The Alkaline Diet, Explained: The Acid Myth, Alkaline Water, and the pH Miracle That Wasn’t
Your body is not too acidic. It is not slowly dissolving under a meatball sub. And no $12 bottle of alkaline water was ever going to save it.
Still, the idea won’t die. Alkaline water, pH test strips, water ionizers that cost more than a used Subaru: an entire industry is built on one claim, that modern food makes your body acidic and acid makes you sick. In this episode of Your Diet Sucks, Zoë and Kylee trace that claim back to its weirdly literal beginning.
Full Episode Transcript
Kylee Van Horn: Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast that's basic and proud. I'm Kylee Van Horn.
Zoë Rom: And I'm Zoë Rom, back and more basic than ever. Today, we are talking about alkaline diets, alkaline water, pH strips, the whole idea that like your body is too acidic and that is a problem for either maybe your bottled water or fruit lozenges to solve. What's your experience with this? Because I feel like this is something that I will hear rear. It's pseudoscientific little head every so often in my world.
Kylee Van Horn: Does it come up in your world? I'm curious. Like, do you have an athlete ask you something?
Zoë Rom: I would say less athletes than normal non-athlete people in my life who are like, I don't eat eggplant because it's an acidic nightshade. Oh, my God. That's like three myths in one. Don't ruin this party, Zoë. Don't ruin Thanksgiving again.
Kylee Van Horn: I guess I do get it from some athletes. But if I've gone to, like, say I went to the chiropractor.
Zoë Rom: Oh, my God.
Kylee Van Horn: I would say when I first became a dietitian, I was working with some gyms locally.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: And it is definitely pervasive in the gym culture.
Zoë Rom: Yes. Yeah, I think my first really big exposure to seeing it in the world was we used to go to the same chiropractor. And I eventually ended up stopping seeing him because even though I thought he was good at that, his lobby was just like a fucked up graveyard of every bad idea.
He had an alkaline water machine that he was selling. He had several self-published paperback books about like the danger of vaccines. And as soon as I saw those in the waiting room, I was like, I'm out.
I'm done with this.
Kylee Van Horn: I think the hard part about pH, though, is does actually matter in the body. It is very regulated.
Zoë Rom: Right.
Kylee Van Horn: Tightly. But that's kind of the problem. It's like something maybe that people are like, should I be worrying about this or not? Because I know there's a pH thing, but.
Zoë Rom: There is a grain of truth. here that I'm kind of excited to disentangle because I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the history, as I often do, but the science I don't understand quite as much, so I'm pumped to
Kylee Van Horn: get into it. I mean, that's the basis for the episode, right? We wanted to talk about where this idea is coming from, what the science says about alkaline water, alkaline diets, and where our culture is getting it wrong, and if people should really care about this.
Zoë Rom: Okay.
Kylee Van Horn: Have you heard of the vocabulary that's used?
Zoë Rom: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm aware of the strips to measure your urine, the blood. And again, I'm like, people, do not be like measuring your own blood. This is maybe not something we want to DIY is any of this. But I think the thing that is fascinating for me is I feel like this topic fits into a very YDS universe where it sounds very sciencey and it uses the vocabulary and the structure of science, but it just isn't science.
Kylee Van Horn: Physiologically, there are things going on in the body, buffering, and your body's keeping itself in a state of acid and base balance.
Zoë Rom: Right. Essentially, it sounds like there is a kernel of truth here in this acid vat of absolute nonsense.
Kylee Van Horn: What I want to look at closer in this episode is that alkaline diet claims take on the physiology, but then they take it and apply it at the wrong scale to the mass population. What does this kind of actually look like for the average person? Again, that's what we kind of want to explore.
Zoë Rom: Okay, so if someone was going to encounter this ideology in the wild, what does it sound like? Because I feel like I've heard little bits and pieces of this green juice will help you heal from cancer.
Kylee Van Horn: The water. The water,
Zoë Rom: the urine strips. What is the universal theory of everything with the alkaline diet?
Kylee Van Horn: Well, the idea is that modern eating.
Zoë Rom: Oh my God, I'm already triggered.
Kylee Van Horn: Meat, dairy, grain, sugar, coffee, and alcohol.
Zoë Rom: Oh my God, why coffee?
Kylee Van Horn: All the things creates an acidic environment in your body, and then that's where disease thrives.
Zoë Rom: A disease or just the concept of disease?
Kylee Van Horn: Well, this is the hard part, right? A lot of things that people struggle with, their fatigue or weight gain or even more extreme versions like cancer. Like if you've heard the cancer claim, that's where they're turning to an answer. And this sounds like it could be something that could be could help them maybe.
Zoë Rom: Right. With with all the things.
Kylee Van Horn: With all with all the different things. And coffee is the saddest one.
Zoë Rom: Oh, my gosh. I'm so over it. I love acidic coffee also, by the way.
Kylee Van Horn: We know, Zoë.
Zoë Rom: What is the pitch here? What is the solution to having an acidic environment in your body? Quote unquote. I wish people could see just how strongly I was rolling my eyes just now. But we are audio only.
Kylee Van Horn: Alkaline foods and water. So alkaline foods are going to be your fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts.
Zoë Rom: Okay.
Kylee Van Horn: So it's kind of like a vegan diet, maybe.
Zoë Rom: They're all pretty decent foods. Cutting down on processed foods, eating fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts. Those are dope things.
Kylee Van Horn: But you eat those and then magically you neutralize acid and restore your health. And then they build this whole industry on it. So that's where the alkaline water comes in. There's water ionizer machines, pH drops, pH strips. The whole cottage market of products comes out of just saying eat more fruits, vegetables.
Zoë Rom: I think the thing that's really wild about this topic is the Googling for this episode and the research process was fully unhinged because you get all these really dumb Canva Instagram posts about the things that are that you're allowed to eat, the things that you aren't allowed to eat. I feel like the one that blows my mind is lemons.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: Which are acidic. But they're always on the alkaline food list. What?
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: They will dissolve your teeth. How is, what is happening here?
Kylee Van Horn: So wild. Yeah, the claim is that a lemon has that alkalizing effect once it's metabolized, even though it's chemically acidic in a glass.
Zoë Rom: So it's acid when we say it is and then it's not when it's not.
