Lowering Inflammation With Baking Soda and Alka-Seltzer Gold
Good old-fashioned baking soda and Alka-Seltzer Gold can be used to squelch excessive inflammation at the molecular level, as bicarbonate immediately neutralizes peroxynitrites, which are among the most damaging free radicals there are, a typical regimen,
“I like the Alka-Seltzer Gold — it has to be that specifically, as it doesn't have the aspirin in it. Take it just to build up your bicarb level. Take two tabs in the morning, two tabs in the middle of the day and two tabs at night. Do that for about three days to a week, and then go down to just doing two tabs a day.
If you're using baking soda by itself, start with a half a teaspoon about every three hours, do six doses a day for a few days, and then go to a full teaspoon, three times a day for a few weeks … an easy treatment, we utilize bicarb in many other aspects too, in immune diseases and so forth.”
While simple baking soda (sodium bicarb) will work, I personally use and recommend using potassium bicarb. You can purchase it inexpensively on eBay for about £10 for 2kg.
The key to using it effectively is to pick up some litmus pH paper and regularly monitor your urine. Ideally, your pH should be about 7. Without the bicarb, it will likely be 6 or even lower. I use about one-half teaspoon three to four times a day based on my urine pH.
This is a powerful strategy I would encourage nearly everyone to adopt as by keeping your urine pH around 7 with the bicarb you will avoid having to neutralize the acidity with either amino acids from your muscles or calcium and other minerals from your bones. This is a simple inexpensive habit that can go a long way to improving your health.
Bicarbonate Improves Cellular Power Output
Bicarb also works well together with ketone esters and MCT oil as the bicarbonate improves the power output of the cell. This can be particularly useful for athletes.
“It takes it to a new level. Bicarbonate absolutely improves the power output of the cell, of the muscle, just based on improving the ability to work against the buildup of lactic acid over time. It's just improving [athletes’] ability to perform longer, and when you combine ketones and bicarbonate, you've all of a sudden changed the playing field.
You're still getting the signalling of that lactic acid process. You're not affecting what the lactic acid is important for in the brain, because that’s what's going to improve the increase in insulin for you also. The key here is understanding that you're not changing signalling. All you're doing is controlling the pH of the cell …
The signalling is of utmost importance for improving insulin to improve the utilization of glucose. So, it's just a really amazing circle, and if you understand these pathways, you've got some tremendous tools that are WADA [World Anti-Doping Association] approved. There are no stipulations against any of this type of stuff.
When we're giving bicarb, that's going to challenge the ionic charge of the hydrogen ions that are going to be produced. It's going to be able to challenge that instead of going into the muscle and taking glutamine, and then to the liver to produce ammonia to balance out the pH. And so, we're preserving muscle. We're preserving bone.
Take this a step further, if I can. Diets today are set up to destroy that acid-base metabolism and over time — what I just described — is what's happening. You get a slow leak of loss of amino acid from the muscle.
We've studied it based on nitrogen produced in the urine, and the kidney has to make up for this acid buildup because of the protein buildup. It has to deal with it by taking amino acids from muscle or alkali from the bone.
So, we've got this strategy of utilizing bicarb that changes that. It stops osteopenia. It stops sarcopenia, and on top of it, it's got these other aspects of improving cell metabolism”.