This is a followup article to the recent responses and questions I’ve received from this article about alkalizing your body to reduce viral infection.
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Since the video went live, I received a tremendous response from fellow Doctors and healthcare providers about how they are turning people around early with fever, chills, sore throat, body aches with something so simple as baking soda.
There are certainly other more sophisticated ways we can approach redox (acid/base metabolism) in disease to aid in cell efficiency but at this time and in this situation we all have access to baking soda.
Allow me to explain how this goes so much deeper but let’s start out with a few facts that are concrete:
Over 71% of Americans are overweight or obese. Diet is one of the most significant contributing factors to being overweight. If the food consumed is largely higher protein (acidic, meaning with more meat or processed meat) vs. vegetable (alkali) based, that will increase the body’s acidic state. Unfortunately, when the acid load is greater than the alkaline load, this leads to a net acidic state.
What is misunderstood is that the body can adjust to this and the kidneys can keep the blood pH in equilibrium and all will be OK. That is not the case.
The kidney does not just produce more bicarb out of thin air to make up for this constant increase in acid load from diet.
Instead, it produces ammonia (to adjust for proper pH) and excretes it from the kidney which increases the net acid secretion, all to keep up with the diet-induced acid increase. This establishes a new total set point in the acid-base equilibrium.
What does this mean? We now have a total acid load on the body that starts the trend in disrupting everything else.
The cell directs signals to handle the acid increase by changing the net total acid that results in:
- Stealing calcium and phosphorus from bone (the start of slow progression of osteoporosis)
- Stealing glutamine from muscle to make ammonia in the kidneys (which leads to sarcopenia, gut break down)
Loss of amino acids like glutamine lead to what we call a Net Negative Nitrogen Balance (such as muscle mass loss, and sarcopenia).
When the nitrogen balance is positive, the body is in an anabolic state (body is in repair state). This is good.
When the nitrogen balance is in a negative state, it’s similar to what your body goes through when you’re in starvation. This is bad.
That means, we have the beginning of sarcopenia, osteoporosis, and more importantly a new set point in acid-base equilibrium. The downhill spiral begins.
I’m taking the time to explain this to you because this is truly where it all starts, and just by giving simple bicarbonate we can stop nitrogen loss.
This means we can stop sarcopenia and stop bone mineral wasting known as osteoporosis.
This is why we integrative and functional health practitioners look at diet. It’s the start and foundation of cell efficiency (where my work on peptides plays a tremendous role).
If you get the big picture of sarcopenia and osteoporosis, imagine what is happening at the cell level where little change in acid-base metabolism has real effects on the metabolic flexibility of the cell.
The cell starts to lose its ability to make crucial decisions on how to best adjust to its environment and produce the energy it requires for survival.
As the cell loses its efficiency, cell signaling alters and wrong messages start to be produced by the cell. Remember the immune system depends on functional immune cells that work efficiently. Metabolic flexibility paired with the efficiency of a cell is very important.
So at this point, the cell starts undergoing epigenetic changes while the cell phenotype (changes to your genome based on environment) alters. And if it goes the wrong way like mentioned above, it’s a domino effect.
Diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, heart disease, and even cancer risk increases.
Sodium Bicarbonate (baking soda) can help early on with the cellular redox and it is an amazing short term solution.
Just look at what we have done in athletic performance with simple bicarbonate. We have proven that we can increase work capacity for longer periods of time under progressive anaerobic conditions while maintaining VO2 max!
We did it with plain baking soda in the beginning and if we’re being honest, at the time, we were not the smartest in how we started out utilizing this knowledge.
Early in our use of baking soda, we experienced GI problems with diarrhea because we used too much and did not know how to properly load it in the body (even though we saw astonishing results in athletic performance).
When I looked back deeper, I found that Arm n’ Hammer (makers of Bicarbonate)actually got in trouble for giving medical advice with Bicarb. But they had it right halfway. Who would have thought that in 1918 they had uncovered this groundbreaking discovery for human health…
While it might seem crazy to be taking baking soda to improve your body’s immune system, the science and history is there. I especially like it as a Doctor because it doesn’t include toxic chemicals and pharmaceuticals. This leans on your body’s existing survival and intelligence systems to do the job it’s meant to do: keep you alive and keep you well.