Kylee Van Horn: The claim is kind of doing the work that it needs to do, which is making the framework impossible to disprove. So if a food agrees with the theory, you use its chemical pH.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: If it disagrees, then you use its metabolic effect instead.
Zoë Rom: Oh, my God.
Kylee Van Horn: So you never really lose the argument, which is kind of genius if you're looking at this diet claim.
Zoë Rom: I feel like this is one of those dumb games you would play at summer camp. I'm going through the green glass door where, like, the solution would be you can bring anything that has two consecutive letters. You can bring a kitten, but not a cat.
You can bring a puppy, but not a dog. And like once you know the solution, you're like, oh, that's kind of fun. But when you don't, you're like, this is made up and dumb as hell.
And I am so annoyed right now.
Kylee Van Horn: Is that how you feel right now about the alkaline diet? Yes.
Zoë Rom: I mean, I know this is so not the point of this podcast, but I'm upset at history, if that makes sense. Oh, my God.
Kylee Van Horn: The history behind this diet is insane. Can you get us going?
Zoë Rom: Yeah. So I would say our story really begins around 1912, way back in the day. But, you know, again, not going all the way.
Kylee Van Horn: back in the day as some episodes here.
Zoë Rom: Not Pythagoras or like the Code of Hammurabi. Wouldn't it be wild if on the Rosetta Stone they were like BT-dubs, lemons, rock? You know, Mesopotamia, big on lemons.
So in 1912, these researchers named H.C. Sherman and A.O. Gettler were interested in acid-base balance and nutrition, particularly looking at kidney function.
Hold that in your mind. At the time, there was no long game of trying to sell anyone a $12 bottle of water. It was a legitimate physiological question.
And because this was early 20th century science, the way we studied things was extremely literal. We would just set shit on fire. I really wish I was like a 1912 scientist. You'd be like, I don't know,
Kylee Van Horn: burn it. Just burn it up and see what happens.
Zoë Rom: Burn it. So they would take food and set it on fire. So researchers could burn food completely. And then what they would do is they would examine the mineral ash that was left behind and classify the residue according to whether or not it contained more acid forming or base forming elements.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay, so they're making assumptions then that whatever happens when they burn things down outside of a body are going to be the same in the body.
Zoë Rom: You're getting ahead of me, but yes, the cracks are starting to show. But I've been thinking about this. Yeah, and that's what became known as the acid ash hypothesis.
And this is the sort of the underpinning for those really unhinged categories when you actually think about the food as it functions as a food in the human body and not as a Bunsen burner. So, like you mentioned, meat, acid forming. Grains, also acid forming.
Vegetables, alkaline forming. Fruit, generally alkaline forming. Like lemons, alkaline forming.
So, the famously alkaline lemon. Hmm. Welcome.
Essentially, what was happening is there was not a lemon that just violated the laws of chemistry. Those categories were 100% based on the minerals that were left behind after combustion, not whether eating the food actually produced those byproducts as metabolism. So they make this big logical leap where the researchers began wondering whether the acid or base forming properties of food could have meaningful effects inside the body.
And because the kidneys play a major role in acid-base balance, those were legitimate medical reasons to ask this question. Again, they were trying to think about this in the context of not healthy people of diseased kidneys. So the idea was boiled down to this extremely simple sort of some foods are acid, some foods are alkaline.
Acid equals bad, alkaline equals good. So you can sort of start to see why the wellness industry was like, huh.
Kylee Van Horn: I'm wondering, did they take that and it became something? Or did it sort of take hold in culture and then it got debunked somewhere? Well,
Zoë Rom: so just to like look at the science from a high level, like you mentioned, burning shit outside of the body is extremely different than how metabolism works, right? Intuitively, we know this. Listen to our calorie episode for additional information on why an even more sophisticated machine, the bomb calorimeter, is still imperfect.
So food burnt at extremely high heat means you destroy the organic material. What's left is the mineral ash, which is only one component of that food. The carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins all get burned away.
So what's left is inorganic minerals. Depending on which minerals dominate, researchers could characterize that ash as relatively acid-forming or base-forming. So that's the very flawed logic here.
But the way this happens inside the human body is food gets digested, absorbed, metabolized. It gets broken down into many component different chemical products where then your lungs and kidneys deal with those products and byproducts. So the ash isn't totally meaningless, but there is a ton of nuance here because the minerals and compounds in food really can affect the amount of acid your kidneys eventually need to remove.
So that's why modern researchers can calculate things like potential renal acid load. And that's why your personal chemistry isn't 100 percent decoupled from the diet. But the mistake is looking at the ash and then thinking that that serves as a perfect miniature model of your whole body's pH.
You and I are not just heat burning little furnaces.
Kylee Van Horn: So someone had to debunk this at some point.
Zoë Rom: So in the 1930s, this whole idea of acid versus alkaline eating had really escaped the medical literature. This is when it first became a big diet trend because books and paid dietary services were offering these sort of elaborate alkali forming plans. So for context, the chocolate chip cookie was introduced to America in the early 1930s. And it was by that time that scientists were like, wait, this doesn't feel totally right.
Kylee Van Horn: That's so wild that in 1935 they were having alkali forming meal plans.
Zoë Rom: Yeah. And it actually became popular enough that the American Public Health Association's Committee on Nutritional Problems addressed it in the 1935-36 report. And they were like, we do not like this.
We can see this market is growing extremely quickly. In 1936, they concluded in this report that there wasn't sufficient evidence that acid-forming diets, quote unquote, were inherently harmful. So the first debunk here actually happened in 1935.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay, so we're going from 1935, there was a debunk, and now we, if we jump to modern times here, it's coming back again, which I guess we do see some of those kind of trends. Oh,
Zoë Rom: yeah. I mean, again, if so many of these wellness fads never die, they just sort of spruce up there and they just get upcycled.
Kylee Van Horn: Did it revive or come back at some point earlier than modern times where we're at now?
Zoë Rom: So I would say in the 1960s, researchers again returned to this idea of studying acid-base balance in people, big clue here, with chronic kidney disease. So when your kidneys aren't functioning normally, handling acid does become a real physiological issue. So these researchers became really interested in whether bone minerals might play some role in buffering the accumulated acid.
