Every day there's a new miracle on the market to improve your health. Sometimes these aids are beneficial to the body, other times; they may have no effect or even harm the body. The alkaline water scam is the latest in the snake oil treatments that pawns itself off as holistic medicine. The truth about what is healthy goes back to basic science, common sense and some knowledge of how the body functions.
It Doesn't Take a Rocket Scientist
You don't have to know that much about human physiology to understand what happens to anything alkaline when you ingest it. It goes into your mouth where some change takes place through the saliva and immediately into your stomach where the gastric juices take further action. The gastric juice is composed of pepsinogen, hydrochloric acid and mucus. The pepsinogen is the inactive form of pepsin and requires an acidic condition to become pepsin. That's one purpose of the HCL. The mucus protects the stomach lining from self-digestion and once activated, pepsinogen becomes pepsin, which digests proteins. The second purpose of the HCL (hydrochloric acid) is to kill harmful organisms and partially digest food.
If an alkaline substance goes into the stomach, it does one of two things. It either neutralizes or becomes acidic or changes the stomach to an alkaline pH and not activating the pepsinogen. If the substance neutralizes or becomes acidic, there's no harm. If, however, it neutralizes the HCL, then you have a problem. You compromise your entire digestive process.
Isn't an Alkaline PH HEALTHIER?
You probably read that some diseases come from an overly acidic body, alkalizing seems to make sense. That's how the alkaline water scam got many of the followers. It's not that simple. For instance, even though something is acidic, it doesn't necessarily make your body acidic. For instance, lemons are acidic but they are alkaline producers, meaning they tend to make the body more alkaline after the process of digestion. Just because a food or substance enters your body as an alkaline or acid substance, doesn't mean that it's alkalizing or acid forming. Most fruits and vegetables are alkalizing.
The key is not to necessarily eat alkaline foods or drink alkaline water, but to consume substances that are alkaline forming once digested.
How Acid Foods Become Alkaline
When you ingest acidic foods, many times the organic acids are weak and represented as sodium or potassium salts. The body attempts to maintain a balance in its charge and so when it creates CO2 during metabolism, it converts these acids into a bicarbonate. If that sounds like a familiar word, check out the Arm and Hammer Baking Soda you have on the shelf. It's sodium bicarbonate and it's alkaline.
Can the Alkaline Water Scam Hurt You?
It most certainly can hurt your pocketbook, but drinking extra water, shouldn't do any harm. In fact, that may be why people often feel better after they begin the alkalized water scam. They simply are providing their body with the additional hydration required to remain healthy.
