Welcome to Debate Club! Please be aware that this is a space for respectful debate, and that your ideas will be challenged here. Please remember to critique the argument, not the author.
How do you feel about an Alkaline diet?
Options
jharris10252012
Posts: 7 Member
in Debate Club
So I read that adding more alkaline-forming foods will help slow down the leech of calcium from your bones, helping maintain your bone health for years to come. Also, that it will help fight free-radical damage and inflammation while supporting healthy cellular regeneration. Is it worth the extra effort? Are you a believer?
2
Replies
-
I'm a big believer in people eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, etc as these things provide a ton of awesome nutrition (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, probiotics, etc) are consumed in pretty low quantities in what is often referred to as the SAD. I think it's definitely worth it to eat more of these things...but the notion of controlling your body's PH with food is a bunch of nonsense.
Regardless of what you eat, the human body maintains a PH balance within a very narrow range all on it's own and that can't be manipulated with food.
25 -
My mother has silent reflux, also known as laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), and her upper respiratory symptoms do go away when drinking alkaline water and eating an alkaline diet.
However, despite having done this for quite some time, she does have osteoporosis.
Absent a specific medical condition like hers, I'm with cwolfman13.5 -
copied & pasted from The Renaissance Diet 2.0 (authored by Dr. Mike Israetel, Dr. Melissa Davis, Dr. Jen Case, Dr. James Hoffman, Dr. Gabrielle Fundaro, Dr. Alex Harrison, & Paul Salter MS, RD):
Alkaline/Acidic Diets
A certain class of diets proposes to bring your body’s pH into balance. On the face of it, that
sounds great, but like cleanses and detoxes, your body is already very good at regulating this. If
your blood pH is altered by as little as 0.4 (from its normal range of 7.35-7.45 pH), you will die.
For this reason the body maintains its blood acidity very tightly with a host of pH buffers. Certain
gut pH levels can affect the microbiome, but the alkalinity of food does not correlate to these
changes as they arise from byproducts of digestion. Eating alkaline foods or drinking alkaline
water will have zero impact on your gut as stomach acid will neutralize whatever small
alterations in pH might come from food pH immediately upon contact. The pH of your urine can
be altered with foods, but this is due to metabolites produced during the digestion process and
has zero impact on blood or cellular pH levels. Alkaline water and diets are essentially a scam.
There is not even a seed of truth to their claims.
13 -
What you eat doesn't help to cause a flux in regulation of your pH. A nominal shift in either direction could spell disaster. Don't buy into the hype. Like most diet plans that sound interesting, they are concocted to make a profit off unknowledgeable people looking for the "secret" to weight loss or health.
A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
7 -
I agree that eating somefoods probably does help with reducing osteoporosis - high calcium foods.
There is a dietary component.
Alkaline foods - No, I dont think so.3 -
If you want to maintain healthy bones, look for and follow advice of mainstream osteoporosis specialists, who are going to be tuned into the best science on this topic. I guarantee they're not going to recommend a so-called "alkaline diet". (Instead, it's going to be boring, mainstream things like overall good nutrition, getting enough calcium, getting enough vitamin D, limiting alcohol, etc.)
You'll also want to be doing strength-challenging exercise, such as weight training, throughout life, and some impact exercise may also be helpful, as long as you don't overstrain/overtrain.
I have osteoporosis, despite not having a family history of it, and despite having been overweight/obese for most of my adult life (obese people are somewhat less likely to become osteoporotic). Unfortunately, obese people are more likely to get certain types of cancer, and the one I got (at a pretty advanced stage, besides) required medical treatment (chemo & other drugs) that did a number on my bones. If I had been smarter when younger, and stayed active, at a healthy weight, and eating a nutritious diet, I would've greatly reduced the odds of both the cancer and the osteoporosis.
Give it a think. Well-rounded fitness, well-rounded mainstream nutrition, healthy body weight, give you the best odds of long-term good health. Magical diets do nothing to overcome deficiencies in fitness, nutrition, healthy weight.
9 -
One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.13
-
One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
Tells me everything I need to know. It's a woo diet being peddled by a woo proponent.
Also, the human body has various organs to maintain your pH balance on its own. Usually, when it can't regulate it on its own, that means there is a serious problem that you need medical intervention for, not a weird diet featuring alkaline water.
Sounds an awful lot like a panacea... and all of those are snake oil being peddled by charlatans.3 -
One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
I just love when Stephen Colbert satirizes Gwyneth Paltrow / GOOP!
(Beginning is a little NSFW.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0HCStAYMA 8 -
kshama2001 wrote: »One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
I just love when Stephen Colbert satirizes Gwyneth Paltrow / GOOP!
(Beginning is a little NSFW.)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0HCStAYMA
I’ll just leave this here and walk away giggling to myself.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/01/gwyneth-paltrow-goop-vagina-candle-exploded-inferno-sparks4 -
cwolfman13 wrote: »I'm a big believer in people eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, etc as these things provide a ton of awesome nutrition (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, probiotics, etc) are consumed in pretty low quantities in what is often referred to as the SAD. I think it's definitely worth it to eat more of these things...but the notion of controlling your body's PH with food is a bunch of nonsense.
Regardless of what you eat, the human body maintains a PH balance within a very narrow range all on it's own and that can't be manipulated with food.