The operative phrase here is people with diagnosed chronic kidney disease. Because over time, ideas emerging from research on people with impaired kidney function started to get applied a lot more broadly, which is, again, a trend we see again and again of maybe this principle is extremely important for people with impaired metabolic function. But does it mean Gwyneth Paltrow should pick it up and run with it?
Maybe not. So the reasoning was basically could be broken down to if the body has to deal with acid and bone contains lots of minerals, could the body pull minerals from the bone to help neutralize that acid? And if certain foods produce more acid, could eating lots of those foods slowly weaken your bones?
Now we've arrived at the acid ash hypothesis of osteoporosis. I know, it's sort of a super group of pseudoscience, you know?
Kylee Van Horn: Wow.
Zoë Rom: It's like the boygenius of bad ideas. So suddenly this isn't just about kidney disease. It sort of became this theory about what meat, grains, and other acid-forming foods might be doing in the skeleton of otherwise healthy people, because you can kind of sell products to a smaller proportion of unhealthy people in the population. You can definitely make a lot more money selling more products to people who are well, but extremely anxious about their bones.
Kylee Van Horn: We wouldn't know anything about that at all.
Zoë Rom: I've never once bought anything that I didn't need because I was scared. There were observations that made researchers interested enough to keep looking into this hypothesis. And historically, I think this is important context because the alkaline framework has sort of picked up something even more powerful, which is where the sort of disease prevention story gets introduced.
It was no longer just eat vegetables. They're good for you. It was eat these foods because they protect you from acid.
And acid is what causes bad things to happen. This is where things really take off.
Kylee Van Horn: Really take off.
Zoë Rom: Enter Robert O. Young. This was sort of in the early mid-aughts. He was not a licensed physician.
He had a doctorate from a non-accredited correspondence program. So that's three steps below University of Phoenix. You know, this is like getting a PhD from Trump University.
There could not be a more meaningless piece of paper. He did have something enormously useful if you want to sell a invented health theory, which was the universal theory for absolutely everything. So Young developed a framework that he called the New Biology.
And the central idea here was that the human body was, quote, alkaline by design and acidic by function, end quote. Essentially, every single disease could be understood through this single explanation of acid versus alkaline, which is such a good idea if you want to sell shit because...
Kylee Van Horn: It just makes the answer really easy.
Zoë Rom: It makes the answer really easy, and it's always that, right? Because medicine typically requires you have to learn about viruses, bacteria, genetics, the Krebs cycle, immune systems, hormones, blah, blah, blah, environmental exposure, cellular mutations, blah, blah, blah. So boring.
17 million other things. It's complicated. Who has the time?
Young had basically like one spectrum, acid to alkaline, good to bad. And there's nothing wellness culture and pseudoscience loves more than cut and dry, black and white, no nuance. If your hair is brittle or you have cancer, it's probably the grains, right?
Kylee Van Horn: I'm waiting for the product line here. What did he come up with here? Yeah.
Zoë Rom: So then he ended up publishing additional books called One Sickness, One Disease, One Treatment, a title that does at least have the courtesy of being extremely transparent about, like, here is the way that I am extremely wrong. The premise was essentially what it said on the front. There is one disease.
There is one solution. So in 2002, he published the book that really took off and made this idea famous, which was the pH Miracle. Yep.
which always good when the word miracle is being used, because that's definitely a framework that exists and should never be treated to skeptical inquiry. And celebrity culture ended up taking it from there. Gwyneth Paltrow was super into it.
Victoria Beckham, Kate Hudson, Kelly Ripa, which this is the cursed holy trinity of blondes that you should not take health advice from.
Kylee Van Horn: Why didn't any celebrities pick up my book? That's the question.
Zoë Rom: Right. Hey, Gwyneth. I blame the title because isn't it like...
Kylee Van Horn: Practical fueling for endurance athletes. Womp womp.
Zoë Rom: The miracle of carbs. Eat carbs, live forever. So suddenly this theory that had roots in early 20th century experiments, which were just like literally incinerating food, had become taken up by modern celebrity wellness culture.
And here is where things stop being kind of cute and quirky and funny and get extremely serious extremely fast. because Young wasn't just trying to sell books or tell healthy people to eat vegetables, which is not the worst thing in the world. Again, the universal theory of everything, finding one boogeyman, I don't love telling people to eat broccoli.
I'm fine with him so far that you also addressed the complicated socioeconomic and policy proposition baked to their end that no one ever does.
Kylee Van Horn: I'm sure that book addressed that.
Zoë Rom: I'm sure that he, yes, there's some really coherent policy analysis in this guy's work. But the thing that got really bad and really unhinged is this non-doctor started treating extremely ill people, including people who had been diagnosed with cancer at what became known as the pH Miracle Ranch.
Kylee Van Horn: I feel like I heard this on the news or something.
Zoë Rom: Yes, I cannot stress this enough. Never go to a miracle ranch. No miracle ranches.
Kylee Van Horn: What is going on at this miracle ranch?
Zoë Rom: No miracle agriturismo. None of it. Stay off of this fucked up version of yesteryear ranch. He took his interpretation of acid-base theory and took it with...
Kylee Van Horn: Theory.
Zoë Rom: Theory. I mean, theory is an extremely generous term. Yeah,
Kylee Van Horn: that's true.
Zoë Rom: Like, I would honestly say a better word is Mad Libs.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: He took this from the realm of the metaphorical and started practicing it like it was medicine. So he recruited, sought out, and got people with cancer, diagnosed cancer, came to him, and he began administering treatments such as intravenous sodium bicarb.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, like baking soda.
Zoë Rom: Baking soda. Putting it into people diagnosed with cancer. Also, he was super into enemas and colonics, obviously, because people like this always have to get weird with their butts. There were tons of colonics and cleanses and detoxes and saline drips in place of legitimate medical care.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay, so this wasn't even supplemental to what they were getting. They just were like, I'm not doing treatment.
Zoë Rom: He would say, if you leave the pH Miracle Ranch, you're going to die within a week. you have to stay here so we can put green juice into your sphincter.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, no.
Zoë Rom: Yes.
Kylee Van Horn: That's terrible.
Zoë Rom: Oh, it's so tough, man. So he was actually eventually convicted of practicing medicine without a license. People died, by the way.
