Are there any proven benefits of alkaline water?
July 30, 2018 3:45 PM   Subscribe

Alkaline water is a big thing in these parts. Are there any proven benefits? If you drink it, or have tried it, I'd be interested in your personal anecdote, too.
posted by Room 641-A to Health & Fitness (14 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
"[All] of the water we drink ends up being alkaline anyway!" It probably won't hurt you, but will hurt your wallet.

On the other hand, a certain other water fad, "raw water", CAN SERIOUSLY HURT you.
posted by Seeking Direction at 4:01 PM on July 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


I don't really know about any other health benefits, but I drink water that is has a pH of 7+ because very pure (acidic) water makes my bladder hurt. Dysuria/Interstitial Cystitis will make you try anything. I don't buy expensive alkaline water though, unless I'm out and my choices are limited. I buy distilled or cheap reverse osmosis water and add a tiny bit of baking soda and other minerals.

I've been testing water with a cheap reagent to get a general idea. This all started after buying a Zero Water filter that worked well but had the side effect of making the tap water here go from ~7.7 to ~4 to 5. If the tap water didn't taste like chlorine, copper, and chromium I'd drink it.

Fun discovery from earlier this week: Costco and Winco may get their bottled water from the same place, in the same bottles, but Costco has some minerals added back in that bring the pH up above 7 while Winco water is just plain RO water that's about 6.5 like distilled.
posted by monopas at 4:05 PM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Scientifically, through large peer-reviewed studies that are universally accepted? No. There are a few studies that claim it has some benefits in certain situations, but it’s not the panacea of health that many people claim (surprising, I know).

A big idea that gets handed around is that you need to alkalize your diet because a lot of food we eat is acidifying and that’s bad for you. However, our body is incredibly good at regulating our pH to within incredibly tiny increments because otherwise we would die. And anyway, each of our organs has a different pH and if you really have a pH imbalance you should not try to treat it with alkaline water because it may not help and may even worsen the problem.

People praise ‘alkalizing’ diets because they consist of leafy greens, lean meat, and healthy fats. An ‘acidifying’ diet consists of processed carbs, high fat meats, and refined sugars. Neither of them actual impacts your body’s pH overall. To then extrapolate that alkaline water will solve the problem of poor diet, or even to support a good one, is a big reach. . . but when you can sell that water for $$$, people have been known to, um, stretch the truth a bit.

Also, consuming a lot of overly alkaline water can decrease the effectiveness of your stomach acid and there’s a lot of digestion issues that can arise from it, so . . .

However, Monopas makes a good point that people suffering from acid sensitivity (I’ve had IC and they are correct that it will make you try anything) can benefit. But I guarantee you their overall pH is unchanged because they just posted here which indicates they are very much alive.
posted by ananci at 4:12 PM on July 30, 2018 [14 favorites]


I don't want to speak for anyone else's medical condition, but whatever trace minerals may be dissolved in your water so as to tweak its pH in one direction or the other are going to be absolutely overwhelmed by whatever's in the food that you eat, not to mention your stomach acid, not to mention the entire rest of your body. Whatever water you drink is immediately going to get mixed into the churning soup of whatever else is there inside you, and a bit of sodium bicarbonate here or carbon dioxide there is not going to make any practical difference. There's just way, way too much other stuff in you.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:15 PM on July 30, 2018 [9 favorites]


The Mayo Clinic has different dosing directions for diluting baking soda in water to "to make the urine more alkaline (less acidic)," relieve heartburn, etc.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:41 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I dunno what it does to your general health, but I swish with "alkaline" water, that is, water with a bit of baking soda in it, in order to reduce the acidity of my mouth and prevent tooth decay. Not sure how much evidence there is, but the acid is bad for enamel, so neutralizing it must be good, right? They put it in toothpaste, anyway.

I also use baking soda for heartburn because the calcium in tums can cause kidney stones to develop.

I doubt it will cure any diseases, but i don't think it can hurt, and it's probably good for your teeth.
posted by dis_integration at 4:47 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I often wonder if alkaline water helps gout, which is caused by an excess of uric acid in the bloodstream. I suspect it's only the water part of alkaline water that helps.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:05 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Your biological processes all require specific PH levels to work. Drinking pH balanced or imbalanced water is not going to affect that. Your body has ways to manage all that on its own and if those systems were to fail to the point that drinking a specific pH would have any effect... You'd be dead.
posted by kzin602 at 5:29 PM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


From a non health perspective, I bought some because I was trying to make pretzels. Pretzels traditionally use lye water, which is very alkaline, for their texture and browning. I didn't want to buy a big bag of lye for a single baking experiment, so I tried using the commercial alkaline water. It had no benefits over a baking soda solution.

I literally worked doing blood and body fluid pH assessments while I was in school, so I was starting with skepticism
posted by cobaltnine at 8:08 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I drink alkaline spring water occasionally, I like pH 6-7, 8.2 ‘crazy water’ is the highest I commonly see commercially available.

