Before you believe what you read on Quackwatch read this

[Alive]

Not logical, that claim re baking soda supposedly "debunking" anti-acid/alkali claims, the whole point is that the human body self-regulates its PH value. Anyway, like I said before, others such as Craig Bates found that the acid/alkali theory did not apply to their own bodies, so I can safely conclude that the acid/alkali theory is bogus, especially given  the scientific data debunking it.

What scientific data? You didn't provide any scientific data, you only provided some random opinions.
The only scientific data I have seen says that the body self regulates pH, and resorts to sacrificing muscle and bone as a buffer to keep this balance if required.

However providing support for your opinion that there is no problem with RAF acidity: http://www.ajcn.org/content/71/3/682.full.pdf+html
'No hunter-gatherer population is entirely or largely dependent (86–100% subsistence) on gathered plant
foods, whereas 20% (n = 46) are highly or solely dependent (86–100%) on fished and hunted animal foods.'

So hunter-gatherers raised from birth on a largely or totally animal based diet, due to that lack of plant availability in their environment, could survive without acidity problems. However I believe that many modern people raised on a high grain based diet will have accumulated an alkaline deficit that could take some time to rectify. Also modern life, pollution, chemicals etc could increase the benefits of an alkaline forming diet.

[raw-al]

In the modern world its fine if most people die very slowly and sometimes painfully through bad diet, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, smoking etc - this is just normal life and happens gradually so we don't notice. At least they have paid heaps of taxes along the way, that's what really matters!

But if there are any random sudden deaths from an infection or accident then that is not OK, it happened fast enough for people to notice, and so we all need to eat cooked food to ensure that the odd person doesn't quickly drop dead. 'Microbes are the source of illness and cooking kills most microbes so it must be good. I'm a doctor / nutritionist / scientist, I have a university degree in health and I am really clever, I eat cooked food and in living memory my family ate cooked food, so it is normal to eat cooked food you idiots! (So what if my photo shows that I am grey, fat and wrinkly)'

I'm a bit confused, so are you on a raw paleo or similar diet?

[Alive]

Sorry I was being sarcastic - yes am on raw paleo : )

[TylerDurden]

 Here are mentioned 3 studies in the refs, demonstrating that the alkali theory does not help as regards bone-health at all:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_diet#Scientific_evaluation

Since the bone-health/osteoporosis link is the mainstay of the alkali/acid notions, that means we can safely ignore it.

[raw-al]

I posted this as a separate thread but decided to add it to this thread as it is apropos:

It is an email I got from a yahoo group

"Censorship, Sports and the Power of One Word
Editorial by Howard Straus

(OMNS May 21, 2012) At the World Snooker Championships, one of the finalists, Peter Ebdon, who had qualified for the Snooker Championship finals an amazing 21 times in a row, was asked to remove a logo from his tee shirt. [1]

Anyone who watches almost any sport at all is certainly familiar with the blizzard of brand name logos for everything from banks to watches, from lubricants to cigarettes, from pain relief medications and golf paraphernalia to the naming of stadia. The commercialization of virtually every sport in this fashion is virtually a "given," no matter how harmful or carcinogenic a product may be, to the extent that it is a multi-billion-dollar a year industry in itself, with star sports figures earning millions of dollars in product endorsements.

But Peter Ebdon raised a firestorm by wearing a logo that said, "Gerson Therapy." Interestingly, few of the photographs of Ebdon in any of the articles clearly showed the logo. [2] Ebdon was moved to wear the logo after his father's death from cancer. But the explosion from the cancer, pharmaceutical and medical industry was prompt. "World Snooker received several messages questioning whether he should be allowed to wear the Gerson Therapy logo," noted the Telegraph newspaper article.

"Obviously, I've upset somebody somewhere, but personally, I think it's too important for people not to know," said Ebdon, in a post-competition press conference. World Snooker officials clearly disagree, justifying their censorship by pointing to a rarely-enforced 1939 law prohibiting the advertising of any cancer therapy, or virtually any public speech about it. This law is never invoked when white-coated oncologists touting toxic chemotherapy or other ineffective [3] but immensely profitable allopathic cancer treatments take to the airwaves. In a very personal endorsement of Gerson Therapy principles, Ebdon has become a vegan since his father's death.

