Alkaline water does have a place for LPR sufferers like me because it deactivates the pepsin that has vaporized and deposited itself in my esophagus and throat which when activated by acidic foods will begin to digest my soft tissues. The rest of ways to sell it I agree are completely bunk.
This is true for most fad health things. They come from a place of “this is good for one hyper specific medical outcome” and then extrapolate to “this is good for literally all medical outcomes”
Remember the gluten free phase where people with no gluten alergy whatsoever decided they wanted to eat breads stripped of most of their protien(gluten) because they thought it was healthier.
Low carb diets led to commercial production on non-wheat breads in the western world, creating more options for people with celiacs and increasing public awareness of gluten allergies. With more bread options some people noticed they felt better after chowing non-wheat bread.
Without a lot of health info and bullshit american healthcare, they figured they had gluten allergies or celiacs and adjusted their diet accordingly.
A widely publicized study on non-celiacs gluten allergies found no gluten allergy, media took it out of context and implied those people were full of shit. This polarized the public against anyone claiming a gluten allergy.
But! More and more people self-diagnosed gluten allergies, and more study led to discoveries on how fermentation helps digestion (like with sourdough), that parts of grains contain enzymes that aid digestion, found industry-wide problems with undercooked grains, and allergies to different classes of grains.
So it was healthier for a lot of people, they just didn’t know why.
Being gluten free is a nightmare because of the stigmatism from the gluten free movement and all of those idiots fadding. Sincerally a gluten allergy sufferer well not so much an allergy as much as a immune system disease.
I know how serious it can get. One of my roommates got diagnosed with celiacs while we were living together, we all had to learn a whole lot about food. He was out for two days when someone got bread crumbs in the butter.
He loves the fad because of all the gluten free options.
As far as I know, all allergies are immune diseases. Intolerances and sensitivities have different mechanisms. An immune diease is when the immune system attacks healthy cells, and an auto-immune diease like celiacs is when the immune system attacks itself. I believe there’s some evidence that non-celiacs gluten allergy could have auto-immune aspects.
Its hard. I have highly sensitive. Cooking on separate equipment and dishes. Disposable dishes at times. It’s even harder than my room mates and family do not understand even though they see how much I’ve been in the hospital and suffered immensely. There’s certainly more food options that years ago but that’s about the only good win. Most people just think your a nutcase the moment you tell them. They think your woke or something. Even doctors and hospital staff like nurses don’t fully understand. It’s very hard to navigate and a lot or most things are trial and error still.
I have a very high family risk of diabetes and my rule of thum for carbs has always been the more fiber the better. White breads, especially wonder bread has so little fiber you’re basically just eating fluffy sugars. I’m no doctor and my body isn’t everyone’s body but If someone was asking me why bread messes with them my first question will always be, well how much fiber are in the bread you eat? Less then or equal to 10g carbs per 1g fiber? Alright. If you can get to 7:1 better. If you can crack 5:1, that’s pretty good for bread.
That’s a great point, too. Our digestive systems didn’t evolve as fast as food processing.
I researched the gluten thing because I was a chef around the time it took off in my part of the world, and almost had to fire a line cook when he flat out refused to follow protcol because of the gluten study.
I wasn’t super on board at the time, but now I think we should just listen to people. They know their bodies even if they don’t understand the mechanisms.
That’s still unbelievably common where I live. Some restaurants will have zero vegan options, but you can be sure they’ll offer half a dozen clearly marked gluten free items. Come on, you can’t spare the overhead for a block of tofu, but you can keep gluten free breads and pastas?
I’m curious if it’s just additional labeling or new options? Are they just labeling things they already served as gluten free that didn’t have wheat, or are they making new options specifically designed to avoid gluten?
Can I just say though, as someone who does have diagnosed Coeliac Disease, the gluten free fad really helped to open up my options both for products to buy and restaurants I can eat at and for that I’m thankful. It does suck that there aren’t more/better vegetarian and vegan options at mainstream restaurants though.
I don’t know how common this is, but I’ve heard the opposite sentiment. It caused a lot of restaurants to stop being careful to ensure there was no cross contamination because most people asking for gluten free foods didn’t actually have an issue with eating it.
Yeah I’ve heard that a fair bit too - thankfully I’m a high-tolerance Coeliac meaning my body can handle very small amounts of cross contamination but for those whose bodies can’t process a single iota of gluten this has become a significant issue for them. I find that when I order gluten free a lot of servers will ask me “is that for preference or are you Coeliac” and that gives me confidence that when I tell them I’m Coeliac they’ll take extra precautions.
