Andrea W.: When I told my doctor that I now take alkaline activated water against my hyperacidity, he literally laughed at me. If I was too acidic, he would long ago have admitted me to hospital, and with water one can not de-acidify at all, since it is not buffered, so water ionizers are completely worthless and just used for profiteering. Now I’m totally confused.
Even doctors do not always agree. When Dr. Walter Irlacher in “Service Manual for People” calls alkaline activated water as the “Perpetuum Mobile for de-acidification”, he wanted to surely not call for its use in emergency medicine for acute acidosis, meaning if 5 liters of blood in the body are already so acidic that it cannot carry enough oxygen. In such a case, highly buffered alkaline solutions must be introduced directly into the blood cycle. Above all, the emergency patients will get to breathe pure oxygen. There, alkaline activated water would be far too late and could not be administered in required amounts in order to level several liters of blood out of hyperacidity.
Even in conventional medicine one distinguishes different types of acidity (acidosis) as acute, chronic, metabolic and respiratory. Also, the location of acidosis (blood, lymph, saliva, urine, cells …) plays a role in their medical judgment. In the stomach no reasonable person would speak of acidosis at very low pH levels, but many complain of an “over acidified stomach”, which in reality is perceived as gastric juice being pressed up into the oesophagus which is not adapted to withstand such strong acids. This is often done by fermentation processes with flatulence in the intestine or in pregnancies that lead to an elevated diaphragm which thus pushes the stomach upward.
Now we come to the buffer argument, which you will always find in articles that position themselves against alkaline activated water. It is always repeated that water is an unbuffered substance which every chemist knows.
This ignores that, unlike pure water which the chemists talk about, alkaline activated water is highly buffered. It not only contains a high number of free OH – ions corresponding to its pH level, but also even compared to the original tap water, a significantly increased number of cations, i.e.: minerals which can form alkali, in short, buffer substances.
You can definitely agree with your doctor that the lung is by far the most important de-acidification organ of humans, which is why respiratory failure leads to death by acidosis within a few minutes. In the documentary “Drink Yourself Alkaline” we demonstrate how 0.2 liters of alkaline activated water with pH 9.5 for a full minute buffers the acid load of the air exhaled by an adult man.
Maybe your doctor can hold his breath for a full minute to break down carbon dioxide in the body. But if he is not a trained diver, he will breath out as soon as possible so as not to lose consciousness. The buffer capacity of alkaline activated water is by no means as low as that of chemically pure water or water from a reverse osmosis system!
When mineralized water is alkaline, one can unequivocally assume that it can also neutralize acids. However, the pH value is a pure ratio value. One can nicely illustrate in a car race, where two vehicles of the same design and horsepower, driving in the opposite direction on a circular racetrack cruise at full speed. At first you will meet always in the same place. But at some point one of the cars will stop, namely the one with a lower tank capacity. Until the tank is empty, the vehicles are traveling at the same speed. A 0.2 liter glass of alkaline activated water is a small tank for over 5 liters of blood in the body. After 1 minute, it is empty, as we have seen. So for example, to neutralize a glass of coke with pH 2.5, you need 15-30 glasses of alkaline activated water with a pH 9.5. It depends on how many mineral buffers the activated water contains. Adding calcium to soft water increases the buffering of activated water, something which already occurrs in modern water ionizers mostly from the filters.
For example, stomach acid is strongly buffered and a glass of alkaline activated water with pH 9.5 would hardly influences this. Nevertheless, many advertising messages place the “alkaline force” of activated water in the foreground, which compared to other effects is only secondary.
You can not also de-acidify your body by suppressing an acid production pharmacologically: Just as the lung regulates the blood pH, each organ system has its own pH window. If the proton pump produces hydrochloric acid (HCl) from common salt (NaCl) and water for the acidic gastric juice, at the other end alkaline bicarbonate is transferred to the pancreas and blood. If I take a proton pump inhibitor, I therefore block the production of alkaline pancreatic secretions, especially after prolonged use. If you were to take sodium bicarbonate, there is an acidic-rebound effect, i.e.: the stomach buffers the invasive sodium bicarbonate in the wrong place with an increased acid production whilst simultaneously the pancreas increases its own production of sodium bicarbonate. This can eventually lead to total exhaustion of both organs.
Excerpt from the book “Karl Heinz Asenbaum: Electrically activated water – An invention with extraordinary potential.”
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