Just throw that out there is where it gets like way less like theoretical. Remarkably, he was convicted again in 2025 on additional charges involving unlicensed medical treatment and was sentenced to prison. So I think this is a point where the alkaline diet story starts to change character and gets away from kind of the fun romp through quirky history to like people get hurt with this shit, which is why we like to talk about this stuff, because there's a huge difference between buying expensive water because it makes you feel good.
Whatever. If you want to spend $12 on a bottle of water, go with God. Join our Patreon first, please.
but convincing a scared person with limited resources who has cancer that conventional medicine fundamentally misunderstands their disease is murder. Like, I struggle to find a different word for it. Our legal system, it must be acknowledged, did not use that word, my opinion.
Kylee Van Horn: And this guy's still kind of going, right?
Zoë Rom: Well, no, he's in jail.
Kylee Van Horn: He's in jail. He's in jail. Doesn't he have a website still?
Zoë Rom: If you go to the pH Miracle website, to this day it says, tight, we're rebranding and you can enter your email to be alerted when they relaunch.
Kylee Van Horn: Which means that he's planning on relaunching when he gets out of jail.
Zoë Rom: Or he or some other permutation. So again, this shit never dies. The only thing that it would be okay for that website to say is, oh my God, we're so fucking sorry.
Kylee Van Horn: Wow.
Zoë Rom: This is also where, again, there's sort of this veneer of credibility and I want to talk about the Warburg hypothesis. So stay with me. Otto Warburg was a German biochemist in the early 20th century.
Unlike Young, he was an actual doctor and a very real or he was an actual accredited scientist. And in the 1920s, he made a really interesting and prescient observation about cancer cells, which is that they metabolize energy differently from most normal cells. Many cancer cells rely heavily on glycolysis and produce large amounts of lactate even when oxygen is available.
This observation eventually became known as the Warburg effect. This was important, legitimate, good cancer research. Warburg himself went on to develop broader theories about cellular respiration and cancer that did become controversial, but this one has stayed and is acknowledged as a thing to look at.
So you can probably see how people started to connect these dots because you had the words cancer, acid, and Nobel Prize-winning doctor or Nobel Prize-winning scientist Otto Warburg. This is where things get really complicated and important because the questions that Warburg was asking about what happens inside cancer cells are not automatically the same question as what happens when someone eats an acid-forming food,
Kylee Van Horn: right?
Zoë Rom: Your metabolic process on the macro is different than the metabolic processes of cancerous growths. This is kind of where these effed-up historical threads converge, and you have this early scientific attempt to understand the mineral composition of food. You have research into acid balance and kidney disease.
You have a random hypothesis about osteoporosis and research into cancer metabolism and a charismatic guy in an Amazon lab coat promising a universal theory of disease. Add a little bit of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kelly Ripa and bada bing, bada boom, you get this entire industry of alkaline diets, pH drops, test strips, and water ionizers. And they all sort of get bundled up into this extremely compelling story that your body is just too acidic.
The question, I think, is whether that story actually describes what is happening inside of a human body. Where did these grains of truth get spun into a garden of absolute misunderstanding?
Kylee Van Horn: Well, it's wild because, I mean, we mentioned it at the beginning that your body has systems in place your pH within a narrow range. And so blood pH sits in that narrow range roughly from 7.35 to 7.45. Okay. And maybe we should talk about like the acidic and basic, like if we look at pH, what does that look like in a number scale? Because people might not fully understand what that is.
Zoë Rom: Right. What is blood pH actually? What does that actually mean for our health? And if you have a smoothie, is it going to meaningfully change that number?
Kylee Van Horn: So when we look at the pH scale, it's a logarithmic scale that ranges from 0 to 14 and measures the acidity or alkalinity of a liquid solution.
Zoë Rom: Okay.
Kylee Van Horn: And so when we look at the pH of pure water, that's around 7.
Zoë Rom: Okay.
Kylee Van Horn: When we are talking about blood pH, that's where it is supposed to stay within the range of roughly 7.35 to 7.45. And that's a very narrow range. But again, the body is very good at keeping it within that range.
Zoë Rom: That's what kidneys do.
Kylee Van Horn: And if you're outside that range, that's a medical emergency type of situation. Like acidosis or alkalosis, if you've heard of that. That's like a medical thing that happens and it's a life-threatening thing.
Zoë Rom: It's not like I have a little bit of brain fog and some jawline acne.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: You know.
Kylee Van Horn: Yes.
Zoë Rom: Things are not good. You are unwell.
Kylee Van Horn: Exactly.
Zoë Rom: Okay, so eating random shit isn't going to meaningfully change that, right?
Kylee Van Horn: Right. No, if you, you know, if you eat a smoothie or some kind of food, the body's not just going to like randomly get really acidic up to a 14 or something, you know?
Zoë Rom: Instant onset acidosis because you looked at a lemon.
Kylee Van Horn: Exactly.
Zoë Rom: Which I guess technically aren't acidic because when you burn them, what it leaves behind is acidic, which is so many versions of that's not how anything works.
Kylee Van Horn: Right. The system itself is pretty cool. It's called the bicarbonate buffer system. And it's composed of the lungs and the kidneys, but the lungs are also involved. And the lungs adjust how much CO2 you actually breathe off.
Zoë Rom: Right.
Kylee Van Horn: And then the kidneys adjust your acid and base excretion. The lungs piece works in minutes and the kidney piece actually works over hours to days. So it's kind of a longer tailed part of the system.
Zoë Rom: So you have this system with multiple components that are helping you stay in homeostasis. And shockingly, they are not going to be felled by like a meatball sub. So, OK, even if a food theoretically pushed your pH in a certain direction, base acid, your body could adapt, right?
Kylee Van Horn: Yep. So your body has these systems in place to kind of help. It is important, I think, to say that a person with normal lung and kidney function, diet moving your blood pH is not really a thing to think about.
Zoë Rom: OK.
Kylee Van Horn: But we're talking about people that have no issues with lungs and kidneys.
Zoë Rom: And again, that same pattern of people will create these universal theories of everything based on a super like an edge case of, yeah, maybe this is a concern in people with kidney disease. But if you don't have kidney disease, you do not need to behave as if you have kidney disease. Right. You know, for the people who are using things like the pH test strips, what is actually changing? Like, what are people actually measuring if it says the pH of their urine has moved in a certain direction?
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah, I feel like this is the part where we start to get into the products and the things that are being sold.
