Facing Reality On Acidosis And Alkalosis
Acidosis and Alkalosis
Today, we’re going to talk about acidosis and alkalosis. I’ll explain just what I mean by that in a second. But first, what put this topic in my head?
In the past week, I’ve directly or indirectly read/heard two things that prompted me to write this. First, there was a comment by Shari on my Eat Real Food post lambasting me for promoting a “meat-based diet” because it “not only causes acidosis, but has also been unmistakably linked to increased incidence of colon cancer.” (Of course, most everyone that reads that post realizes that I promote a diet based on unprocessed foods, not necessarily meat, but that doesn’t stop people from seeing what they want to see.)
Second, as you all now know, I just moved to San Diego. Part of setting in has been finding a new farmer’s market since my old one is now about 2200 miles away and it’s just not feasible to pull that off on a Saturday morning. So I hit the weekly Wednesday farmer’s market in Ocean Beach and overheard a girl selling asparagus telling a couple other girls about how awesome asparagus is because it’s “the most alkaline vegetable and alkaline helps you be stronger for longer” (as she flexed). She went on about how you want to avoid acid foods like meat, dairy, and…citrus fruits.
A Quick Physiology Primer: Acid-Base Metabolism
So what exactly are these people talking about? “Acidosis” is quite simply when the pH of the blood falls below the bottom end of the healthy pH range (normal range is 7.35-7.45). “Alkalosis” is the opposite; the pH of the blood is out of bounds on the upper end of the scale. Neither is good. Both can cause serious health issues and/or death (which I suppose is a very serious health issue).
Now, here’s how they claim it works: everything you eat, once digested, exhibits either acidic or alkaline by-products for the body to deal with. Eating too many acidic foods causes your body to become “acidified” and, therefore, more susceptible to disease. On the other hand, eating good alkaline foods helps your body to get into an alkalized state where disease cannot exist. Dr. Mirkin points out at QuackWatch that:
Promoters of these products claim that cancer cells cannot live in an alkaline environment and that is true, but neither can any of the other cells in your body.
Just as an aside, some foods, while being acidic, leave an alkaline ash after digestion. Unfortunately for the girl selling the asparagus, lemons and limes are two of those, so even if she were correct about everything else, her advice to avoid citrus fruits is out.
To continue, you have to balance out your acids by eating more alkaline foods. And then there’s the requisite list of some common foods and whether they are acidic or alkaline (or neutral):
| Acid | Neutral | Alkaline |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
The Reality Of Acid-Base Balance
And now to reality…”eat more alkalizing foods” is the New Age, pseudo-scientific way of saying what Grandma said for centuries: “Eat your fruits and vegetables.” Not bad advice, in and of itself, though it seems to have been adopted by people that are especially anti-meat.
I think the reality is that the grand majority of the people talking about the idea are using it as a way to reinforce the “superiority” of a vegetarian diet over an omnivorous diet, much like Shari seemed to be doing on the Nutrition 101 post.
Slippery Slope Alert!
I mean, if alkaline is better than acidic* and animal foods (other than goat milk and human milk) are acidic, then obviously vegetarianism is better than meat-eating. Of course, carrying this to its logical extreme, we would want to avoid acidic foods completely (like the girl at the market recommended), like raw milk, and opt instead for an alkaline food, like soy milk (depending on which list you consult). All meat is out…but that’s okay cause you can eat tofu to your heart’s content.
Pecans and cashews? Out. Luckily you can eat almonds. Spinach as fine…as long as you don’t cook it. Bananas are okay…as long as there’s no green on them. Here’s my favorite…green beans, good; string beans, bad. Other than the strings that have been bred out of most modern green beans, it’s the same plant. Another “we’re not real sure which way is up” moment is that depending on which chart you consult, eggs and chicken breasts are either acidic or alkaline.
Oh, here’s another fun one: antibiotics are alkaline, while probiotics are acidic. Yeeaaaaahhhhh…But here’s the icing on the cake of this run into ridiculousness. Please see the chart to the right. If alkalizing is what we want, why don’t we just balance it all out with a nice glass of ammonia or bleach. Or hell, sprinkle a little household lye into your next casserole! (Disclaimer: Since some people around here have a hard time picking up sarcasm, this is sarcasm. Please, please do not consume ammonia, bleach, or lye, no matter how much alkalizing you want to do.)
