X-Message-Number: 33192
From: "sbharris1" <>
References: <>
Subject: Kurzweil Water Woo #2  (CryoNet #33186)
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 21:46:22 -0800

Here is some very effective stuff against the alkaline water internet scams,
much of which Grossman and Kurzweil seem to have fallen for:

http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html

There's even a bit on Fantastic Voyage:
http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html#FV



Ray Kurzweil certainly has the intelligence to learn a little Chem 101
acid-base chemistry. He also could and should have gone to some conventional
scientists (chemists, respiratory physiologists, nephrologists) after being
warned that there was some stuff about pH in the book that was going to be
roundly criticized.

The doctors who study and write about pH problems for a living (of which
there are many) aren't all in the pocket of drug companies. In medical
school, the textbook from which we learned blood gases and acid-base
problems was technically fairly dense (it's probably the worst inorganic
chem that conventional M.D.s have to face in practice), and not at all sexy.
If the guys who wrote it were in the pocket of anybody, who would it have
been? The giant TUMS or citrate laxative conglomerate?

Incidentally, I saw a new magnesium salt on the health food store shelves
just today: magnesium malate. It's being promoted for being a Krebs cycle
intermediate, but of course anybody metabolizing glucose makes all those
things (citrate being one of them). It's not the organic acids per se that
alkalinize you; it's the metals that go along with them and the fact that
the acids must be metabolized to bicarbonate. The malate seems cheaper than
the lactate as a supplement, but didn't look quite as inexpensive as the
citrate. Any of these are usable to raise urine pH, and in reasonable doses
(300 to 400 mg magnesium) they make fine supplements. Just don't overdo it.

BTW, looking at my previous letter, it doesn't look at all clear why taking
a metal chloride (like sodium chloride) should do nothing for your acid/base
status, but taking an alkaline salt (like simple sodium bicarbonate) will.
The answer is although NaCl is neutral, actually sodium chloride intake does
have the same effect of acid intake in some ways, and details and just being
hammered out (see http://ajprenal.physiology.org/content/293/2/F521.full).
This may turn out to be yet another reason why too much sodium chloride is
bad for some people.



However, the easier-to-understand fact is the other fact that the body has
to "pay" for every bit of alkali it neutralizes in food, and it does that by
excreting metal bicarbonate in the urine, or the reaction product of these
with sulfuric or phosphoric acids, which are metal phosphates or sulfates
(both more or less neutral in pH, with the phosphate depending on how it is
titrated).

Remember how this works: in the stomach, "proton pumps" pump HCl into the
stomach and an equivalent amount of bicarbonate HCO3- is released into the
blood. These recombine when bicarbonate-rich pancreatic juice neutralizes
stomach acid. The net result is nothing. But if you neutralize some stomach
acid on your own with a metal salt base like sodium bicarbonate or calcium
carbonate, then extra bicarbonate is effectively released into the blood,
where it cannot get back into the gut from pancreatic juice (which is
secreted to keep pH in the small bowel balanced). So that bicarbonate (along
with the metal that goes with it, if it was absorbed) must be gotten rid of
by the kidneys or deposit in your tissues (in the case of calcium). Your
kidneys get rid of bicarbonate by actively secreting bicarbonate into the
urine, which they can only do if there is a cation to go with it (your
kidneys can't just excrete carbonic acid into your urine-- they can excrete
bicarbonate but a soluble ion like sodium has to go with it). The sodium
bicarbonate neutralizes metabolic acids (phosphoric and sulfuric) and that
brings urine pH up.



This is all well and good, if you don't take more base than you make acid
for. If you are taking magnesium, 500 mg (about 42 meq) of a soluble
magnesium salt like citrate is enough to offset a good fraction of your
metabolic acid load, which is of 50-100 meq a day (American diet).
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/242975-overview . This is true even
with no calcium antacid. Remember, your urine doesn't actually need to be
alkaline. For reasons discussed below, it's not good if it is.

Remember, every antacid in the world neutralizes your metabolic acids and
raises the pH of your urine, so why buy a water electrolysis machine to do
it? The answer is that there isn't any good reason. There are reasons not to
take antacids of certain types in quantity as health-aids, however. Sodium
bicarbonate presents a sodium load, and too much alkali (of any kind) can
present pH problems if your diet has too much calcium in it. This happens at
intakes of more than 2000 milligrams of calcium as carbonate, which is 100
milliequivalents (meq) or so-- enough to alkalinize your urine even with a
normal metabolic acid load. That can happen to milk drinkers, but is more
likely to happen to calcium antacid users. When too much base in soluble
form is ingested (enough to make your urine actually alkaline, due to
alkaline load), the base load must cause bicarbonate to be secreted by the
kidneys, and they lose sodium and eventually chloride trying to do this.
That leads to low chloride in the body, a low volume state, and highly
absorbed calcium actually precipitating out into tissues because it has no
where else to go in an alkaline environment.



This state was actually called the "milk-alkali syndrome"
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/123324-overview in the days when milk
and antacids were the mainstays of ulcer treatment. Today it's less often
seen, but the metabolic problems it causes are the same, in theory, any time
so much base is taken that the urine is alkalinized, especially if calcium
supplements of any kind are being also taken. If you take basic magnesium
supplements, you probably will retain enough calcium in your urine that you
won't need to supplement with calcium.



The bottom line for antacids and macromineral supplementation is this: so
long as your kidneys are fine (get basic lab-work) you can take around 300
to 500 mg of magnesium as the citrate, malate or lactate (watch for laxative
effects and cut back if you need to). Take a vitamin D supplement to get
your vitamin D levels in normal range. Take calcium supplements only if
you're trying to correct known calcium bone losses (confirmed by DEXA = DXA
scan) and under treatment by a doctor. That's about as much acid/base care
as you need, unless something else is clearly going wrong with you.



Steve Harris, M.D.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33192