Aren’t alkaline drinks supposed to counteract the acidity found in our stomachs? How do they pass through with no effect?
In: Biology
They don’t “just pass through”. They react with the stomach content and it gets neutralized to a point. Once in the duodenum, the whole content largely neutralized to about pH 6 and then in the ileum to above 7 or so. What you drink/eat doesn’t make a difference, your body maintains these values by pumping bicarbonates as needed in the specific volume.
They do neutralize it. However your stomach can make more acid, so it does.
Mea ing it doesn’t stay neutralized
Here’s a good link that might help explain. Alkaline water isn’t alkaline enough (high enough pH) to counteract the extreme acidity of the stomach (pH 1.5-3.0). Even if it was, the effect would only be temporary. [https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/is-alkaline-water-better](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/is-alkaline-water-better)
ELI5: Alright, imagine your stomach is like a big, bubbling cauldron full of acid, right? That acid helps break down the food you eat into smaller pieces so your body can use it for energy. It’s super strong, like the evil villain of digestion! Now, let’s talk about alkaline water. It’s kind of like the hero of the story, with a higher ph level than your stomach acid. So, you might think when the hero meets the villain, they should cancel each other out, right? Well, not exactly. ( i have watched way too many youtube shorts with the guy explaining stuff that i can’t hear that sentence in my own voice anymore)
When you drink alkaline water, it does mix with the stomach acid, but it’s not enough to completely neutralize it. Think of it as adding a little bit of water to a big pot of soup; it might dilute it a little, but the soup is still pretty strong. Plus, your stomach is really good at maintaining its acidic environment. It has special cells that constantly produce more acid to keep things balanced. So even if you drink something alkaline, your stomach just ramps up the acid production to keep doing its job. So, while alkaline drinks might help balance out the ph in other parts of your body, like your bloosdtream, they don’t really have a big impact on the acidity of your stomach.
Non ELI5:When you consume alkaline water or other alkaline stuff, they indeed have a higher ph, usually around 8 or 9. At face value, one might assume that consuming alkaline substances would neutralize stomach acid due to their higher ph. However, the stomach’s acidic environment is maintained by a complex system of proton pumps that actively secrete hydrogen ions (H+) to maintain acidity.
The stomach is capable of producing more acid to match the volume and pH of the food consumed. In addition “alkaline water” and similar substances are not particularly alkaline so only a small amount of additional acid is required to neutralize it.
“Alkaline drinks” are a scam preying on the public’s poor knowledge of basic human biology.
It does….a little bit
Let’s make an analogy with temperatures, where more acidic is hot and more alkaline is cold
The thing is, our stomach is VERY acidic, so it’s like a big boiling pot of water on a stove, where it’s really hot, and directly having heat applied to keep it hot (like a bunch of a strong acid where our stomach keeps pumping in more acid)
Now, alkaline drinks that are safe to drink are mildly alkaline, so pouring this mildly alkaline drink into this really strong acid is akin to dropping a frozen pea into this boiling hot pot of water. It will cool it, but not enough to make a meaningful difference
The thing that makes this less intuitive if you look up the pH of alkaline water vs the pH of stomach acid, is that it’s on what we call a logarithmic scale. This means a pH of 5 is 10 times as acidic as a pH of 6, which is 10 times as acidic as a neutral pH.
The pH of stomach acid is 1.5-3.5, let’s just say 3 for easy math. Alkaline water is usually around a pH of 8. So given what I mentioned above, in equal volumes of stomach acid and alkaline water, this would neutralize stomach acid that’s a pH of 6, but the thing is, it’s 3, so it’s 1,000 times more acidic than what that alkaline water could neutralize, so you could neutralize stomach acid by drinking 1,000 times your stomach acid’s volume in alkaline water (about 20-100 liters) which is obviously an unreasonably large amount, or we’d need much more alkaline fluids, like 1,000 times more alkaline, which wouldn’t even be close to safe to consume. Also, again, our stomach can continually make more acid to increase acidity so even if you were to put down 20-100 liters of alkaline water, it’d only neutralize it very temporarily (obviously I’m ignoring here that drinking that much water would far surpass the amount to kill you even if you somehow could chug that much)
When you drink alkaline water, it temporarily raises the pH of your stomach, making it less acidic. However, your stomach quickly responds by producing more acid to counteract this change and restore its usual highly acidic environment. This quick adjustment by your stomach means that the effect of alkaline water on stomach acidity is short-lived and minimal.
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