Zoë Rom: We love selling shit.
Kylee Van Horn: Selling shit and making money off of people.
Zoë Rom: Making money. Because, again, telling people to eat vegetables. Sure, you can probably sell some books. You can sell a coaching program. But if you make them afraid they're not doing it right, then you can sell them a lot more shit on the back end.
Kylee Van Horn: Exactly.
Zoë Rom: And it could come with a monthly subscription. Even better.
Kylee Van Horn: Have you used a urine pH?
Zoë Rom: Never once.
Kylee Van Horn: It's not me either. This one actually does shift based on what you eat. And so this is where people get really confused.
So you actually pee on the strip and then you see a number and it feels like, oh, look, my urine's acidic. But the urine pH reflects that your kidneys are excreting to maintain the blood pH. It's not the blood pH itself.
Zoë Rom: So it'd be like pulling out like a water filter and being like, look, it's dirty. The water is dirty. And it's like, no, the filter is dirty now the water is clean, you're looking at the byproduct of the water being okay. And you're saying this is proof the water's not okay.
Kylee Van Horn: Exactly.
Zoë Rom: Which is not how things work.
Kylee Van Horn: Yes.
Zoë Rom: Basically, the test that people are running is just measuring that the system is working correctly. It's not measuring at all the thing they think it is. Sort of getting back to that idea that connects acid and acidic diets with osteoporosis and bone issues.
We sort of teased things and set them up with a little bit of history. But can we look at the science now? What's going on there?
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah, so this is built off of that hypothesis. And the idea is that a high dietary acid load, mostly from protein and grains, gets buffered by calcium pulled out of your bones and over time causes bone loss.
Zoë Rom: Okay, that sounds like something you could easily test, though, right?
Kylee Van Horn: That's the thing. It's like it is a completely testable claim and it actually got tested.
Zoë Rom: Thank God someone's doing their job.
Kylee Van Horn: Meta-analysis of the actual trial data, including the main work, was done by Fenton and his colleagues over a four-year period of time between 2008 and 2010. And this was a four-part research trial sort of thing. They didn't find any supportive effect of dietary acid load or alkaline supplementation on bone density or fracture risk. And in fact, one of his papers actually looked at phosphorus specifically and showed the opposite effect.
Zoë Rom: Ah, that's so interesting.
Kylee Van Horn: So bone strengthening, essentially.
Zoë Rom: Right.
Kylee Van Horn: Instead of osteoporosis claims that were being made. And this is kind of a good example of science working the way that it's supposed to. So this mechanism that seems kind of plausible got tested and then the data didn't support it. And it's also then a different story compared to Robert Young and his crazy.
Zoë Rom: Yes. Yeah. Because there's sort of like two tiers of stuff that I feel like we're always talking about on the show, which is the totally implausible mechanism of like, this is vibes.
Like there is no part of this. This is real. This is like all fanfic about your kidneys and none of it matters.
Then there's the slightly more, I think, like insidious and dangerous form of things is when you have a plausible mechanism, sort of like autophagy and yeast cells. instead of just saying, yeah, we have some interesting trial data in house flies about autophagy and longevity or whatever. So there is a plausible mechanism.
However, we haven't seen this in people. It's always good to know where that line is. But so often what wellness culture does is it takes a plausible mechanism because it's basically like you have this baked in pretty good sounding narrative, just science 101.
It's one of those things that sounds intuitively true. And there's this narrative baked in. But when you pressure test it, they just don't hold up, but wellness never pressure tests it. And often the simplest wrong version is a lot more narratively appealing and easy to remember than the like more complicated.
Actually, no, drinking sparkling water doesn't pull calcium from your bones or whatever. Can we talk about the cancer bit? Because this is the one sort of like I alluded to earlier that I feel like has, I don't want to say like a grain of truth, but it seems like there's some truth adjacent properties here, but people could get really hurt, right?
Kylee Van Horn: Yes, and there is no credible evidence that diet meaningfully shifts your systemic pH or any credible evidence that alkalizing diets or treatments treat or prevent cancer. And even, what's his name, the guy, the Warburg guy.
Zoë Rom: Otto Warburg, shout out.
Kylee Van Horn: He never said that any of the findings that he had were supportive of making this whole industry about alkalizing diets and cancer.
Zoë Rom: Because he was like, yeah, we can see that there's acid around these tumors. That doesn't mean the acid caused the tumors. The tumors produced the acid because of how they work. So it's sort of putting the metabolic cart way in front of the horse in a pretty dangerous way.
Kylee Van Horn: We're not saying like what you eat for breakfast then is going to, you know, prevent cancer and shift that pH.
Zoë Rom: Yes. Thinking about this for athletes, I'm imagining, you know, we've already sort of teased lactate, acid. These are all real things. I'm curious if there are any different considerations for athletes and active folks here.
Kylee Van Horn: A lot of our listeners are training maybe for endurance things. So I guess when we're talking about this, I'm chatting more maybe to the endurance space on the athlete side of things, especially if we're doing something high intensity.
Zoë Rom: Right.
Kylee Van Horn: So anaerobic glycolysis in working muscles produces hydrogen ions and other byproducts that lower pH locally in the muscle and in the blood around it. It's called exercise-induced metabolic acidosis.
Zoë Rom: And that's why your muscles get that burning feeling when you're exerting. People have always talked about, like, this creates lactic acid, which is one of my least favorite 1980s sort of myths about how anything works. No one asked for this, but I'm going to give people a fact check anyway, I feel like people just really misunderstand lactic acid, quote unquote, because now we understand it as lactate, a byproduct of this positive metabolic process.
Right. And like one of the reasons we train is to better teach your body how to use that lactate as fuel and keep the cycle going at a more sustainable effort. Lactic acid isn't a bad thing that makes you like fall apart during a marathon.
Kylee Van Horn: Fall down.
Zoë Rom: Yeah, fall down. Grab your calf. The amount of conversations I've had to just excuse myself from as like a running coach just to be like, these people are not ready for my spiel on lactate like at 730 in the morning in line at Starbucks.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, no.
Zoë Rom: I think the other thing that I'm interested about is I feel like this does go towards this idea about using sodium bicarb, a.k.a. baking soda or other supplements to try to like buffer that. Right. How does that play into this?
Kylee Van Horn: Sodium bicarbonate does work as an extracellular buffer.