The biggest initial issue for many is that it’s pretty sedating, but that lessens with time. I slept like the dead for the first three weeks as baclofen is one of the few drugs that increases the frequency and duration of deep sleep. Now I can take 100 milligrams in a day and not feel a thing. I have literally no side effects.
One downside is sudden cessation is hell. If I miss an entire day, my anxiety gradually increases until it’s through the roof until I start taking it again. Two days results in gradually increasing visual hallucinations. All of this completely reverses within an hour of taking a dose. You must taper off this stuff, but doing it isn’t hard at all. Just don’t go cold turkey.
It’s also a medication that people tend not to grow resistant to. It hasn’t lost any effectiveness for me despite having taken 60-80mg/day for almost two decades.
I used to have constant burning throat pain and the taste of stomach contents. Not anymore!
It reduces the frequency of transient lower esophageal sphincter (LES) relaxation and increases its resting tone. Here’s a relevant paper for anyone interested:
Better for the teeth than pH neutral? Nope. For heartburn it might help, but only for a real short time. Non-fat milk would probably be the better choice.
I believe the intended purpose is to reduce the overall acidity of your body, which it will do (negligibly, maybe even immeasuably). Your stomach acid will compensate regardless, but, in doing so, it uses acidic compounds in the process to do so. Whether that is even beneficial in general is debatable at best, though likely not. But mixing in other acids does negate at least some of the alkalinity, which would defeat the entire point, if there is any effect from it.
Edit: Clarified my position a bit. I’m not suggesting that alkaline water is effective at doing anything at all, nor even that its intended purpose would be a health benefit.
Stomach acid is like 10,000,000x more acidic than most alkaline water is basic. Dilution is probably doing an order of magnitude more work than the hydroxide here (meaning just drink more tap water)
I didnt say it would make a significant or even measurable difference. But it will technically drop your overall pH. If I drop any mass of basic material in any volume of acidic material with which it can react, there will be some net change in acidity, even if negligible.
Yes, I know. And to maintain homeostasis, it has means to make adjustments to changes, like pH. Which means you can change the pH of some fluid in the body within reason, and it will correct this change. We are not saying anything different.
Yep, we agree. I was just pointing out the overall pH doen not change, there are ways to avoid that. From the the previous comment it kimd of seemed as though if you put something acidic in, the overall acidity must increase, which is not the case, so I wanted to make sure random readers don’t get the wrong idea.
Ok. Then they’re wrong. The human body’s overall pH can vary within to a small degree with little to no effect on your health, let alone kill you. Changing the pH in small amounts, particularly in different areas like the stomach, will not typically harm the body at all. The entire purpose of some medications like antacids is to do that specifically with the stomach, for example.
First, like someone stated above, your stomach pH won’t be very much affected by the alkalinity. Basically, your stomach pH is very low, pH 2 is normal. Since pH is a log scale, you would need to make it ten times less acidic to get a pH of 3. Som slightly alkaline water solution won’t get it there, especially since the stomach fluid is a buffer which helps maintain a constant pH. Dilution will help more, depending on the volume of stomach fluid. However, your stomach will produce more acid to make up for it.
Second, now you still have to get the pH of the whole body higher, which means raising the pH of the blood. The pH of blood is about 7,4 and it is also a buffer. You have 5 liters of blood, which get constantly pumped around the body. If there were something jacking the pH of your blood (via IV), your kidneys would remove the alkalinity again, right up to the point of kidney failure. This is where you die.
Alkaline water won’t be alkaline for long after it enters the stomach, so it doesn’t really matter
Alkaline water does have a place for LPR sufferers like me because it deactivates the pepsin that has vaporized and deposited itself in my esophagus and throat which when activated by acidic foods will begin to digest my soft tissues. The rest of ways to sell it I agree are completely bunk.
This is true for most fad health things. They come from a place of “this is good for one hyper specific medical outcome” and then extrapolate to “this is good for literally all medical outcomes”
Remember the gluten free phase where people with no gluten alergy whatsoever decided they wanted to eat breads stripped of most of their protien(gluten) because they thought it was healthier.
The whole gluten thing is pretty interesting.
Low carb diets led to commercial production on non-wheat breads in the western world, creating more options for people with celiacs and increasing public awareness of gluten allergies. With more bread options some people noticed they felt better after chowing non-wheat bread.
Without a lot of health info and bullshit american healthcare, they figured they had gluten allergies or celiacs and adjusted their diet accordingly.
A widely publicized study on non-celiacs gluten allergies found no gluten allergy, media took it out of context and implied those people were full of shit. This polarized the public against anyone claiming a gluten allergy.
