quas wrote:Forgot to give the proper link:

http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ReaderQ ... m#alkaline

ScholasticSpastic wrote:I sincerely hope you're not serious about this idiot. Alkaline water isn't oxygen reductive period. Not with soap. Not with baking soda. Not with naturally occurring minerals from the spring between Minerva's thighs. Not anywhere at all.

Kurzweil has said that soap/baking soda water is not oxygen reductive. Water that contains minerals in it, can be ionised (in a process similar to electrolysis?) such that it becomes alkaline water that is oxygen reductive.

So what? Why should I care what Kurzweil says about chemistry when I have several big fucking chemistry textbooks which counter his claims?

The autodissociation of water is an interesting thing. Learn about it. Please understand that water doesn't care what proton acceptor you add to it, the result is the same. Drop in some lye, or some MgO, or some baking soda and you get exactly the same fucking anion: OH-. So any claim about the selectivity of the process by which anions in water are derived is going to be bullshit to the same extent that homeopathy is bullshit. All bases everywhere are identical in terms of capacity to produce OH- in aqueous systems (this is not a claim that all bases will produce the same number of molar equivalencies of OH-, it's a claim that OH- is the anion they produce). I suppose we could move into organic-phase solvent systems where some really cool shit becomes possible, but I would advise against drinking organic solvents.

At least, not any more so than anything else with an abundance of negative charge.

Such as?

Such as, as I mentioned above, anything basic added to water. Anything at all with the capacity to scavenge protons from its environment will produce OH- anions and it makes no difference to the quality of the OH- which base you use. They're marketing an electric device which doesn't do anything baking soda doesn't do, and then providing bullshit hand-waving explanations for why it's better than baking soda. There is only one real reason it's better than baking soda: People are willing to pay more for it because it sounds exotic and scientific- even though anyone with a modicum of chemistry background would laugh in their lying scamming faces.

Damn you with your knowledge, facts and textbooks - you enemy of the freemarket you!!

THWOTH wrote:Damn you with your knowledge, facts and textbooks - you enemy of the freemarket you!!

Da, Komrades! Vniz s svobodnogo rynka !

The dumbasses from the link wrote:We ran tap water with pH 7.1 from our home faucet into the device and found that the water coming out of the alkaline outlet had a pH of 9.5 (indicating very alkaline), while the water from the acid outlet measured pH 4.5 (indicating very acidic).

This would appear to indicate that their much vaunted water alkalination device is little more than an over-priced hydrolysis setup. In which case, yes, they're getting more basic water out at the cathode and more acidic water out at the anode due to the half-reactions:

Wikipedia wrote:Cathode (reduction): 2 H2O(l) + 2e− → H2(g) + 2 OH−(aq)
Anode (oxidation): 4 OH−(aq) → O2(g) + 2 H2O(l) + 4 e−

(I copied from Wikipedia because I was too lazy to write it out myself)
As you can see, the high pH at the cathode (what the fucking wankers call the alkaline outlet) is due to the presence of OH- anion which, coincidentally, is exactly the same as what you get from adding baking soda. So the fuckers are blatantly lying when they claim otherwise.

If 4.5 is 'very acidic', then I guess these guys don't know much about stomach acidity.

A mate of mine once made the mistake of indulging at a college beer festival and then 'going back to work and falling asleep' on his keyboard. When the keyboard still failed to work after he'd tried to remove the evidence, he owned up and we opened it to see if it was salvageable, to find a significant absence of copper tracks.

It was a pity he didn't fall asleep on his PC keyboard. They were only somewhat expensive in those days.
A new VAX keyboard was seriously expensive.

tolman wrote:If 4.5 is 'very acidic', then I guess these guys don't know much about stomach acidity.

To save time, I've only picked on a selection of their idiocies. The link quas provided is a rich source of weasel words, logical failures, and factual misrepresentations that could keep us busy exercising our skeptical thinking muscles for days to come.

Lemons have a pH of about 2, or more than 100 times more acidic than what they're calling "very acidic." (Recall that the pH scale is logarithmic, so each whole number change represents a 10x difference in pH.)

ScholasticSpastic wrote:
To save time, I've only picked on a selection of their idiocies. The link quas provided is a rich source of weasel words, logical failures, and factual misrepresentations that could keep us busy exercising our skeptical thinking muscles for days to come.