Zoë Rom: Ding, ding, ding. We have a measurable process. Yes, finally.
Kylee Van Horn: There is evidence for it helping in high-intensity efforts, roughly in the 1 to 10-minute range, though. That's a key point because I think right now we're seeing a lot of use of it in longer endurance events. Yes,
Zoë Rom: just because your favorite pro athlete is slurping bicarb during their 100-mile race does not mean you should. Think of your shorts. Think of the shorts.
Kylee Van Horn: That's the crazy part to me because if you really look into it, there's no evidence for longer endurance events. using bicarb products.
Zoë Rom: Counterpoint, what if I want to spend $75 every time I run?
Kylee Van Horn: We kind of already alluded to it, but people aren't just taking baking soda and downing that.
Zoë Rom: Well, they used to.
Kylee Van Horn: Well, they used to, yes. Or if you're the guy giving IV infusions. Yeah,
Zoë Rom: exactly. Which I'm like...
Kylee Van Horn: Well, I don't know because he's infusing it. So it's not going in the digestive system.
Zoë Rom: People have theorized that baking soda or sodium bicarbonate would work this way in the body for athletes. to have guys in the 60s and 70s doing track workouts and trying to guzzle baking soda, which
Kylee Van Horn: anyone might have been successful, but others.
Zoë Rom: Anyone who's ever been like 11 years old and made a science fair volcano knows where this is going. Once you introduce sodium bicarb to an acidic environment like vinegar and or your stomach, it creates a science fair volcano.
Kylee Van Horn: An explosion.
Zoë Rom: It creates an explosion and honestly 50-50 which end it comes out of, which is kind of the fascinating thing. So back in the day, people even used to call it soda doping because they were like, we know that you can get a performance benefit if you're somehow able to smuggle it past the stomach. For a while, it was big to use these lotions and creams that didn't really have a super strong body of evidence behind them. But now it's sort of... So now it's evolved to Maurten
Kylee Van Horn: bicarb. Yes. And I'm naming Maurten because they are the ones that have the patented bicarb system.
Zoë Rom: The like goo system where it wraps the sodium bicarb in a little jelly sphere. In a hydrogel.
Kylee Van Horn: But it still is risky. Anecdotally, I have people that still are there trying it or using it, and they're still having GI issues. So I'm not saying don't use it, but I'm also saying you still need to use caution when using it.
Zoë Rom: It's not without risks. Consider what the desired outcome is. And if it's winning a 5K, that's very different than trying to use it for...
Kylee Van Horn: But you still might not if it doesn't work for you, right? Correct. But the point is, is that supplement is something that could potentially give certain people a performance advantage.
Zoë Rom: Cool. So what is the other sort of mechanism we're looking at here when it comes to the other supplement that might be advantageous to athletes?
Kylee Van Horn: Beta alanine.
Zoë Rom: Ooh, okay.
Kylee Van Horn: So this supplement can raise intramuscular carnosine, which acts as an intracellular buffer.
Zoë Rom: Okay.
Kylee Van Horn: The evidence there is for more repeated high-intensity efforts.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: And here's the kicker is that it can take weeks of loading, like a loading process to build up. And then it comes with a really weird side effect, like this tingling sensation that can come as like a byproduct of it called paresthesia.
Zoë Rom: That doesn't sound amazing.
Kylee Van Horn: Zoë, have you tried it?
Zoë Rom: So the good news is, is you have to take a shit ton of it for quite a while. The bad news is you might go totally numb and tingling during your event. Actually,
Kylee Van Horn: I've never tried it myself. And I don't think maybe a couple athletes that I've worked with have used it.
Zoë Rom: I tend to be pretty risk averse when it comes to supplements. And again, given that I compete at the 100 mile distance, it's kind of like my version of a performance. That's high intensity. Yeah. My version of a performance enhancing drug is just like mashed potatoes.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, I love that.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: Can you market your own version of mashed potatoes?
Zoë Rom: Performance enhancing spuds.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah. They have that. Oh, there was like a. Sorry.
Zoë Rom: Spuds suck.
Kylee Van Horn: Side note, but there was this one company that was trying to make like a mashed potato gel or like food thing.
Zoë Rom: It was like a food pouch. Yes, I'm aware.
Kylee Van Horn: But I'm kind of like, why not just buy instant mashed potatoes?
Zoë Rom: Well, so I tried both, by the way. And the cost of the prepackaged, like the sort of pre-mixed one, they tasted better. But I was also like, I'm not out here to like have a buffet.
Like I'm here to just inject potato into my digestive system. Like, I'm not like, I love that this one has hints of rosemary and thyme. Yes, when I'm running at 12,000 feet, I really want to make sure that I get those subtle herbaceous notes in my endurance fuel.
Kylee Van Horn: I'm just thinking about what if that is why you ran ultras, though. I really want to try all the sports nutrition.
Zoë Rom: I mean, honestly, when people are like, I don't like the way this tastes. I'm like, what are you tasting? I basically just unhinge my jaw and swallow.
I'm not like, you know, I'm getting that like this one clearly has very long legs and it actually has a very tannic aftertaste. It's like, what are you doing, you dumb sugar sommelier? Just eat the food.
Get over yourself.
Kylee Van Horn: Dang, that's a new.
Zoë Rom: All of that's to say those things are real, like beta alanine and sodium bicarb. There are measured things that it does in the body that are backed by sports science. But I do think that it's important to acknowledge that neither of them is saying to drink water that costs, you know, $12 a pop because a machine meaningfully changed its pH.
And it'll change the pH of, again, your entire body. These are pretty specific systems, right? Like it's in the muscles.
Kylee Van Horn: And it's a performance-specific thing.
Zoë Rom: And it's acute.
Kylee Van Horn: Yes, exactly. And we are not saying it's going to cure diseases by staying alkaline all day.
Zoë Rom: I have a disease of sucking at 5Ks, maybe, which that is my disease. That is what I have. I have a chronic case of sucking at 5K. It's chronic. You can donate to my GoFundMe. So I think it's just interesting to consider and sort of look at these things and put it up against some of the other sort of mechanisms we're looking at, because it looks like a good portion of this is just marketing.
Kylee Van Horn: There's a lot of marketed products, and then there's the sports performance supplement side of things.
