Gut Germs Appear to Play Role in Multiple Sclerosis

Sure that includes cheese, preserved meats, honey, grains, and many liquids, but you can also find those held in paper, wax, wood, and glass containers. Hamburger Helper is processed and it always comes in a plastic bag.

From the Wikipedia article on Greger, it looks like he may be cherry-picking his evidence or overstating his claims in some cases. Speculation, but that might be a reason people would disagree that nutritionfacts.org is a good source:

> Retired physician Harriet A. Hall, who is known for applying critical thinking to health claims, has written that, while it is well accepted that it is more healthy to eat a plant-based diet than a western pattern diet, Greger often overstates the known benefits of such a diet as well as the harm caused by eating animal products (for example, in a talk he claimed that a single meal rich in animal products can "cripple" one's arteries), and he sometimes does not discuss evidence that contradicts his strong claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Greger

I haven't read the study, and I don't want to claim that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence. I just wanted to argue against the claim that your pH is "too acidic" or "too alkaline" or whatever. Any potential benefits of an alkaline diet are surely independent of the pH variation they induce, because the variation will be close to 0 in any case, if your body's working properly. The stress hypothesis is interesting (I'm not saying it's even remotely correct! only that it's an interesting twist on the crackpot claims I've heard elsewhere), but you'll never be able to gauge how stressed your regulation mechanisms are just by measuring the blood's pH. You'll have to find some upstream biomarker that measures "stress" directly.

- Part 1. Background

> Life on earth depends on appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells.

I take issue with this sentence. This is obviously true, as life must carefully control the concentrations of some substances inside and outside the cell. However, this makes it seem like pH is uniquely special. This is not true: pH is merely a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. If this is meant to address the layman, as it's supposed to, such clarification is important. In fact, I think many of the myths around pH would be better addressed by making the pH concept taboo, and talking instead of "the concentration of H+ ions in solution".

> As a comparison, in the past 100 years with increasing industrialization, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 because of increasing CO2 deposition.

This is very important for the bisphere as a whole, but useless to understand the impact of pH changes in the body. I don't understand the reason for this section.

> This results in a diet that may induce metabolic acidosis which is mismatched to the genetically determined nutritional requirements

No. This is not true. Such diet may wreck your kidneys due to hypertension, and the kidney damage will give you metabolic acidosis. The diet itself will not give you metabolic acidosis, as long as your lungs and kidneys are fine. This is written in a very misleading way.

> With aging, there is a gradual loss of renal acid-base regulatory function and a resultant increase in diet-induced metabolic acidosis while on the modern diet

Now we're talking. I don' know if this is exactly true, but at least it makes sense.

- Part 2. The Role of pH in Various Cells, Organs, and Membranes

None of the mechanisms described here have anything to do with the systemic blood pH. The author doesn't say it, and he should. This section adds confusion and very little understanding

- 3. Chronic Acidosis and Bone Disease

This section is a little confusing. Many studies, little understanding.

The interesting part is this:

> There is evidence that in healthy humans the increased sodium in the diet can predict the degree of hyperchloremic metabolic acidosis when consuming a net acid producing diet

The study this is taken from has does have some regressions that advance this point, but the correlation is so weak I'm not sure we should take the results at face value.

- 4. Alkaline Diets and Musce

> Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis result in accelerated breakdown in skeletal muscle [40]. Correction of acidosis may preserve muscle mass in conditions where muscle wasting is common such as diabetic ketosis, trauma, sepsis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and renal failure

While you can manipulate the pH f patines with no functioning kidneys by giving them tablets with NaHCO3 (an alkali), you should never, ever extrapolate this to the diet of healthy people. Even in patients with kidney failure, doctors don't try to correct the pH with diet alone.

- 5. Alkaline Supplementation and Growth Hormone

> It has long been known that severe forms of metabolic acidosis in children, such as renal tubular acidosis,

No, no, no... Again, don't extrapolate from serious kidney diseases to healthy subjects.

- 7. Alkalinity and Chemotherapy

Some drugs work better with low pH and some work better with high pH. Again, you won't change the pH with diet, so this is useless to a discussion of Alkaline diet

> It has been suggested that inducing metabolic alkalosis may be useful in enhancing some treatment regimes by using sodium bicarbonate, carbicab, and furosemide

As you can see, even when you cant to induce alkalosis, you sue actual drugs, and not dietary changes (one of these drugs, furosemide, works by manipulation kidney function, it's not merely an alkali concentrate).

The discussion and conclusion say that the evidence is weak for lots of things. The only stroong part is the K/Na ratio. If the Alkali diet does this, then its benefits have nothing to do with blood alkalinization per se.