But! More and more people self-diagnosed gluten allergies, and more study led to discoveries on how fermentation helps digestion (like with sourdough), that parts of grains contain enzymes that aid digestion, found industry-wide problems with undercooked grains, and allergies to different classes of grains.
So it was healthier for a lot of people, they just didn’t know why.
Being gluten free is a nightmare because of the stigmatism from the gluten free movement and all of those idiots fadding. Sincerally a gluten allergy sufferer well not so much an allergy as much as a immune system disease.
I know how serious it can get. One of my roommates got diagnosed with celiacs while we were living together, we all had to learn a whole lot about food. He was out for two days when someone got bread crumbs in the butter.
He loves the fad because of all the gluten free options.
As far as I know, all allergies are immune diseases. Intolerances and sensitivities have different mechanisms. An immune diease is when the immune system attacks healthy cells, and an auto-immune diease like celiacs is when the immune system attacks itself. I believe there’s some evidence that non-celiacs gluten allergy could have auto-immune aspects.
Its hard. I have highly sensitive. Cooking on separate equipment and dishes. Disposable dishes at times. It’s even harder than my room mates and family do not understand even though they see how much I’ve been in the hospital and suffered immensely. There’s certainly more food options that years ago but that’s about the only good win. Most people just think your a nutcase the moment you tell them. They think your woke or something. Even doctors and hospital staff like nurses don’t fully understand. It’s very hard to navigate and a lot or most things are trial and error still.
I have a very high family risk of diabetes and my rule of thum for carbs has always been the more fiber the better. White breads, especially wonder bread has so little fiber you’re basically just eating fluffy sugars. I’m no doctor and my body isn’t everyone’s body but If someone was asking me why bread messes with them my first question will always be, well how much fiber are in the bread you eat? Less then or equal to 10g carbs per 1g fiber? Alright. If you can get to 7:1 better. If you can crack 5:1, that’s pretty good for bread.
That’s a great point, too. Our digestive systems didn’t evolve as fast as food processing.
I researched the gluten thing because I was a chef around the time it took off in my part of the world, and almost had to fire a line cook when he flat out refused to follow protcol because of the gluten study.
I wasn’t super on board at the time, but now I think we should just listen to people. They know their bodies even if they don’t understand the mechanisms.
That’s still unbelievably common where I live. Some restaurants will have zero vegan options, but you can be sure they’ll offer half a dozen clearly marked gluten free items. Come on, you can’t spare the overhead for a block of tofu, but you can keep gluten free breads and pastas?
I’m curious if it’s just additional labeling or new options? Are they just labeling things they already served as gluten free that didn’t have wheat, or are they making new options specifically designed to avoid gluten?
Can I just say though, as someone who does have diagnosed Coeliac Disease, the gluten free fad really helped to open up my options both for products to buy and restaurants I can eat at and for that I’m thankful. It does suck that there aren’t more/better vegetarian and vegan options at mainstream restaurants though.
I don’t know how common this is, but I’ve heard the opposite sentiment. It caused a lot of restaurants to stop being careful to ensure there was no cross contamination because most people asking for gluten free foods didn’t actually have an issue with eating it.
Yeah I’ve heard that a fair bit too - thankfully I’m a high-tolerance Coeliac meaning my body can handle very small amounts of cross contamination but for those whose bodies can’t process a single iota of gluten this has become a significant issue for them. I find that when I order gluten free a lot of servers will ask me “is that for preference or are you Coeliac” and that gives me confidence that when I tell them I’m Coeliac they’ll take extra precautions.
And thank God for that fad, now I can actually find food for my celiac wife everywhere.
cough keto cough
Huh, cool.
Hey fellow LPR person! Ever looked into baclofen? It’s an oddball, but it helped me and a friend with our LPR.
No but I will take a look, thanks! Always pursuing any lead on this particular issue ;-).
Edit: took a look, looks like pretty serious stuff, any side effects?
The biggest initial issue for many is that it’s pretty sedating, but that lessens with time. I slept like the dead for the first three weeks as baclofen is one of the few drugs that increases the frequency and duration of deep sleep. Now I can take 100 milligrams in a day and not feel a thing. I have literally no side effects.
One downside is sudden cessation is hell. If I miss an entire day, my anxiety gradually increases until it’s through the roof until I start taking it again. Two days results in gradually increasing visual hallucinations. All of this completely reverses within an hour of taking a dose. You must taper off this stuff, but doing it isn’t hard at all. Just don’t go cold turkey.
It’s also a medication that people tend not to grow resistant to. It hasn’t lost any effectiveness for me despite having taken 60-80mg/day for almost two decades.
