Alkaline Water: is it a 'real thing"?
20 years ago I wrote "The Untold Truth About Alkaline Balance'. ~Ian Blair Hamilton
In the two decades since, thousands of people have asked for it and benefited from it. And yet in that time many of the ideas in that book have been well.. debunked.
To me, this isn’t a bad thing. All ideas, concepts and sciences need constant review and renewal through the process of continual exposure to new knowledge. So this small offering, The Untold Truth About Water Ionizers, comes about because almost everything I wrote about so long ago has been turned upside down.
I’m going to try to keep it simple. I do, as my son and IT manager always tells me, tend to ‘go on a bit too long’. But the issues I’ll discuss are important because many people are still making decisions based on 20-year-old ideas, because they haven’t been able to locate better information in the vastness of the world wide web. It’s a strange thing. Endowed, for the first time in human history, with unlimited access to unlimited ideas, the very size of that information base has made it almost as hard as it was pre-internet to find answers. (Answers without a sales pitch, anyway!)
OK, OK, I’m already talking too much. And because we all have shorter attention spans due to the world wide web, I’d better quickly tell you what you’ll find here.
1. Alkaline balance and diet; the theory.
2. Alkaline water; the sales pitch.
3. Alkaline water machines: the method.
4. The end of the alkaline water sales pitch.
5. Alkaline water: the real thing.
6. Antioxidant water?
7. The industry, the sellers, the buyers.
8. The knight in shining armour who upended the myths.
9. Molecular hydrogen
10. Molecular hydrogen and water ionizers
11. Water ionizers and filtration and molecular hydrogen 12. The new hydrogen technologies that are replacing water ionizers. Let’s begin. I have already written many articles that relate to each subject above, so to allow you to avoid the traps that so many people have fallen into over the last 20 years, I’ll give you links to those articles as well as my up to date information so you’ll be capable of making an empowered decision about you and your family’s health. Alkaline Balance and Diet; The Theory ~ and the Reality It seemed simple.. (I like simple).
- We become too acidic because we eat too many acidic or acid-creating foods.
- To counter this, we need to eat more alkaline foods and try to limit the acid-making foods.
- We are also too acidic because we live in such a stressful environment, and stress creates acidity.
- We are also acidic because the wastes of an acid-fighting metabolism are acids.
- We are also acidic because many of us are in a permanently inflamed state. And inflammation causes acidity. To counter acidity we (according to the many acid/alkaline charts sold on the net) need to eat 80% alkali-containing foods and 20% acid-containing foods.
Simple, right?
Our next step in our alkaline journey is to consult the charts. We created our own many years ago and I still think it’s the best one around, based on Dr Susan Brown’s research. What this usually means is becoming vegetarian, because all the proponents of an alkaline diet say meat is perhaps the worst acidifier. And so we went vegetarian. I had been vegetarian since around 1970, so it wasn’t really very hard to do. The one result of this was that neither Cassie nor I had a cold or influenza for the last 21 years. Can I prove that it was the diet, or the water? No. But it’s still pretty spectacular. However.. It’s not that simple. Cassie continued to suffer for ongoing digestion issues. Yes, she is a ‘sensitive’ but we had expected a less ‘acidic’ diet’ to help. It didn’t. And we should also add that we didn’t just ‘go alkaline’ in our food. We began to drink ‘alkaline’ ionized water from our own water ionizer.
What’s the problem?
There are two main ones.
a) Is it really alkaline? Let’s talk about bananas, repetitively described as ideal alkaline foods because they contain potassium. (as do many other foods, especially fruits). The charts tell us to substitute these alkali rich foods for more acidic foods.. completely ignoring the elephant in the room.. The bananas, and oranges, and many other luscious fruits, do have small amounts of alkalis, but they also have massive amounts of acid-forming sugars, usually fructose. And unlike our paleo ancestors, we eat a LOT of fruit! In fact one of the WORST examples of our excess acid-forming fruit intake is the modern day habit of a fruit smoothie.
We NEVER ate that much sugar in one sitting.
We shared fruits with our tribe when it was seasonally available.. And it certainly wasn’t anything like the size or sweetness of the engineered fruits we now get from the local supermarket.
b) Most vegetarians are what I’ve heard called ‘lazy vegetarians’, meaning they don’t adhere closely to the foods that by their nature, contribute little or nothing to their carbohydrate loading. One prime example of a ‘lazy vegetarian’ is the one who eats bread. Yes, it might be ‘stone-ground, wholemeal, organic.’. But it’s still wheat.. And wheat is a serious acidifier. What I’ve noticed is that many vegetarians (and ordinary diet people) have massive blind spots. Their brains seem to go offline when their stomach asks for its next ‘hit’.
They have a stack of ‘righteous’ foods in the larder.. but what actually passes into their mouth is unbalanced and fed by this blindness, which Dr William McBride, author of Wheat Belly, described as an addiction. And if you get the chance to view many people’s actual diet - not the one they say they follow.. It does look that way!
Summarizing, if you can follow the basic 80/20 rule and stay away from the foods ‘on the list’ that really shouldn’t be there, if you can really honestly monitor what you eat every day, I certainly believe that the alkaline diet is useful, because it is still fundamental to our new balance when we no longer live in harmony with nature.
If you care to read the remainder of my report, here’s a link to access it.