It is impossible to avoid the parallels to another, similar case. In 2004, when HRH Prince Charles mentioned the word Gerson once in one speech at the Royal College of Gynecology and Obstetrics, the medical and pharmaceutical industry in the UK pilloried him in the tabloid press for months. The Prince had said: "I know of one patient who turned to Gerson Therapy having been told she was suffering from terminal cancer and would not survive another course of chemotherapy. Happily, seven years later, she is alive and well. So it is vital that, rather than dismissing such experiences, we should further investigate the beneficial nature of these treatments." It is not exactly a wild-eyed statement.

Yet attacks on Prince Charles went so far as to imply that the Prince was crazy and lament that royals could no longer be beheaded. The tabloids picked up the story, and ran with it around the world. It was only when they realized that they were exposing the name Gerson to millions of people who would have otherwise never heard of it that they finally went silent.

Now, once again, the name Gerson, put forth publicly by one person, on one occasion, has given the medical/pharmaceutical industry apoplexy, and generated tens of thousands of words of calumny in the controlled press. Many people must be wondering what generated that kind of reaction. This "over-the-top" response is the greatest acknowledgement that the word Gerson clearly generates such fear in the medicine-for-profit industry that its knee-jerk reaction is to spew abuse in all directions.

The pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable business on the face of the planet. Yet it is terrified of one word, whether spoken by a prince or worn by a snooker player. If they have to resort to silencing even the quietest whisper of dissent, they are exposing their lack of confidence in their own competitiveness as providers of methods and products that are supposed to enhance and restore good health.

(Howard Straus is the grandson of Dr. Max Gerson and author of the doctor's biography, Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless. [4] He is also president of Cancer Research Wellness Institute.)

References:
1. April 24, 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersp....tment-logo.html

2. For a photo of the offending logo, with negative opinion: http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2012/04/....r-quackery.html

3. Chemotherapy contributes less than three percent to five year cancer survival in the USA. (Morgan, Ward and Barton. Clinical Oncology, 2004. 16:549-560) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=....2016%3A549 -560

4. Reviewed in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine 2002, 17:2, pages 122-124. Scroll down to the third book review posted at http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2002/pdf/2002-v17n02-p120.pdf

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org

Find a Doctor
To locate an orthomolecular physician near you: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n09.shtml

The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource.

Editorial Review Board:
Ian Brighthope, M.D. (Australia)
Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. (USA)
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. (USA)
Damien Downing, M.D. (United Kingdom)
Dean Elledge, D.D.S., M.S. (USA)
Michael Ellis, M.D. (Australia)
Martin P. Gallagher, M.D., D.C. (USA)
Michael Gonzalez, D.Sc., Ph.D. (Puerto Rico)
William B. Grant, Ph.D. (USA)
Steve Hickey, Ph.D. (United Kingdom)
James A. Jackson, Ph.D. (USA)
Michael Janson, M.D. (USA)
Robert E. Jenkins, D.C. (USA)
Bo H. Jonsson, M.D., Ph.D. (Sweden)
Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. (USA)
Stuart Lindsey, Pharm.D. (USA)
Jorge R. Miranda-Massari, Pharm.D. (Puerto Rico)
Karin Munsterhjelm-Ahumada, M.D. (Finland)
Erik Paterson, M.D. (Canada)
W. Todd Penberthy, Ph.D. (USA)
Gert E. Schuitemaker, Ph.D. (Netherlands)
Robert G. Smith, Ph.D. (USA)
Jagan Nathan Vamanan, M.D. (India)

[TylerDurden]

While I agree that chemotherapy and many other mainstream ideas have been disastrous, I don't think we should wholly condemn all of their ideas. Some have been brilliant. The way I see it, we should look at Hulda Clark and other whackos as well as quackwatch, and then determine some sort of middle-ground. I don't agree with quackwatch on many issues, but then again, a lot of his ideas have been dead right as regards the more questionable aspects of alternative medicine.So I'll take ideas from all sides and accept them based on my own personal experience, the scientific data(and whether it's solid or not).

[raw-al]

While I agree that chemotherapy and many other mainstream ideas have been disastrous, I don't think we should wholly condemn all of their ideas. Some have been brilliant. The way I see it, we should look at Hulda Clark and other whackos as well as quackwatch, and then determine some sort of middle-ground. I don't agree with quackwatch on many issues, but then again, a lot of his ideas have been dead right as regards the more questionable aspects of alternative medicine.So I'll take ideas from all sides and accept them based on my own personal experience, the scientific data(and whether it's solid or not).