Obviously I’m just having a little fun here, but, as always, much truth is said in jest.*
And then there’s the flip side of the coin: if eating animal foods promotes acidosis, then eating plant foods promotes alkalosis. Of course, while both are definitely medical issues, neither are likely and neither dichotomy is the way it really works. Lucky for all of us, evolution equipped the body with a range of ways to keep blood pH in the proper range and you’re not going to outdo your acid-base metabolism by eating too much meat, dairy, grains, or anything else.
They Missed A Puzzle Piece: Vinegar
Another key piece of information left out by The Alkalizers** is that some acids, like vinegar, improve your blood sugar response, an element of your health that is most likely a bit more important than if your last meal contained 60% alkaline foods and 40% acidic foods (and in reality, were it to matter, there’s no way of measuring whether you’ve properly countered your acids and bases since it’s a continuum, though you could test your urine, a thoroughly pointless endeavor).
These data indicate that vinegar can significantly improve postprandial insulin sensitivity in insulin-resistant subjects.
As usual, when people try to complicate nutrition, they leave out some key pieces of the puzzle and ignore some pertinent facts to try to fit into a nice, easily digested little package.
A Nice Cold Bucketful Of Reality
There is no evidence in the real world that food changes the pH of the blood. I searched on Pubmed and I read plenty of stuff by others that had searched Pubmed. No one has come up with anything. And that’s a good thing because with such a narrow range of “healthy,” you wouldn’t want it moving either up or down depending on how much you decide to indulge at a party.
In fact, the stomach is so acidic (getting down towards battery acid and hydrochloric acid), that you can’t even significantly change the acidity of your stomach, much less your blood. And that’s also a good thing since that acid helps you digest things.
Dr. Mirkin again:
All foods that leave your stomach are acidic. Then they enter your intestines where secretions from your pancreas neutralize the stomach acids. So no matter what you eat, the food in stomach is acidic and the food in the intestines is alkaline. Dietary modification cannot change the acidity of any part of your body except your urine. Your bloodstream and organs control acidity in a very narrow range. Anything that changed acidity in your body would make you very sick and could even kill you.
I’ll Say It One Last Time (In This Post)
Seriously…who wants another set of diet rules to keep up with? It’s just repackaging dietary OCD in another way. There’s nothing wrong with eating more fruits and vegetables, but worrying about acids and bases is entering a whole new area of navel gazing.
For Pete’s sake, man! Just eat real food! It really is that simple. When you eat real food, low-carb and low-fat become less important. Glycemic index becomes unimportant. And acid-base balance, if somehow it were to actually matter, takes care of itself. Stop the paralysis by analysis and just cut out the processed garbage.
You can spend your life debating dietary minutiae on Internet forums or you can eat real food, then perhaps go outside and try talking to real people or maybe take up a hobby with your new-found time.
So is this something that we really need to be concerned with or is it, as I said, just another way of complicating nutrition with an unhealthy dose of pseudo-science thrown in for good measure?
** Believe it or not, there’s actually a product called The Alkalizer that promotes “a wetter water for a better body,” because, of course, even regular water is acid-forming. That’s right! It’s not the sugar, fake fats, or processed grains you’re eating that are making you fat and sick. It’s the water coming out of your tap. In other news, I walked out to the end of the Ocean Beach Pier today and saw a surfer jump a shark. If you want a debunking of “ionized water,” check out this site.
About Scott
Scott Kustes loves to cook and loves to eat. He started Real Food University to help you get maximum enjoyment out of the meals that you eat. To find out more about how he has rebelled against the fast food culture and counting calories or carbs, join the Real Food Revolution.
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it’s been a rage here in Hong Kong to buy incredibly expensive water purifiers that make the water more alkaline.I can’t tell you how many of my friends are trying to get me to buy one! I checked it out and it’s pure quackery.
Great article, brother-in-law! I got swept up in the “low fat” diet of the late 1990s, and tried low-carb in the early 2000s (never the carb counting, though). The former left me ravenous all the time, the latter tore up my digestive system. So I suspect any other “count the units” approach suffers from exactly what you say above. I don’t know that I’ll ever come to idealize the “caveman diet,” but it’s general principle is probably less nerve-wracking than the older alternatives.
