In recent years, the concept of “acidic body” has become a big hit. According to some “experts”, an acidic body is prone to various diseases, including cancer. People want to know if they are acidic, and if so, how to adjust the balance and make it alkaline? Does eating salty food help? Some media reports say: the blood of healthy people is weakly alkaline, about pH value is between 7.35~7.45, and the general newborn babies are also weakly alkaline body fluid. However, with environmental pollution and abnormal living and eating habits, our body constitution gradually turns acidic.
Acidic people often feel physical fatigue, memory loss, back pain, weakness, dizziness, tinnitus, insomnia, diarrhea, constipation, etc. 85% of patients with gout, hypertension, cancer, hyperlipidemia are acidic.
Therefore, medical experts suggest that the acidity of the human body is the source of all diseases.
This paragraph perfectly explains what I said earlier: the first sentence is the science of pseudoscience is the excellent pseudoscience! The blood of a healthy person is indeed weakly alkaline, with a pH of about 7.4, and the blood of a newborn baby has a pH of about 7.4. But that’s the end of this media’s professionalism, the rest is pseudoscience.
The fact is that whether you are a baby or a 90 year old, the pH of your blood is almost the same, it’s all weakly alkaline! There are 3 systems in the body to ensure that the blood pH is 7.4 alkaline: the whistle system, the kidney urine excretory system and the body fluid system.
1. If the body becomes briefly more acidic or alkaline, the whistle system will respond within minutes to speed up or slow down the excretion of carbon dioxide (acidity), thus adjusting the pH back within minutes.
2. The kidney system will respond more slowly, but will also slowly increase or decrease the acidity into the urine within a few days. The normal range of human urine pH is 4.6 to 8.0, which means that both acidity and alkalinity are normal, which is a very powerful balancing system.
3. Body fluids regulate pH mainly by the various proteins and buffer ions inside. Because the amino acids that make up proteins are both acidic and basic, and can absorb or release acidic hydrogen ions, proteins are a super powerful pH buffering system. And the good news is, we have plenty of protein in our bodies!
With these 3 powerful acid-base regulatory systems in place, no one’s blood is acidic (pH < 7.0), so there is no such thing as an acidic body causing disease. In fact, if the blood pH reaches neutral (pH=7.0), the person will be dead before it reaches acidic.
The pseudoscience of “acidic body” is actually relatively easy to debunk, you can go to the hospital and ask: can you help me test my body is acidic or alkaline? I’m afraid no one can help you, because there is no hospital in the world that can measure the “pH” of your body, which is 7.4 anyway.
Since there is no hospital that routinely tests for acidity and alkalinity, where does the conclusion that “85% of people with gout, hypertension, cancer and hyperlipidemia are acidic” come from? It can only be fabricated by some paid “medical experts” in order to sell some so-called “acid detoxification” health products.
China is marching into an aging society and people are paying more attention to health care than ever before. Speculators and pseudo-healthcare experts are taking advantage of this opportunity to preach all kinds of trumped-up health care knowledge through various “science” opportunities.
A good friend of mine, who has just returned to one of China’s top universities as a professor, said that from time to time, various health care companies would send him a large sum of money in exchange for his written support for a health care product, so that the company could label it as “recommended by a Harvard doctor and university medical school professor”. I believe such advertisements are very confusing and attractive. My friend is not willing to charge such money, but there are certainly people who are.
So no matter what kind of expert you see, please remember that basic research or clinical medicine, any real science is well documented, “expert quotes” without citations are pseudoscience, and not the old man with more gray hair speaks reliably.
The “acidic body” theorists also often come up with the concept of “acidosis” to confuse and fool people.
”Acidosis is really a serious clinical problem, often due to problems with the whistling system, which does not properly expel carbon dioxide, or with the kidneys, which cannot remove acid through urine, but this is only one of the acute clinical manifestations of lung or kidney disease, and has nothing to do with chronic acidity.
In fact, there is an equally serious clinical condition called “alkalosis”, which can be caused by persistent vomiting and excessive loss of stomach acid. There is even “water intoxication”, when there is too much drinking water in a short period of time, such as participating in a boring water drinking contest, it can lead to an excessive decrease in electrolyte concentration in the body, which can affect brain function and, in particularly severe cases, can be fatal.
Obviously we will not be “water poisoning” because of the existence of the conclusion that “the body of water is harmful, we must often drain”. Similarly, the existence of the phenomenon of “acidosis” also does not provide any basis for the so-called “acidic body to drain acid”. Some people also point out that “acidic body” does not necessarily mean pH < 7.0, but rather a state of the body, like "Yin deficiency" or "Yang deficiency" in Chinese medicine.
I think, first, if the theory of acidic body starts from the fact that pH 7.4 is weakly alkaline when babies are born and people are healthy, then acidic body must be related to pH, otherwise you should not use pH 7.4 as your reference. Secondly, if “acidic body” is not related to pH, you should at least tell me what objective criteria to use, I can accept non-Western medical theories, pulse, qi and blood, as long as they can withstand objective testing, come to a person, you can tell everyone that it is not acidic, and publish large-scale human data to support your conclusion.
Don’t reverse the cause and effect and tell me that “the body is acidic if you get sick, and alkaline if you are healthy”. I can also make up that “a sick body is sweet, a healthy body is bitter, everyone should drain sugar”.