That is in essence what I do also. There are a great many useful therapies that do work, but get trashed by QW. I read QW once in a while just to see how bad they can botch it up. Wackipedia does the same thing. It's written by people with a vested interest. It is valuable advertising, they have discovered.

There are many sides to therapeutic intervention. This can be seen  if you truly look. One therapist might have excellent luck with a procedure, but not be good at getting others to understand it properly, so it is lost. History is replete with examples.

Also patients sometimes go into therapies with a jaundiced eye, or maybe they don't get along with the therapist so they make up a victim story and thus they brand the practitioner.

Also patients generally don't follow what their therapist says anyway.

These reports are no less ridiculous than the restaurant patron who writes up a big bad article on the net because he didn't like the waitress or the lasagna was different than his favourite.

[raw-al]

Here is something on "Dr." Stephen Barrett from Dr Nenah Sylver's book "The Rife Handbook of Frequency Therapy and Holistic Health".

"Barrett whose organization QW has sued almost 40 people over the years, never won a lawsuit. On more than one occasion, the presiding judge has harshly reprimanded him for attempting to stifle free speech and freedom of health care choice. Coverage of one trial by Canadian health organization provides more detail.

At trial under a heated cross-examination... Barrett conceded that he was not a Medical Board Certified Psychiatrist because he had failed the certification exam. This was a major revelation since Barrett had provided supposed expert testimony as a psychiatrist and had testified in numerous court cases.

Barrett also had said that he was a legal expert even though he had no formal legal training. During the course of his examination, Barrett also had to concede his ties to the AMA, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food & Drug Administration (FDA)" *

I could go on about the AH, but it is difficult to type all day. Suffice it to say he is paid by "The World Union of Drug producers and Allopathic Doctors" and you see just how qualified and honest he is even in his own pathetic field.

*Canadian Lyme Foundation, "Dr Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch exposed in Court cases," October 13, 2005, www.canlyme.com/quackwatch.html (December 7, 2006)

[Dorothy]

Here is something on "Dr." Stephen Barrett from Dr Nenah Sylver's book "The Rife Handbook of Frequency Therapy and Holistic Health".

"Barrett whose organization QW has sued almost 40 people over the years, never won a lawsuit. On more than one occasion, the presiding judge has harshly reprimanded him for attempting to stifle free speech and freedom of health care choice. Coverage of one trial by Canadian health organization provides more detail.

At trial under a heated cross-examination... Barrett conceded that he was not a Medical Board Certified Psychiatrist because he had failed the certification exam. This was a major revelation since Barrett had provided supposed expert testimony as a psychiatrist and had testified in numerous court cases.

Barrett also had said that he was a legal expert even though he had no formal legal training. During the course of his examination, Barrett also had to concede his ties to the AMA, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food & Drug Administration (FDA)" *

I could go on about the AH, but it is difficult to type all day. Suffice it to say he is paid by "The World Union of Drug producers and Allopathic Doctors" and you see just how qualified and honest he is even in his own pathetic field.

*Canadian Lyme Foundation, "Dr Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch exposed in Court cases," October 13, 2005, www.canlyme.com/quackwatch.html (December 7, 2006)

Oopsy. That "Wold Union" made a boo boo and didn't check out the creds on their boy. Bad, bad big monster machine!

[raw-al]

Quote from Dr Richard Schultz, School of Natural Healing, Santa Monica, California www.whale.to/c/shulze.html

(Allopathic) medicine in our country (USA) has been on a crusade over the last 100 years to wipe out every other form of (natural) medicine. One of the things they did that was unique was they lobbied to make words legal only for them to use. Today in the US, only a medical doctor can diagnose a disease, prescribe something, and cure you. Nobody else can say "diagnose", "prescribe" and "cure". That means that nobody can cure you but a medical doctor...

I cannot say "cheparral is the cure for a tumor".  I can't say "garlic is the cure for cholesterol or high blood pressure". They have made the laws. So that makes me look stupid, impotent and it makes the herbs look weak and wimpy. I can't as an herbalist, say that an herb will cure, even though a lot of prescription drugs are made from herbs. This was a tactic by organized medicine to wipe out the opposition, by making them look silly and impotent... They have the words [and] they control the high ground. They can walk out and say, "Yes, if you take this drug, you will cure yourself". But they hired lawyers and got the government behind them. If I say that I go to jail. It isn't because the herbs don't work and the drugs are better, it's just because they have more money, have lobbied more and got the law passed in their favour. That is why people get the idea that herbs don't cure you."