Zoë Rom: So I want to talk about alkaline water because I feel like this is one of the things I personally run into. I have not seen an alkaline diet or an alkaline protein bar at the grocery store, but I've definitely seen and actually in researching this episode was made aware that I have accidentally bought alkaline water.
Kylee Van Horn: You know what I can picture right now? And I don't even know what the brand is, but it has like a black label.
Zoë Rom: Essentia.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, Essentia. That's what it is.
Zoë Rom: Which is what they sell at the Grand Junction Airport where I fly out of a lot. So I'm like, oh, that's why. It costs $11 to get a pH water. So,
Kylee Van Horn: yeah, this one's interesting because I feel like it ties into everyone, right? All of our fitness enthusiasts, the general pop sports people.
Zoë Rom: I straight up got in a, I wouldn't, fight is maybe too strong a word.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, no.
Zoë Rom: I got into a heated discussion with two women at the Aspen grocery store because they were looking specifically for alkaline water. And they couldn't decide on the brand and the front. Oh, no. I was honestly trying to find Cheetos.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: And they were like one aisle over and I popped my head up over the sort of low shelf. I was like, by the way, that doesn't do shit. And they were like, yeah, it does.
It changes the blood. And it was like this whole thing. And eventually they were just like, fine.
And ended up buying the alkaline water and walking away. But I was, well, actually.
Kylee Van Horn: So Essentia water, that's one. And then the other exposure to this is Kangen water.
Zoë Rom: Kangen water.
Kylee Van Horn: Have you been exposed to, it's a brand of alkaline water. water that's like put through this ionizer made by a company called Enagic?
Zoë Rom: Enagic? I mean, all of these brands, like the name is always like... I don't know. Yeah, some obscure name that like
Kylee Van Horn: you're like, should I?
Zoë Rom: Combines energy and magic. Yeah,
Kylee Van Horn: exactly. Oh, perfect. That's where they came up with it. Probably.
Zoë Rom: Which like, okay, great. Two fake things, put them together. You basically get a fake unicorn or a fake centaur.
Kylee Van Horn: So have you been exposed to this, Zoë? Oh my God, absolutely.
Zoë Rom: Definitely the chiropractor's office. I've definitely had random people around town give you the MLM pitch on this. And I feel like it's basically the pseudoscience. But wait,
Kylee Van Horn: it's an MLM.
Zoë Rom: It's an MLM.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay.
Zoë Rom: Yes.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay.
Zoë Rom: Yeah. It's like the pseudoscience version of a timeshare, but for your blood acidity.
Kylee Van Horn: These things are insanely priced.
Zoë Rom: How much are they?
Kylee Van Horn: I was first exposed to this at the gym that I was working at.
Zoë Rom: I would literally rather talk to a Jehovah's Witness than someone trying to sell me expensive ass water. Because at least Jehovah's Witnesses will help you clean your kitchen. They will engage in good faith debate with you. These water grifters are not good debaters and I don't respect them.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah. So the guy would come to the gym. He would have his Kangen water and he would give samples of it out. He's considered a distributor. So he would try to sell the actual machines, which run from thirty five hundred dollars to eighty five hundred dollars plus for commercial stuff.
Zoë Rom: Oh, my God.
Kylee Van Horn: Well, it's the machine. So I mean, technically, you could be like water,
Zoë Rom: which I don't want to brag, but my fucking sink does that. for free.
Kylee Van Horn: They're earning commissions on the machines that they're selling to other people. So the actual pitch itself was not about the water. It's about selling the machine.
Zoë Rom: So what does this machine actually do mechanically because the time that I've had this pitch to me, the person trying to give me the hard sell, clearly didn't have their head wrapped around really any element of science. Like, I don't think they could have told you what acid meant.
Kylee Van Horn: The machine itself uses electrolysis. So you run tap water over electrically charged plates and it splits it into two streams, an alkaline stream that's marketed for drinking and an acidic stream that's marketed for cleaning surfaces or skincare.
Zoë Rom: That is actually so smart. I mean, obviously it's dumb as hell and fake, but that is actually so smart that it's like, now that we've shocked this water, here's the water that goes inside of you and here's the water that goes outside of you.
Kylee Van Horn: The electrolysis part, though, is actual chemistry. So that's not fake. It does change the water's pH and mineral content before it actually hits your glass. So that's not, it's not live.
Zoë Rom: That's real.
Kylee Van Horn: That is real.
Zoë Rom: So where does it get less real? Because again, I'm very skeptical of a machine that's like, I will cure cancer and also be skincare.
Kylee Van Horn: Well, they're saying that then if you drink this, it's changing your body's pH. So this is kind of where we already went through that part about why this is not a problem with somebody with normal lungs and kidneys.
Zoë Rom: Yeah. Basically, it's an $8,000 Culligan that is totally subverted by the existence of kidneys.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah, and then there's the part that's even more of a problem before it gets to your bloodstream.
Zoë Rom: Ooh, double debunk.
Kylee Van Horn: Coming from your stomach.
Zoë Rom: Ooh.
Kylee Van Horn: So your stomach sits at a pH of around 1.5 to 3.5.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: And that's one of the most acidic places in your entire body.
Zoë Rom: Yeah, dog.
Kylee Van Horn: And it exists to specifically break things down.
Zoë Rom: It's its whole job.
Kylee Van Horn: So whatever pH the water came in at, it's kind of getting up. overwhelmed instantly.
Zoë Rom: It's awesome.
Kylee Van Horn: So if you buy that nine, well, no, you said it was $11 Essentia water at the Grand Junction airport.
Zoë Rom: I don't know if they're shipping this shit through the Strait of Hormuz or what, but I do feel like it's getting more expensive.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah, so it's either that or you get the $5,000 water machine. They're coming into the same stomach acid.
Zoë Rom: So this marketing claim does not survive digestion whatsoever.
Kylee Van Horn: Nope, doesn't even make it past the first stop.
Zoë Rom: Yeah, I guess technically,
Kylee Van Horn: If we wanted to be generous,
Zoë Rom: we're like, it gets through your mouth. Great. Love that. So step one and a half, it's all over.
Kylee Van Horn: Yeah.
Zoë Rom: Incredible. I think one of the arguments is that there's like a taste and texture thing. People will claim that it like tastes better, tastes more refreshing, etc. What's going on there?