Sure, there are many more things to explore from there.

Lemons have a pH of about 2, or more than 100 times more acidic than what they're calling "very acidic." (Recall that the pH scale is logarithmic, so each whole number change represents a 10x difference in pH.)

Strangely though, they view the ingestion of lemon as "alkaline", because fresh fruits and vegetables will always be alkaline once consumed inside the body.

By the way, I have read of reports of people drinking lemon or lime juice on an empty stomach to treat gastric/heartburn problems. If I am not mistaken, this goes against the conventional way of treatment where you are supposed to consume alkaline such as milk of magnesia. Speaking of milk (as in dairy milk), even though it's alkaline, once consumed it becomes acidic inside the body, and thus it's not it is not advisable to drink milk to treat/relieve heartburn. What do you think about all these bizarre claims?

quas wrote:

Lemons have a pH of about 2, or more than 100 times more acidic than what they're calling "very acidic." (Recall that the pH scale is logarithmic, so each whole number change represents a 10x difference in pH.)

Strangely though, they view the ingestion of lemon as "alkaline", because fresh fruits and vegetables will always be alkaline once consumed inside the body.

This is patently bullshit.

By the way, I have read of reports of people drinking lemon or lime juice on an empty stomach to treat gastric/heartburn problems. If I am not mistaken, this goes against the conventional way of treatment where you are supposed to consume alkaline such as milk of magnesia. Speaking of milk (as in dairy milk), even though it's alkaline, once consumed it becomes acidic inside the body, and thus it's not it is not advisable to drink milk to treat/relieve heartburn. What do you think about all these bizarre claims?

I've heard reports of people practicing cannibalism by eating bread. I think these claims make just as much sense. Milk, by the way, is acidic, not alkaline. The average pH of milk ranges from 6.5 to 6.7 if the milk is derived from healthy animals. Deviations above or below this range are indicative of health problems in the cow. Please accept that the claims you are sharing have no basis in rational thought, and represent the fabrications of con-persons. You are welcome to allow yourself to be conned all you like.

I am unable to find any documentation regarding the effects of lemon juice on gastric function from a reliable source- but you're right, these claims are rampant. Just like chiropractic, homeopathy, and acupuncture. Probably, given that lemon juice and stomach acid fall within the same pH range, there is little effect on the overall acidity of the stomach. You know, from a not-peddling-woo perspective. There is a very slim probability that acetic acid, being a weak acid, might form a buffer system in the stomach, moderating a severe pH drop due to overproduction of the mineral acid HCl at the proton pumps. I would need to see information from a reliable source to conclude that this is so, however. Good luck wading through the bullshit to find it.

I think I've seen water ionisers peddled in a shop here once, it did trigger my bullshit sense at the time but I never looked into it. Cheers for the posts on ant-oxidants, rather interesting.

ScholasticSpastic wrote:I am unable to find any documentation regarding the effects of lemon juice on gastric function from a reliable source- but you're right, these claims are rampant.

It's not just lemon juice, lime juice has been recommended for gastric treatments as well. I remember reading it in a magazine article, and it was recommended by a German doctor. If I recall correctly, I don't think he was selling a water ioniser or recommending an alkaline diet. He only claimed that there was a chemical in lime juice that would protect gastric lining.

ScholasticSpastic wrote: Some will be good for you- and your safest bet is to stick with the ones a healthy body makes on its own- while others can be carcinogenic or harm you in other ways.

The body makes its own antioxidant? First time I've heard about it, can you elaborate a little bit on what these are and how these work?

To sum up: Eating foods high in antioxidants probably doesn't help you out all that much. This is being borne out by the largely equivocal results obtained via double blind studies and meta-analyses. It is simply another "super-food" myth being promulgated by those marketing fad diets to the credulous for obscene amounts of ill-gotten gain.

You are saying a diet high in fruits and vegetables is useless. You are also saying that vitamin C supplements are useless. Is that it?

quas wrote:You are saying a diet high in fruits and vegetables is useless. You are also saying that vitamin C supplements are useless. Is that it?

