Aren’t alkaline drinks supposed to counteract the acidity found in our stomachs? How do they pass through with no effect?
In: 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)
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