Alkaline Water

Alkaline water is all the buzz these days. Is is healthy or harmful to ingest? What are the best sources or best methods of producing alkaline water?

Let's start with the science:

Regular water has a pH of 7 (neutral). The pH scale ranges from 0-14. Anything below 7 is considered acidic and anything above 7 is considered basic. Too much acid or too much base can be hazardous at a certain point-- for instance, we would not drink battery acid or bleach.)

Alkaline Beverages
There are plenty of beverages we drink that are considered acidic: Orange juice, lemon juice, tomato juice to name a few. However despite their initial pH, because these fruits naturally contain minerals like potassium, calcium, magnesium, and selenium- they actually have an alkalizing affect on the body. This applies to most FRESH squeezed juices. The alkalizing effects change when cane sugar is added to the juice, (sugar increases acidity) or when chemicals are added. Now coffee is another weird one; Coffee is by definition acidic, however the better quality the coffee, the less acidity. The more pesticides and chemicals added to the coffee, the higher the acidity, and it applies again here that adding sugar to the coffee increases acidity. The best way to drink coffee is black, and made from good quality organic beans. Dairy products are alkaline or at least have a highly alkaline component to them (calcium) and an acidic component (protein). Different dairy products have different pH values. For instance: ice cream has lots of sugar or artificial sweeteners added to it. But good goat milk and whole milk, are both alkaline.

The key to understanding alkaline benefits of beverages and foods is to know how our body metabolizes something in order for us to understand whether it will have a acidic or alkaline influence on the body.

Alkaline Water
First of all, do we need water to be alkaline? The normal pH of water is actually neutral. But of course we are talking distilled water here. The addition of minerals like magnesium, calcium, sodium increase the pH of water. Water that is naturally running over rocks and through streams is in a naturally alkalized state due to picking up all sorts of minerals that naturally occur. Now, tap water is generally acidified in order to put it in a more sanitary form by adding things like chlorine and fluorine to the water to allow it to be drinkable for a general population and be free of any harmful bacteria. So the typical glass of fresh tap water is around a 6 in pH....still not horribly acidic, but ingesting chlorine and fluorine might be a problem.

There are many water alkalizing devices out there and most of which use platinum and titanium rods to 'ionize' the water. Ionizing the water will move electrons around, therefore casting off the acidic water by exchanging the left over hydrogen to create a more alkaline pH. These ionizers increase alkalinity still by sometimes adding minerals to the water after the water is alkalized, creating a water with as high as 9.5 pH.

The cost of these ionizers can be thousands of dollars to install into a home system and usually only effect one source of water like the tap you drink from or cook from, leaving out the shower, and other faucets you may use in the house. Now, while alkalizing water could be good for us, the quality of the water is in question if the source is coming from a tap. For example: Chlorinated/fluorinated water that has been alkalized. We then just change the pH with a ionizer and still leave in all the crud. The better option to consider is to first filter the water and THEN ionize it. But still, what would be best for our health would be to have minerals in filtered water that increased pH naturally. So maybe all we are left with by drinking ionized water is a changed pH, and when filtering water THEN alkalizing it, we are left with VERY expensive water that could be replicated by adding some sodium bicarbonate to filtered water.

Lastly, determining the nutritional benefit of alkaline water is a hard one. There are many claims made on it suggesting it has anti-cancer properties and helps to alkalize our blood as acidic drinks and foods are thought of as harmful to our health and linked with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc. Alkaline substances are beneficial to our health but as far as water goes, I wonder if it is better to just filter our water VERY WELL and look to food for the rest. ??