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, God. I'm a water snob.
Zoë Rom: You're like a water sommelier. Actually, this is the thing. Like there are people that will taste tap water and like give feedback on their tap water.
Kylee Van Horn: Maybe I need to get involved in that.
Zoë Rom: Well, there was actually... The level of pettiness here is extremely relatable, but you know the water brand Fiji? They made like a dumb ad campaign a few years ago that basically boiled down to like, suck it, Cleveland.
Our water is better than you because it's from Fiji. So the town of Cleveland paid for professional water tasters to taste municipal water from Cleveland versus Fiji bottled water. And all of them were like, the Cleveland stuff slaps.
Kylee Van Horn: Oh, my God. Yeah. That's hilarious.
Zoë Rom: Which is hilarious. Point Cleveland. You know,
Kylee Van Horn: I am a water snob and meaning that taste really affects me. And if I drink water out of our sink in Carbondale, I'm like, oh, this is disgusting.
Zoë Rom: No, I love that. I always feel bad when I eat something like I'll have a meal with someone. I'll be like, nom, nom, nom.
And they're like, wow, that was so salty and gross. Right. And I'm like, oh, yeah, totally.
I definitely tasted exactly what you're tasting. I just had to eat it so fast to get over to get it over with. I do not have a very refined palate, by the way.
Kylee Van Horn: I feel like I have a picky palate.
Zoë Rom: I love that for you.
Kylee Van Horn: This is probably not a good thing.
Zoë Rom: This is why we're a good team.
Kylee Van Horn: This legitimately can change the taste of the water. But also, is it worth that price tag? You know, so when people taste the Kangen water, they describe it as softer or smoother.
Zoë Rom: I'm really struggling to come to terms with the fact that my best friend is someone that has strong takes on water taste. That's like being like, I'm an expert in beige.
Kylee Van Horn: But I'm not saying that it's reversing disease. And that's also like the dude with the whiteboard that's trying to sell you the machine.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: That's what he's saying.
Zoë Rom: You need to buy this $8,000 water vibrator so that you don't get cancer and also it tastes better.
Kylee Van Horn: Yes.
Zoë Rom: I feel like it would almost be better if they're like, and it tastes like shit, but don't worry, it's good for you. They're like, it definitely cures cancer and you'll probably like it a little more.
Kylee Van Horn: And it tastes like rotten eggs. Yeah,
Zoë Rom: exactly. Okay, so I feel like the honest version here is if you follow the money, you have this several thousand dollar machine. Like it's basically a Tesla that you run water through sold through an MLM structure for a health claim that is not backed up by any level of evidence.
Kylee Van Horn: Exactly. And it's the same thing with like we already covered the pH strips, but like those those drops that you can get the pH drops. Those are like a smaller scale kind of thing.
Zoë Rom: I love even like within the like pseudoscience here, there's like products that kind of negate each other. They're like, you definitely need this $8,000 machine or these $4 drops or this $12 bottle of water.
Kylee Van Horn: It's like if you don't want to commit, you can just get the lower tier thing.
Zoë Rom: Yeah. It's like, wait, is that that kind of seems like it's not the same thing. Those things like really don't seem like they're the same.
Kylee Van Horn: But people think, they're like, well, whatever I get, I'm managing this pH in my body with this thing that I'm spending money on.
Zoë Rom: This thing that humans have never had to worry about for a single second of our millennia of evolution until 1912 is now my number one health priority. Kind of amazing. I love that.
That's amazing. Humans are incredible. So where do we land with all of this? What's the takeaway?
Kylee Van Horn: Might not like it.
Zoë Rom: All right, I'm bracing myself. Do I have to put aside like Bowie's college fund to buy one of these water shockers?
Kylee Van Horn: Kangen water shocker for Bowie.
Zoë Rom: Yeah.
Kylee Van Horn: Okay, so the blood pH is real. However, it is tightly regulated in people that have normal kidney and lung function.
Zoë Rom: Amazing.
Kylee Van Horn: It's not something that diet, whether you consider your diet good or bad, is going to meaningfully change things in a certain direction with your pH.
Zoë Rom: Yep.
Kylee Van Horn: Trying to control dietary pH also isn't going to affect your bone health or cure cancer.
Zoë Rom: Ha!
Kylee Van Horn: Got him! So if you haven't gotten that one yet. And then if you encounter a Kangen water salesperson, I'd recommend running far, far away unless you're like me and you, you know, want to spend thousands of dollars for the taste.
Zoë Rom: We're doing so well here at YDS. I think it's time for us to take a break and drink some water out of our 12,000. I'm just going to keep increasing the cost. Our $12,000 water shocker.
Where did the alkaline diet come from?
In the early 1900s, scientists burned food and sorted it by the ash left behind. That is how the lemon, a fruit that can strip tooth enamel, ended up on every “alkaline foods” list. A real question about kidney disease got stretched into a theory about everyone’s bones. Decades later it became a theory of all disease. Then came a bestselling book, a celebrity fan club and a “pH Miracle” ranch where very sick people got hurt.
Can food or alkaline water change your blood pH?
Not in any way that matters. Your lungs and kidneys hold blood pH between roughly 7.35 and 7.45 whether you eat a kale salad or a cheeseburger. If you leave that range, you are in a hospital, not a wellness slump. Alkaline water also has a bigger problem: it meets stomach acid at a pH of around 2 before it gets anywhere near your blood. Those urine strips aren’t catching a problem. They’re watching your kidneys do their job.
Kylee also covers what the research says about acid load and bone health. She breaks down the two buffering supplements with real evidence for athletes, sodium bicarbonate and beta-alanine, and where that evidence runs out. If the bomb calorimeter part makes you curious, our calorie counting episode covers why burning food in a lab tells you less than you’d think.
Bottom line: does alkaline water work?
Alkaline water can taste different. It cannot change your body’s pH, protect your bones or treat cancer. Drink whatever water you like. Your kidneys already handle the rest for free.
Want more of this? Our Patreon is where the YDS community hangs out, with bonus episodes, live Q&As with Kylee, and a lot of people who also yell at the alkaline water aisle.
References
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Fenton, T. R., & Huang, T. (2016). Systematic review of the association between dietary acid load, alkaline water and cancer. BMJ Open, 6(6), e010438. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010438
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