I used to have constant burning throat pain and the taste of stomach contents. Not anymore! It reduces the frequency of transient lower esophageal sphincter (LES) relaxation and increases its resting tone. Here’s a relevant paper for anyone interested:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9981648/
Bonus: 20 mg for non-users will halt hiccups but will likely also sedate them pretty hard. 10-20 mg will prevent MDMA hyperthermia.
TIL, thank you. It indeed makes perfect sense that it would help for this.
- Homer Simpson
Which is reason number two (pun intended) why brown M&Ms are the superior ones.
Light brown or dark brown?
Yes.
Depends on how many you eat…
https://www.reddit.com/r/90s/comments/xp2psz/anyone_else_remember_that_old_light_brown_mm/
Light brown aka tan.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/121011-blue-honey-honeybees-animals-science
Slightly better for the teeth maybe? And maybe a slight benefit if heartburn is an issue.
Better for the teeth than pH neutral? Nope. For heartburn it might help, but only for a real short time. Non-fat milk would probably be the better choice.
I believe the intended purpose is to reduce the overall acidity of your body, which it will do (negligibly, maybe even immeasuably). Your stomach acid will compensate regardless, but, in doing so, it uses acidic compounds in the process to do so. Whether that is even beneficial in general is debatable at best, though likely not. But mixing in other acids does negate at least some of the alkalinity, which would defeat the entire point, if there is any effect from it.
Edit: Clarified my position a bit. I’m not suggesting that alkaline water is effective at doing anything at all, nor even that its intended purpose would be a health benefit.
It’s not debatable.
Stomach acid is like 10,000,000x more acidic than most alkaline water is basic. Dilution is probably doing an order of magnitude more work than the hydroxide here (meaning just drink more tap water)
I didnt say it would make a significant or even measurable difference. But it will technically drop your overall pH. If I drop any mass of basic material in any volume of acidic material with which it can react, there will be some net change in acidity, even if negligible.
The body maintains homeostasis. It cannot afford to change pH. It is capable to buffer pH by neat biochemical mechanisms.
Yes, I know. And to maintain homeostasis, it has means to make adjustments to changes, like pH. Which means you can change the pH of some fluid in the body within reason, and it will correct this change. We are not saying anything different.
Yep, we agree. I was just pointing out the overall pH doen not change, there are ways to avoid that. From the the previous comment it kimd of seemed as though if you put something acidic in, the overall acidity must increase, which is not the case, so I wanted to make sure random readers don’t get the wrong idea.
Ahh I see you have forgotten pH buffering solutions.
I was more of a physics nerd. Can’t say I’ve heard of such a thing.
Weak acids/bases tend to not fully convert their potential free ions, stabilizing at particular pHs for relatively large ranges of concentration.
You can use that as a basis for solutions that aren’t super-basic but will preserve their pH in response to drips of acid.
Hmm TIL
But please…go on.
It absolutely will not. If it did, it would kill you.
How would a negligible change in your stomach acidity kill you? What do you think tums do?
I never said it does.
Then what does that mean?
They said:
Since alkaline water does not change body pH, it would not necessarily kill the drinker.
Ok. Then they’re wrong. The human body’s overall pH can vary within to a small degree with little to no effect on your health, let alone kill you. Changing the pH in small amounts, particularly in different areas like the stomach, will not typically harm the body at all. The entire purpose of some medications like antacids is to do that specifically with the stomach, for example.
First, like someone stated above, your stomach pH won’t be very much affected by the alkalinity. Basically, your stomach pH is very low, pH 2 is normal. Since pH is a log scale, you would need to make it ten times less acidic to get a pH of 3. Som slightly alkaline water solution won’t get it there, especially since the stomach fluid is a buffer which helps maintain a constant pH. Dilution will help more, depending on the volume of stomach fluid. However, your stomach will produce more acid to make up for it.
Second, now you still have to get the pH of the whole body higher, which means raising the pH of the blood. The pH of blood is about 7,4 and it is also a buffer. You have 5 liters of blood, which get constantly pumped around the body. If there were something jacking the pH of your blood (via IV), your kidneys would remove the alkalinity again, right up to the point of kidney failure. This is where you die.
Probably either referring to a non-negligible difference or to how being alkaline enough to make a real difference would make it basically poisonous.
I’m no phlebectomist, so I can’t say whether they’re right about it or not 🤷🏻
Read what I replied to.
You replied to me, dude. And I said more than one thing. Idk what the hell you’re claiming will kill you.
Even if you drink 10 liter and piss all of it out?
If you drink 10L of anything it will kill you.
Depends on how much time you have…
Fair. Ha ha