My one worry is whether or not an acidic diet leeches minerals from my bones to buffer diet induced acid in the blood. Of course, the human body is an esquisitely robust and complicated system, so…it’s probably best not to obsess…
Very few Americans have any science at all in public school. Oh, maybe some rainforest kumbaya in elementary school, but little general, chemistry, or physics. Dietary beliefs are an outcome of this illiteracy. Heck, one doesn’t even need lots of scientific knowledge but an ability to think critically, which can come from philosophy and the arts.I’ve had many a run in on the forum over at MDA from these folks. Someone tells them something, they believe it because they want to. I’ll never forget when some poster talked about her “belief” in sea salt, I think it was. After I thoroughly shredded her belief, she asked me, “Don’t you believe in anything about food?” That sums it up, these folks are no different than religious people who “believe” without personal experience as to why.Last fall I had a blood panel done and my serum pH was perfect. That’s after four months of high (almost all) animal fat (65%), medium protein (25-30%), and low carb eating. Meat, fish, hard cheeses, low carb veggies. Those types of people only talk hypotheticals, never empirical evidence. Well, there ya go, fools.Oddly, Dr. Cordain of Paleo Diet gets into this serum pH via diet stuff, too. Weird.Presuming we are all grown ups here, please permit my observation (with grin!) that semen is very alkaline.Welcome to SD! When my uncle was stationed there in the early fifties he supplemented his lowly pay by snorkeling for abalone in the bays after work. Sure can’t do that today!
Why do you say that a urine test for PH is “a thoroughly pointless endeavor”? I’ve did the test and my PH was 5 and it confirmed what I already knew: that I eat too much meat and dairy and not enough fruits and vegetables.Are you saying that it is not true that minerals leach from the bones and muscle to buffer too much acid from the diet? This is the main area where acid-base balance is important.I agree that we should not obsess over anything but I think the acid-base balance should be taken into account when making dietary choices (I’m not talking about constantly checking the PH charts).Also, the fact that some people with questionable morality try to profit from this idea, doesn’t automatically imply that the whole concept is flawed, which is one of your subtle arguments in the article.This is currently my point of view but I am open to change it if there are compelling reasons to do this.
Nice article. The pH police are one of my favorite new cults.You’re wrong to make light of this situation, though. I drank about 8 Bud Light limes this weekend (I was at a pool, and it was free). The acidic beer plus the acidic beer combined with my stomach acid to make me triple acidic. I was sweaty and tried to sit in a metal folding chair, and the thing just dissolved. Same thing when I tried to lift weights; the bar just split in two. I had to bathe in bleach just so the water wouldn’t run off of me and corrode the drain pipes. Strong stuff, man.Hope you like your new digs.
Low-fat tends to leave people hungry since fat is so satiating. What did you eat on the low-carb? Some people have trouble due to the high amounts of roughage from green vegetables. Could also be a lack of proper bacteria in the intestines. Probiotics can help with that.Who said anything about the “caveman diet”? I talk about eating real, unprocessed food, not any particular diet. Paleo Diet is a fine start and easy to follow with simple rules focusing on unprocessed foods, but I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, including the exclusion of all dairy and non-gluten grains, like rice. If you need to categorize my way of eating, call it the “Don’t Eat Crap Diet”.CheersScott
Meeses, I certainly left out a part or two there in my hurry to get to the beach yesterday. I’ll expand a bit on how the body regulates blood pH here soon. It does involve the bones, but again, no real need to obsess.CheersScott
Paul, how exactly does one “believe” in sea salt? I must see a link to this!
Amazing that your body kept your blood pH right where it needs to be for you to live, eh?CheersScott
Catalin,I’ll cover a bit more on how the body actually maintains blood pH soon, since I gave that short shrift here. You are correct that the bones are involved. I’m still not sure that urine pH testing matters though. I’ll see what I can find on that.CheersScott
Gant,You drank Bud Light Lime and admitted it publicly?
CheersScott
I agree with you Scott in keeping things simple when it comes to food choices. It took me a while to realize that if you just eat whole foods (raw and foods you have to cook) and not get caught up in counting calories, alkaline vs. acidic, food combination, etc., etc., you will do just fine.I will be anxiously waiting to read your follow-up article on how the bones play a role in balancing the blood pH in your body.
Astounding, eh? My body, the result of two million years of evolution, actually knows what’s best for it! Not only was my serum pH spot on, but all other parameters were no less than what I would call “very good,” and the most important ones like triglycerides, HDL, and derived ratios were “excellent” or more, if that’s possible.I was still forty pounds overweight (on a 6’3″ frame) and was age 63.Real food. It’s what’s for dinner. And breakfast. And lunch.As to the sea salt, I might be conflating several threads, topics, and beliefs in my aging brain. It might well have been raw milk vs. pasteurized. Same principle; anecdotes and beliefs.
