. Even without the beneficial effect of the herbal medicine, the acupuncture had a positive effect on my condition. I went home and slept very well that night which was unusual because I was getting up at least one a night to deal with the effects of nocturnal reflux which usually meant going to the bathroom to vomit.

The next morning, I drank Kombucha before I went to practice Qigong. Afterwards I ate a small bowl of congee then I ate breakfast with my wife. Before break fast I drank my herbal medicine in a glass of warm water. I went on to drink my herbal medicine three times a day, before every meal. Dr. Chen also gave me goji berries to eat with my congee in the morning. since the goji berries are dried I soaked them in water before I added them to my congee. I only added to them after I heated up the congee because I didn't want to do anything to diminish the beneficial effects of the goji berries.I followed Dr. Chen's directions explicitly and took the medicine exactly as she prescribed it.

The next day the pain in my side improved but still did not disappear. I was feeling better but all my symptoms had not disappeared. I was looking forward to my appointment with Dr. Chen on the following Tuesday.

Reflux With Chinese Medicine Treatment

After my wife and I returned from our cruise I booked a session with my acupuncturist. By the time I made it to the appointment it was during the Christmas holiday. At that time my acupuncturist told me that she was going back to China to work on a drug that she had developed for cancer treatment. She was not clear as to when she was going to return. This was not great news for me because it left me without the only effective treatment that I had for reflux.

By the middle of January I was getting more and more unwell. my color was pale and the pain in my abdomen had returned,also my reflux symptoms worsened.   Pretty much everything that I ate caused me to choke and at some point after every meal I would vomit part of whatever I had eaten. This was not a good situation.

I started to look into other local acupuncturist. After an extensive search I had narrowed the list down to three possible candidates. my wife called all three. After talking to them she decided on our current acupuncturist. Yan Chen,  a doctor of Chinese Medicine which means that not only does she do acupuncture but she will also prescribe herbal medicine. From the first appointment I had with Dr. Chen I was impressed with her knowledge and ability as a doctor. The first thing she did was look at my tongue and take my pulse. An experienced Chinese doctor can tell so many things from examining your tongue and taking your pulse. The color, shape and texture of your tongue can tell an experienced doctor of Chinese Medicine what is wrong with you. They use the pulse to get more details about your illness.

After our first appointment with Dr. Chen, I started to feel much better. the pain in my side subsided and I had less problem eating and my energy levels improved.  I had a series of 3 treatments. I had herbal medicine to take everyday and I ate congee three times a day.  I mentioned congee in one of my earlier posts. Essentially, congee is a kind of soup made with rice and meat. When it is cooked, it is almost as thick as oatmeal. In China, people eat congee for breakfast. It is funny, when I worked and traveled in China I always avoided congee for breakfast, now I eat it three times a day. It really does calm and coat your stomach before a meal so that it is easier to eat and digest your meal.

Delicious Apple Pie Rice
3 cups cooked rice
1 Tbsp oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1/8-1/4 tsp cinnamon and allspice
salt and pepper
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1/2 cup raisin, soaked and drained
1 apple, chopped
1/2 cup almond toasted.

In a skillet cook onion and celery with the oil until softened.  Stir in the seasonings, depending on how much you want.  Add rice, apples and raisins.    Cover.  Heat thoroughly until the apple pieces are tender.  Sprinkle with toasted almond and serve.  This would be good with chicken and pork.  It is also good as a side dish for a vegetarian entree.

Reflux and Our Caribbean Cruise

After my disappointing bout with Western medicine for Reflux I contracted Bronchitis, something that I did not have the pleasure of suffering for almost twenty years. I think that it was brought on by the reflux. Some of the fluid that would rise up during the night got into my lungs and caused a bronchial infection, at least that is what my doctor hypothesized. At any rate, I had suggested to him that I not go on the Caribbean cruise that my wife and booked for my sixtieth birthday. He told me that it would be the best thing for me to go on the cruise.

I had to agree with my doctor that he was right, after only one day in the Caribbean all signs of my Bronchitis had disappeared. Unfortunately, I still had Laryngopharyngeal Reflux (LPR). The flight down to Houston through Atlanta did not bother me and all of the maneuvering to get to the boat did not cause me any undue effects which I found surprising. It was all stressful but not in the same way that work is stressful so it does not have the same effect on the body which I found to be interesting.

Our first night on board the boat was busy. we were tired by the time we went to bed. I slept fitfully until 4:00 AM when I woke up in a coughing fit brought on by my LPR. I wrote for a while in my journal then I went off to the fitness center at 6:00 AM to practice Qigong.