The thing is, if you happen to be deficient of magnesium or some other mineral in it, it will help you in that regard, but it’s not really a benefit of the alkalinity so much as the benefit of rectifying a mineral deficiency.

Anecdotally, I derive a huge benefit from it: it’s fun to drink, and I really enjoy handing it out to my friends and family who have never tried it*, and watching their reaction!

Pro tip: mix in some lemon juice or apple cider vinegar. pH-neutral lemonade is one of the oddest flavors you will ever encounter ;)

*with informed consent of course, e.g. ‘this is weird and some people hate it but I like it and you might too’.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:25 PM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


In home brewing beer it is a common practice to buy reverse osmosis purified water and then add various minerals to that water to match the concentration found in water of a certain location in order to more closely duplicate certain styles. There are even pre-mixed combinations for some of the more famous ones (like Guinness).

So if you wanted to try it out, but not contribute money to a 'fad' company, you could try to find out what is in the Alkaline water, and then buy the required minerals and add them to some pure water.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 9:30 PM on July 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks everyone. Someone gave me a few bottles and it tasted good but didn’t really believe the hype. On the other hand, there are stores which sell nothing but alkaline water so I thought *maybe* I was missing something.

8.2 ‘crazy water’ is the highest I commonly see commercially available.

9.5 isn’t uncommon here; the one I have is 9.5 from a regular store brand. But I have no idea what the numbers mean!
posted by Room 641-A at 4:52 AM on July 31, 2018


I have no idea what the numbers mean!
So pH is a concept of pure chemistry, defined in terms of concentrations of ions. Simple Wikipedia is a good place to read about pH and other science concepts when the main page may seem a bit intimidating.

But what matters here is taste and flavor.
First: I was being a bt crazy above! Let me correct that; pH 7 is neutral, 6 is acid! And crazy water brand sells up to pH 8.9.

One thing to remember is that the pH scale is logarithmic, so pH 9 has 10 times more ions than pH 8 does.

Anyway, here is an article about pH and flavor, here is a related discussion on Quora .

The first article mentions that we are better at relating flavor to acidity, since we commonly and historically do not drink many alkaline things. Another point to make is that ‘stronger’ flavored alkaline waters do not necessarily have higher pH— that’s what tripped me up about the Crazy water brand: their highest pH water is not their strongest tasting (it has more dissolved minerals, but lower pH).
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:05 AM on July 31, 2018


We have a special word for humans that have altered their blood pH to anything rather different to 7.4: a corpse.

There are a lot of difficult concepts surrounding aqueous acidity (Bronstead acidity) that it is even difficult for some of the Chemists I work with to keep in their head all at once.

You've got pH, but pH is only a measure of the H+ ions (or H3O+ if you're so inclined) in solution. So pH is related to the "strength" of an acid, but it isn't the whole idea. For example if you take 5L of ultrapure water and also a glass pasteur pipette. Take the pipette and dip it into concentrated nitric acid and let the excess drip out back into the bottle. Take that pipette with a trivially small amount of nitric acid in it and dip it into the 5L of water and the pH of the water will be approximately 5. It also would be completely safe to drink and wash with and even splash in your eyes, although it might sting a bit, but nothing that bad. If you were to drink the concentrated nitric acid it would dissolve your flesh and you would probably die. So the pH isn't the end all be all of acid "strength".

On the other hand you've got the pKa, which is another measure of the strength of an acid, the one that gets used in chemistry. It shows how "good" the acid is at giving up a proton and while pH = -log(H concentration) pKa = -log(Ka) where Ka is the acid disassociation constant. Concentrated nitric acid has a pKa of -5 or so, where the lower the number the stronger the acid. Acetic acid (vinegar) has a pKa of approximately 5 and also tastes good on a nice pile of chips (fries). Now you wouldn't chose to put vinegar on your skin, but again you would pick up a chip that has had some vinegar on it without thinking of it, but also if you were to pour pure acetic acid on your skin it would burn it leaving wounds.

Now you're into concentrations and obviously something more concentrated has more potential to be a "strong" acid but in reality you need both the concentration along with the pKa "strength" because water itself has a pKa of 15.7 and a molar concentration of above 55 molar.

What goes on in biological systems to overcome any change in pH internally while being exposed to different pH externally is that they employ buffers. Buffers are a compound which has a pKa near the pH desired. With this an addition of a small amount of acid or base the buffer will have a compensatory effect and revert the system back to the desired pH of the system. (It is more complicated than this in biological systems, but it works to a first approximation). One of the major buffers in your blood is phosphate, which is why in chemistry and biology we tend to run assays and other experiments in phosphate buffered saline (which actually approximates blood pH quite well and the addition of albumin gets us even closer) or PBS.

So Alkaline water will have some good biological effects, mainly that if you are thirsty you will be less thirsty, but if you are drinking enough of this to have an effect on your blood pH you are going to die.
posted by koolkat at 9:27 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


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