Yep!!2 -
All in all it's just wasted money on some pseudoscience.
A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition 4 -
Total woo2
-
The acidic environment in the stomach is not a friendly place for food regardless of it's acidic or alkaline properties. Everything that journey's from the stomach to the intestines will be alkaline anyway and why the body regulates it.0
-
One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
Yes! The sentence "Gwyneth Paltrow is a believer in this" is all I need to hear to inform me that I DONT want to follow it.5 -
Speakeasy76 wrote: »One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
Yes! The sentence "Gwyneth Paltrow is a believer in this" is all I need to hear to inform me that I DONT want to follow it.
Yes, the appeal to authority may be a fallacy, but I think the suspicion of quacks is pretty legit.1 -
lynn_glenmont wrote: »Speakeasy76 wrote: »One of the big proponents of the alkaline diets is Gwyneth Paltrow of GOOP. If that isn't enough to turn you off of the diet, this should. She advocates drinking alkaline water every morning, but she also advocates squeezing fresh, organic lemon juice (an acid) into the alkaline water. Know what happens when you mix an acid and a base? You get a neutral result... thus eliminating any so called benefit from drinking what is now, expensive non-alkaline lemon flavored water.
Yes! The sentence "Gwyneth Paltrow is a believer in this" is all I need to hear to inform me that I DONT want to follow it.
Yes, the appeal to authority may be a fallacy, but I think the suspicion of quacks is pretty legit.
One needs to be an actual authority for the appeal to authority fallacy to enter into this.
Which pretty much leaves Gwyneth Paltrow out of that particular logical fallacy.
Is there a “appeal to *newage” fallacy?
*rhymes with sewage.4 -
Back in around 2013, I acquired a very bad case of MRSA. Cut my foot on a shell (was swimming with sharks and stingrays in Belize and got freaked out a bit) and got a tiny red bump on my rear a few days later. Within a week, it was as large as a grapefruit and I couldn't sit down and it was on fire. Doc wanted to put me in the ICU, but I convinced him to lance it, drain it and just go home with antibiotics. Aside from dislocating my knee, definitely the most painful thing I've ever experienced. When a doc says, "this is going to really, really hurt", not a good thing.
Long story short, I ended up having to take six or seven rounds of antibiotics and it would not go away. In desperation (and a bad MRSA infection will make you very desperate), I did the Alkaline Diet. This was after reading about people having MRSA for years or even decades, never being able to get rid of it. Also, MRSA is contagious and can spread to family members. You have to be absolutely sterile when dealing with your wounds. I read that quite a few people were saying they got rid of it from doing the Alkaline Diet. So I tried it. I was off the antibiotics at that time (had been for weeks) and the MRSA went away.
Now, could it have been the antibiotics working after I was done with them? Maybe. I don't know and, quite frankly, don't care. But the MRSA, which kept reappearing on my skin, disappeared and stayed gone. When I've taken blood tests now, it's not detectable, even though they say you never quite get rid of it once you're septic (it enters the blood, which it did).
I honestly just think that not doing any carbs/sugar to feed it would have been likely a huge help.5 -
MikePfirrman wrote: »Back in around 2013, I acquired a very bad case of MRSA. Cut my foot on a shell (was swimming with sharks and stingrays in Belize and got freaked out a bit) and got a tiny red bump on my rear a few days later. Within a week, it was as large as a grapefruit and I couldn't sit down and it was on fire. Doc wanted to put me in the ICU, but I convinced him to lance it, drain it and just go home with antibiotics. Aside from dislocating my knee, definitely the most painful thing I've ever experienced. When a doc says, "this is going to really, really hurt", not a good thing.
Long story short, I ended up having to take six or seven rounds of antibiotics and it would not go away. In desperation (and a bad MRSA infection will make you very desperate), I did the Alkaline Diet. This was after reading about people having MRSA for years or even decades, never being able to get rid of it. Also, MRSA is contagious and can spread to family members. You have to be absolutely sterile when dealing with your wounds. I read that quite a few people were saying they got rid of it from doing the Alkaline Diet. So I tried it. I was off the antibiotics at that time (had been for weeks) and the MRSA went away.
Now, could it have been the antibiotics working after I was done with them? Maybe. I don't know and, quite frankly, don't care. But the MRSA, which kept reappearing on my skin, disappeared and stayed gone. When I've taken blood tests now, it's not detectable, even though they say you never quite get rid of it once you're septic (it enters the blood, which it did).
I honestly just think that not doing any carbs/sugar to feed it would have been likely a huge help.
7
Categories
- All Categories
- 1.4M Health, Wellness and Goals
- 391.3K Introduce Yourself
- 43.4K Getting Started
- 259.6K Health and Weight Loss
- 175.6K Food and Nutrition
- 47.3K Recipes
- 232.3K Fitness and Exercise
- 387 Sleep, Mindfulness and Overall Wellness
- 6.4K Goal: Maintaining Weight
- 8.5K Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
- 152.7K Motivation and Support
- 7.8K Challenges
- 1.3K Debate Club
- 96.2K Chit-Chat
- 2.5K Fun and Games
- 3.2K MyFitnessPal Information
- 22 News and Announcements
- 913 Feature Suggestions and Ideas
- 2.3K MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions