An awful lot of woo depends on the idea that what we eat and drink makes our bodies acid or alkaline, that a cornucopia of diseases stems from improper acid-base balance, and that through dietary manipulation and supplements we can make our bodies alkaline and thus attain great health, thereby thwarting Big Pharma and the Medical Establishment.
For many, pH is a mysterious and forbidding subject. Thankfully, there is a simple chart that explains it.
Did you know that dihydrogen mono-oxide has a higher pH than sulfuric acid? And the government allows it to be used in foods? :eek:
AH Dammit! All of my precious bodily fluids have been sapped and impurified again.
I never want to have to explain Lewis acids and bases to these people.
Do they make you any less dead?
Hey wait a minute! Nobody with a total body pH of 8.0 or above has ever contracted cancer! It’s a fact!
Pffft, that’s obviously nonsense. Are you saying Darwin was wrong when he invented Deoxyribonucleic Acid? The clue’s in the name!
Also, quantum epigenetics.
Curiously, I had uric kidney stones, which, like gout, is related to the acidity of the blood. My Urologist put me on baking soda to cause the crystals to dissolve.
But that is something different, altogether.
(All together) “But that is something different”
My college freshman chemistry course covered pH in depth. The professor explained it thus: “Many people think that pH stands for “power of hydrogen”, but it doesn’t. The “P” stands for ‘puissance’, which is french for power”.
Thanks, Dr. Robinson!
What a puissant.
Thankfully, this particular bit of woo is on the wane. It’s dying a hard death, but I see it less and less in the alt med circles I frequent.
Now it’s all CBD oil, all the time. :smack:
(And essential oils, and coconut oil. Oily bunch.)
Try to convince them that this is just a conspiracy run by Big Oil. It’ll probably die off fast. 
Considering what a number of Lewis acids and bases are, probably more dead. Though my point was that a Lewis acid/base is a much less intuitive thing than the Arrhenius or Bronsted-Lowry definitions.
I can’t believe people spend extra money on “high pH” water. The first thing the body does is buffer it all out anyway. Though every time I see the latest woo I think that I was right that the company I used to work for should get out of real pharma and into woo.
Well, that’s the (completely wrong) theory. That if your body has to send acids out to buffer the alkaline water, then your body will be less acid overall. It makes a weird kind of sense, if you don’t at all understand how it works.
We must be traveling in different woo circles, because it remains extremely common in my experience, right up there with various forms of “detox”.
One of my interests is cancer quackery, which in many cases involves dietary manipulations that are supposed to “alkalinize” the body to kill cancer cells.
Mainstream wooists like the Food Babe promulgate acid-base nonsense as well.
One positive sign - a major figure in the alkaline woo industry, Dr. Robert O. Young (who made huge sums of money from credulous patients) got busted for his activities.
Hey! What’s wrong with Canadian Bacon Duck oil? I’m frying up my turkey in it tomorrow!
The main problem I have with the pH theory of health is that it does not adequately take into account which direction your head is oriented when you sleepor what diet best suits your blood genotype. Without those factors considered it’s nothing more than pseudo-science.
Good. Hopefully that means I’m educating my circles out of it. That feels nice.
Fuck me, I think I sprained my brain on that second link. It uses enough nearly real science words that I can’t just laugh it off like I can the first link. Sleepy brain compasses? Hah!
Blood GenoType secretion regulation lectin agglutination? Part of my brain immediately starts cataloging the errors, attempts to formulate an argument, and then shouts “DOES NOT COMPUTE” while exploding in a shower of sparks.