There was so much food on board that it was difficult to decide what to eat. i tried to pick food that was not going to aggravate my reflux. Breakfast and lunch were fine because I could choose whatever I wanted in the Garden Cafe which was a full service buffet. Dinner was a little more difficult. We wanted to try the various sit restaurants on board. The food was excellent but the trouble was that the food was rich and inevitably I caused my reflux to act up as soon as we started eating. I found that I had to drink massive amounts of water just to get the food down my throat which somewhat dampened my enjoyment of the meal.

That night, I woke around 12:30 AM coughing with phlegm in my throat. I went back to sleep but I was awake again a 1;30 AM, and the phlegm was coming out of my mouth before I could make it to the bathroom.

After a few days on the boat I was finding it to be more and more difficult to find food that I could eat that was not going to bother or worsen my reflux. Every meal became a struggle to eat. I had to be very careful that mindful about everything that I ate. There were so many good things to eat but the number of things that I could actually eat was a very small subset of everything that was available.

There were a few times that I threw caution to the wind and indulged myself. My wife and I were at an art showing one evening. They were offering large glasses of red wine so I had one. I was just going to take a few sips and put it down

On the second last day on board the ship I decided to go and talk to the acupuncturist on board. the acupuncturist actually had a practice in Washington D.C. He was taking advantage of combining work with a vacation, it sounded like a great idea to me. At any rate, I told him about my symptoms and how I felt at the time. It was interesting that his recommendations were very close to what my acupuncturist at home had done. At the very least, it gave me confidence that she was doing what other acupuncturist would do. What took me by surprise was his $175 fee for one sessions. That is more than twice what my acupuncturist charges me. Since it was the last night that I was going to be on board I did not see any reason to start a course of treatment so I left.

The cruise finished and my wife and I went home. Don't get me wrong, the cruise was great in spite of suffering with acute reflux, I worked around it for meals. Other than meal time, it really did not bother me.

If you are interested in my cruise, here is the link for the series of blog posts for my cruise,caribbean-cruise-day-1.html .

Fish Baked in Banana Leaves

1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tablespoon ginger, chopped
1/3 cup canned coconut milk
2 tablespoons unsweetened  coconut
1/4 cup chopped green onion, optional
4 pieces of fish fillets, (tilapia, cod or  basa)
4 large banana leaves defrosted.

In a blender add cilantro, ginger, coconut milk, coconut.  Blend until smooth.

Place one banana leave on a cookie sheet  Place a fish fillet in the middle  Top each piece of fish with 1/4 of the paste from the blender.  Sprinkle with green onions if using.  Fold the banana leaf like wrapping a present.  Tie with string, or make sure the opening is on the bottom to keep the package from opening.  Bake at 400 for 10-15 minutes, depending of the size of the fillet.

Unwrap carefully and serve with steamed rice.

Reflux and Drugs

Let me start off by saying that I hate taking drugs. I do not even like taking aspirin which usually I don't because I rarely have a headache. Even if I did have a headache I would use some natural method to treat it like acupressure to the point on my hand between the thumb and the first finger. So, it was with great reluctance that I decided to fill my doctor's prescription after keeping it attached to the side of our refrigerator with a magnet.

One Sunday afternoon, my wife and I went to the pharmacy to fill my prescription. There were two drugs that my doctor prescribed for me; Dexlansoprazole Dexlansoprazole and Domperidone Domperidone. Dexlansoprazole is designed to reduced the amount of acid in your stomach. It part of a class of drugs referred to as proton pump inhibitors. Dexlansoprazole works by arresting the final step in acid production in the stomach thereby reducing acid in the stomach. Domperidone is used to help empty the stomach after eating.

I took one Domperidone before lunch and it seemed to help. I took another  one before dinner and it had a similar effect. For the first few days I took three Domperidone and two Dexlansoprazole every day as prescribed. After a few days I realized that although my stomach was feeling better and my reflux symptoms seemed to be getting better I was experiencing a constant low grade headache that did not go away and I realized that I was experiencing a constant elevated heart rate, it was as if I was constantly exercising.

I decided to cut back on the Domperidone, instead of three a day, I only took two a day. My elevated heart rate was less noticeable but the constant headache did not go away. Then I had the experience of taking the Delansoprazole too close to the time when I was practicing Qigong  in the evening. After about five minutes of practice I felt the pill rise back up into my throat. I lost most of the contents of the capsule in the bathroom sink. After that, I took the pill after my practice.

The Dexlansoprazole and the Domperidone seemed to be working well for me for about two weeks and then it just stopped working. All the symptoms came back. In fact, taking these drugs actually seemed to make my condition worse. I woke up one night about two in the morning coughing. I got up and went to the bathroom where I vomited the contents of my stomach. I was really beginning to think that this medication was not working for me. It was about this time that I decided to go back to the literature on these drugs and read the sections about side effects. I was a little surprised by what I found.

Long term use of Dexlansoprazole is not recommended by the FDA because of the side effects. Because Delansoprazole works by reducing acid in the stomach it also interferes with the absorption of iron, calcium. magnesium and vitamin B12, all are important minerals in our daily lives. There is also a risk of contracting pneumonia because the reduction in stomach acid makes it more likely that hostile bacteria can attack your system. There is an increased risk of C- difficle for much the same reason, disrupting the environment of the gut makes it more likely that bacteria like C - difficle can attack the body.

I am not saying that you should never take Dexlansoprazole or any other proton pump inhibitor. What I  am saying is that you need to fully aware of the benefits and the side effects of these drugs before you start taking them and then use these drugs with caution. You should never use these drugs longer than necessary.

Here is another delicious recipe that I find very easy to eat with reflux.

Potato and Kale Soup
1 slice of bacon, cut up small
1 1/2 pounds potatoes, peeled and quartered.
1 leek, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic minced
1 teaspoon thyme
salt & pepper to taste
1 box chicken stock
4 cups water
1/2 bunch of kale, sliced
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Cook bacon in a large pot until brown.  Add potatoes and leeks.  Stir until the leeks are softened.  Add garlic, thyme, salt and pepper, stir until vegetables are slightly wilted.

 Add water and chicken stock.  Bring it up to a boil, turn down to simmer for about 30 minutes until the potatoes are tender.

Add kale and cook for 5 to 10 minutes until kale is wilted.  Stir in Worcestershire sauce.  Carefully puree soup in a blender until smooth.  Serve topped with sour cream.

Reflux and Diet

Acupuncture helped my LPR but I still had it. I had been reading that diet could help. After some searching in the library I found a book with an interesting title, "Dropping Acid: The Reflux Diet, Cookbook and Cure", By Jamie Koufman, M.D. and Jordan Stern, M.D. with French Master Chef Marc Bauer. Dropping-Acid-Reflux-Diet-Cookbook

One of the first things that I learned from this book was that it is not stomach acid that is the problem, it is actually a digestive enzyme called pepsin Pepsin. Pepsin only works when acid is present and it does not care what acid it uses. It will use the acid in our food or it will attack the lining of the throat or esophagus. The authors go on to show the damage that pepsin can do to a body consuming highly acidic foods.

The book gives some steps to get immediate relief from reflux.


1) Don't smoke, it causes reflux.
2) Don't wear tight clothing. especially around the waist.
3) Do not exercise right after eating
4) Do not lie down right after eating, do not eat within 3 hours of bedtime.
5) Elevate the head of your bed if you experience reflux at night.

In the diet section of Dropping Acid, the authors go through , "The Best Foods List", "Best Foods for Refluxer", "Notoriously Bad Reflux Foods". There is a chapter on avoiding acidic foods and beverages. I found that chapter to be especially useful, it has list of the pH of good and bad foods.We did not try them all but the recipes that we did try were very good.

I went through their two week "Induction Diet" and I can say that it further helped reduce my symptoms. I was very much aware of what I could eat and what I could not eat. Basically, any food or beverage with a pH pH less than 5 was off limits. That includes a whole lot foods that I used to eat and enjoy. There were some foods that the diet said I couldn't eat but I could eat them, and other things that I was supposed to be able to eat, but made the reflux worse. I came to realize that this disease has some personal characteristics that you can only come to know through trial and error.

Tomatoes are one of the worst things for reflux, not only tomatoes but tomato sauce, tomato paste, salsa, virtually anything that has a tomato base. I never realized how many foods that we eat that are tomato based or have some sauce or aspect of the dish that contains tomatoes. Like many people in North America, we eat pasta. I would say in a normal week, we would eat pasta at least once, maybe twice and it would usually be pasta with tomato sauce. My wife went to great lengths to come up with a viable pasta dish that was not tomato based. I think she did a great job, I really enjoy the dish that she made and I hope you will too.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It is informative and offers a way to manage reflux without taking drugs. Speaking of drugs, I will write about my experience with reflux drugs in my next post.

Linguine with Clam Sauce

1/2 pound linguine or spaghetti
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup chopped  parsley
1/8 teaspoon dried thyme or 1/4 tsp. fresh thyme
salt & pepper
1 - 7 oz can of clams

Bring a large pot of water to boil to cook the spaghetti, add about a tablespoon of salt to the water. Cook according to the package directions until the pasta is tender but not fully cooked.  Drain.

While the pasta is cooking, in a large saute pan add olive oil.  Cooking garlic for about 30 seconds until fragrant.  Stir in wine, thyme and clam juice from the can.  Cook for about 2-3 minutes until the liquid comes to a boil.  Stir in clams, season with salt and pepper to taste.  Add pasta and toss with tongs.  Sprinkle with parsley and serve.