You may have heard about alkaline water, it's everywhere, the newest health trend. So, what's the deal with alkaline water?  Is alkaline water good for your health? Or is it just one of those unnecessary and so-called 'healthy products' that our beloved brands have been delivering to us for their profits? Let's read more about alkaline water, its benefits and bust some myths around the same further in the article.

 

What is Alkaline Water? Is it really worth a sip? 

Alkaline water is essentially just water treated to have a more basic pH level between 8 and 10 instead of water's usual neutral pH level of 7. pH is a logarithmic scale which means if you're drinking alkaline water with pH level 10, you're drinking 1000 times more alkaline water than regular neutral water with pH level 7.

According to certain health gurus, drinking alkaline water can even prevent bone loss and cure cancer. But here's the twist, science doesn't back it up as any kind of miracle drink. The claim is based on an old idea, often known as the acid ash hypothesis which means that a more acidic body leads to health problems like cancer and osteoporosis. So, if an acidic body creates bad health, then making things a little alkaline may prevent all kinds of diseases. So for many years, people have been coming up with 'special' diets and beverages like alkaline water that are supposed to raise your body pH and thereby cure cancer. But there isn't one bodily pH. Human blood has a pH of around 7.4, for example, while muscles are a bit more acidic at a pH of around 6.1, and it's not easy to change the pH levels with what you eat or drink. 

Also Read: Know Your Water - A complete guide to drinking water quality

For example, a study published in 2001 is often touted as showing that special diets can change the internal pH, but it didn't actually find much of an effect. There were 8 volunteers and for them, 2 meal plans were prepared, an acidifying one where the foods had higher amounts of phosphates, drank low pH water, and one with an alkaline diet having loads of calcium and high pH water. But after four days on the alkaline diet, while the subject's pH was noticeably less acidic, the average blood pH only went up zero 0.14 units on average which was less than the participants' daily variation and possibly within the level of error for the instrument that is used to detect it.

Can you change the pH levels in your body? 

The range of pH where your cells work well is really narrow so a high or even a low level can damage your organs and even be fatal and that's why your body has several systems in place for keeping the acid-base levels balanced. For example, it can respond to decreasing pHs by getting rid of one of the most common acid-forming molecules, carbon dioxide, by breathing a little more. But usually, kidneys do the whole work. They take whatever you have too much of in your blood and put it into your pee which is why pH in your urine does change based on what you eat and drink. In that 2001 study, let’s say, the alkaline diet increased the volunteer's urine pH by an average of 1.2 units.

So, if you wanted to change your blood pH by consuming an alkaline drink, you'd have to interfere with your kidneys, which, just to be clear, is a really bad idea. Also, other parts of your body regulate their acidity, either by making acidic or basic compounds naturally or by throwing whatever they don't want into the blood and letting the kidneys take care of everything which means that your urine is pretty much the only bodily fluid you can alter by chugging alkaline water.

But, there's one exception. You do have some external control over the pH of your stomach, at least temporarily, because you can directly neutralize some of the acids there with what you eat or drink. And which is why alkaline water might be effective in dealing with one particular health issue - Acid reflux. 

Acid reflux occurs when acidic stomach juices activate a digestive enzyme known as Pepsin. If there's too much Pepsin, it sloshes up into your oesophagus or other places, it doesn't belong, it attaches to the tissues and causes symptoms like burping and heartburn. An article that was published back in 2012 found that Alkaline water can deactivate Pepsin in your body but that was done on the dishes in a lab, not in an actual human body. Plus, we already have lots of cheap, OTC medicines available for neutralizing stomach acids. That's the whole idea behind antacids.

 

Myths About Alkaline Water: Busted 

The evidence just isn’t there when you look closer at the purported health benefits of drinking alkaline water. Take cancer. For example, some scientists found that tumorous tissues are often more acidic than healthy tissues in the body, which is possibly where people assumed that reducing acidity could cure or might prevent cancer. And if that were the case, you'd think that bladder cancers would be especially susceptible to alkaline diets because urine pH levels can actually be influenced by what we eat. However, a study including over 270 men from Finland in 2005 found that a lower urine pH didn't significantly increase the risk of developing bladder cancer.

Similarly, there are many claims that alkaline water can prevent or help treat osteoporosis, a disease where bones become less dense and more likely to break. That's because your kidneys would be inefficient on the job. Another way your body can slosh out so much acid is to pull calcium and bicarbonate from bone, and less calcium practically would mean less bone mass. However, a study from 2010 found that there's no association between urine pH in a subject's bone mass density or how many bones they broke.

Recommended Read: Bottled Alkaline Water Don’t Believe the Marketing Hype

Should you use alkaline filters? 

So, is using an alkaline filter in your water purifier really worth it? Well, let's be honest here: 

• Alkaline filters are usually just chemical-based filters so, possibly, they may have some side effects. 
• Talking about the benefits of drinking alkaline filtered water, there aren’t any science-backed ones so it's probably just a myth created by companies to sell the products you don't actually need. 
• In India, most locally manufactured alkaline filters are made of very low quality materials/chemicals without any regard to your safety. Definitely stay away from them. 

There hasn't been any proper research showing that an alkaline diet or alkaline water can improve a person's health or well being. However, there probably aren’t many side effects of it either. So if you want to drink alkaline water because you like the taste, more power to you, you'll just have some slightly more expensive pee. 

So, do not buy the products you don't actually need because money doesn't grow on trees. Get a customised water purifier by Peore and get what you actually need without compromising your health or your money!

 

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Credits for this blog content: SciShow