There are too many variables, quas. You don't really want to believe that dietary strategies work systematically across all individuals. Biochemistry clearly varies enough to make this a betting man's game for the winning hand, and you not only don't know the odds, you can't work out what they are, yet. When would a diet high in fruits and vegetables be demonstrated beneficial to everyone? After 90 years, or something? Most people die of something else.

quas wrote:
The body makes its own antioxidant? First time I've heard about it, can you elaborate a little bit on what these are and how these work?

The primary antioxidant produced by our bodies is glutathione. I remember doing sketches of the molecule in biochemistry because I thought it was pretty. Wikipedia has a fair bit to say about glutathione if you're interested.

You are saying a diet high in fruits and vegetables is useless. You are also saying that vitamin C supplements are useless. Is that it?

I'm saying a diet high in fruits and vegetable is probably useless as a source for antioxidants. It is probably still a very good idea to eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables because they're more than just little packages of antioxidants: they also contain essential vitamins (which we need for way more reasons than possible antioxidant activity), minerals, and insoluble fiber.

There are sometimes benefits to dietary supplements. Not everyone derives those benefits from taking them, however, and there's a growing body of evidence that the claims made by supplement manufacturers are bullshit. Vitamin C is unlikely to have any antioxidant activity left by the time it is absorbed by your body for reasons I've already gone into. We probably still need vitamin C, but not because it's an antioxidant. And certainly not in the megadoses recommended by supplement manufacturers.

These "nutritionists" are as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. Eat a reasonable diet, in reasonable amounts, avoid over-processed foods, cut down on refined sugars, and never drink water. Fish fuck in it.

To be fair, nutritionist isn't a protected or defined term in the US. They are wannabe dietitians. Still, food and exactly what it does when it's all inside us is a tricky subject, but on the general stuff dietitians are decent folks that mostly advocate for trying some food and seeing if it works better. More experimental medicine than science. There's some pretty good videos on YouTube that have a dietitian saying "Hey, have you tried not eating [food] that makes you feel bad and seeing if that makes you feel better" with the client saying "Oh no I could never do that, just tell me what to do to feel better," and then you realize it's amazing we didn't kill ourselves with poisonous berries back in the day.

Anyway, I hope I hear about this from my crazier cousin over the holidays cause some of my family works/was educated in the biochemistry and pure chemistry fields and they love to argue, so that would be fun.

Boyle wrote:
Anyway, I hope I hear about this from my crazier cousin over the holidays cause some of my family works/was educated in the biochemistry and pure chemistry fields and they love to argue, so that would be fun.

That would be very fun, indeed. Like watching footballers wrestle a quadriplegic.

She understands this alkaline diet stuff is horseshit and what was said about anti-oxidants. She did wonder, then, what made her stomach so acidic and painful. I could only posit that something overstimulated acid production.

laklak wrote:These "nutritionists" are as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. Eat a reasonable diet, in reasonable amounts, avoid over-processed foods, cut down on refined sugars, and never drink water. Fish fuck in it.

When mentioning that I was told of some people who don't eat fish because they swim among their own filth. My reflex response was "so do they eat pork?".

Alan C wrote:She understands this alkaline diet stuff is horseshit and what was said about anti-oxidants. She did wonder, then, what made her stomach so acidic and painful. I could only posit that something overstimulated acid production.

I suffer from acid reflux. It has less to do with too much acid production and more to do with a weakened sphincter above the stomach allowing acidic mess farther up than it should be. Prilosec or another proton pump inhibitor for the full course of treatment will often give the sphincter enough time with less acid to heal. It's a recurring problem for me. Ask a doctor prior to regularly using any proton pump inhibitors. If it's a one-time thing to see if it works, she should be fine.

I also recommend getting tested for Helicobacter pylori (the bacterium that causes ulcers) as an H. pylori infection will often result in excessive acid production. This is now readily treatable, which is awesome.

I had a spell of acid reflux a long time ago, which usually happened the same time of day (late morning).
It wasn't too severe, but it went on for some time.

At that time H. Pylori was the hot new thing and the local hospital was doing a pilot project looking for it. I got referred there by my GP 'just in case'. I'd been expecting an endoscope thinner than a pencil, but was a bit surprised when they produced something that seemed more the thickness of a small child's arm, and even more surprised when I managed to swallow it.

They didn't find anything, and in the end, temporarily changing my eating schedule to include a mid-morning snack seemed to get rid of the reflux.
That, or the threat of another visit to the hospital scared whatever had been misbehaving back into line.