Normal urine pH is 5.0-7.5 per my lab report. Chill. (Mine was 7.0, neener, neener…..) Also, color change test strips are suject to interpretation as compared to a digital pH meter.Don’t jump to conclusions about eating too much meat. Old house wive’s type of tale.
Wow, thank god you told me not to have my clients use lye to alkalize their blood….I had written it down as a take away point! (that’s my sarcasm and awesome humor!).Very interesting article, Scott. The whole alkaline lifestyle thing has sort of blown up in the last few years….in my opinion, any diet that tells you to stay away from fruits and vegetables is not worth our time.Susan
Actually, the Alkalizers tell you to avoid meat and dairy (but oddly, not grains) because they are acidic. Fruits and vegetables are all good.And yes, stay away from that lye.
CheersScott
Don’t you find it ironic that no one EVER worries out over-alkalizing by eating too many fruits and veggies?Paul,Great observations. I totally agree about the scientific illiteracy resulting in religion-like attitudes when it comes to nutrition science. I’m trying to reverse my own scientific illiteracy and hoping it’s never too late.I don’t think science should be about belief at all, but rather, whether to accept the best currently available data or not. I have a high regard for skepticism, too.My husband and I have been reading the Descent of Man (Darwin). We both love this quote:”False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”
I have an 8 month old baby now and after going through child birth naturally really do believe that if you just get out of the way and stop trying to over analyze things with the mid that the body can do miraculous things.How simple do we need it natural diet, no process foods, smaller portions for most and if your not already, start moving.
[...] Check it out HERE. [...]
Presumably, it was your wife that gave birth……..
Dude;House warming party, say in the Fall???
Hi Scot,I normally just read and enjoy the posts here. Most are spot on.However; here you have it wrong. It’s not the pH of foods, it’s the mineral content and the metabolites formed from them that determine if a food is acid-forming or alkali-forming.Potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sodium are alkalysing because the metabolise to bicarbonates & bases.Sulfur, phosphorous, chloride and organic acids are acid-forming – metabolize to acids.Look up articles from these researchers for more info: Thomas Remer & Friedrich Manz, Lynda Frassetto & Anthony Sebastian, Wildon Farwell & Eric Taylor.
I tried to quality it, man.
I’ll make it a little easier….The following may be of interest (all can be best found doing a Google Scholar search file type .pdf):Thomas Remer, “Influence of Diet on Acid-Base Balance.” Seminars in Dialysis – Vol. 13, No 4 (July-August) 2000 pp. 221-226.Thomas Remer and Freidrich Manz, “Potential renal acid load of foods and its influence on urine pH.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, July 1995 Vol. 95, No 7 pp. 791-797.Frassetto, Sebastian et al., “Estimation of net endogenous noncarbonic acid production in humans from diet potassium and protein contents.” American Journal of Clinical, 1998;68:576-83.Frassetto, Sebastian et al., “Estimation of the net acid load of the diet of ancestral preagricultural Homo sapiens and their hominid ancestors.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2002;76:1308-16.- – - Interestingly, Frassetto et al say that if grains and energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods (modern foods) were eliminated, meat and other animal foods could easily be increased while maintaining the alkaline-forming diet of the paleo man. **NB: it’s always ‘acid-forming’ foods and not ‘acid’ foods.For other info, try looking up “serum anion gap” on PubMed.
Oh, sorry, skimmed right over that part. My bad! Free makes it okay and sitting at a pool makes it better than something heavy. You’re forgiven!CheersScott
That’s because it’s perfectly acceptable to denounce meat, but to say anything that could be even remotely construed as “eat fewer fruits and vegetables” (and we all know that’s how certain factions of the world would take it) is worthy of being hanged.I like that quote. True science is about learning more than proving points. Much like Mr. Darwin did on his first voyage that resulted in “Origin Of Species”…his goal was to disprove evolution and instead he proved it to himself. That’s science!CheersScott
Jay, my man, you get out here and we’ll throw a party just because you’re here, regardless of whether it’s a house warming or not. I’ll include the vegetables so we stay properly alkalized.CheersScott
Mark, Thanks for the info. I’m working on an update to this post with a bit of additional information. I’ll use this stuff to formulate that.CheersScott
[...] Facing Reality on Acidosis and Alkalosis – Fitness Spotlight [...]
[...] so let’s look back at Monday’s post on Acidosis and Alkalosis. In my haste to go sit on the beach and stare at the ocean, I gave short shrift to covering how the [...]
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