[raw-al]

Here's another biggy, The FDA declares no drug is too dangerous to be "FDA approved".

Amazing, yet herbs are too dangerous to be left to patients... "But with herbs and nutritional supplements, no such decision is extended to patients. The FDA merely bans whatever natural substances it wishes, usually based on reports of very small numbers of people being harmed by extremely rare overdoses (such as with ephedra). In those cases, the FDA proudly proclaims it is, "Protecting everyone from a dangerous herb!"

Learn more: http://naturalnews.com/019331.html#ixzz1w12bw1Sq

Everybody be very careful with that pepper shaker or the cinnamon or God not the cumin... you might die.

[Dorothy]

Thank goodness I don't get colds any more and don't need ephedra - that stuff was magic on the sniflies though and I still forget that the medical mafia won't let us have any unless we go to a doctor for a prescription now.

[raw-al]

Thank goodness I don't get colds any more and don't need ephedra - that stuff was magic on the sniflies though and I still forget that the medical mafia won't let us have any unless we go to a doctor for a prescription now.

Re: Ephedra from Nenah's book like the last few posts...
While dangerous drugs are rarely pulled off the market even when the FDA or a manufacturer voluntarily reports their hazards-government regulations can be quite different for natural substances such as herbs.

Despite the fact that most herbs are much safer than patented pharmaceuticals, botanocals as well as vitamin and mineral supplements are subject to substantially more scrutiny and restrictions.

Notably, data supporting the safety and effectiveness of nutrients is usually from sources independent of the supplement manufacturer--as opposed to the drug company-sponsored studies upon which the FDA relies on to guarantee drug safety.

One example of inconsitant control can be seen with the drug ephedra. Ephedra, which has been used for centuries, is is one of the best bronchialdilators around: it opens the air channels in the lungs of people with asthma and allergies. However, several years ago the FDA decided to impose strict regulations on an herbal supplement containing ephedrine (used for weight loss), after considerable negative publicity over its dangers.

The main problem with this restriction is that ephedra is quite different from ephedrine. Ephedra is the whole herb. Ephedrine is one synthesized chemical out of many that the herb contains. Another issue is amount. A whole herb formula containing, say, 50 mg of ephedra would  only have a half a mg of ephedrine. But a synthesized formula containing ephedrine might have up to 20 mg of ephedrine. Incredibly, the FDA missed this significant difference in it's investigation. One would expect scientists - who by training are taught to be precise - to catch this important difference. But evidently other forces were operating here. Although the natural herb was being heavily regulated, pharmaceutical companies had been producing ephedra alkaloids synthetically for years. Mary Marino writes:

Almost every cold, cough, or allergy product on the market made by the drug companies such as Sudafed, Actifed, Advil, cold and cough formula and others contain synthetically produced versions of the ephedra alkaloid pseudoephedrine. These products are readily found on the shelves of almost every grocery store, convenience store, drug store, and pharmacy outlet in the country... To say that natural ephedra kills and a synthetic version of one of it's alkaloids found in drugs doesnt', is pure hypocracy.

How can the FDA honestly justify banning ephedra which they claim is killing people, yet leave all the pharmaceutical products on the market containing the same alkaloid that occurs naturally in ephedra?... If ephedra is as dangerous as the FDA says, why not ban every product in this country that has any trace of ephedra alkaloids in them instead of taking cheap shots at the supplement industry while protecting the pharmaceutical industry? The fact is, natural ephedra products were taking business away from the pharmaceutical industry."

NS "To make matters worse, the FDA ignored a law governing ephedra sales that was already in place. The regulation of natural ephedra, reports Marino, was already so strict prior to the newer ban, that all labels bore strict warnings "listing a number of possible contraindications, including warnings that persons  under the age of 18 couldn't buy ephedra and shouldn't take ephedra. Some stores even went so far as locking up their ephedra products in special cases behind the counter".

The newer ruling on ephedra was eventually overturned, and is once again allowed to be sold. However, far higher doses of the (concentrated) synthetic analog of ephedra herb are still allowed to be sold, and in far higher doses per pill, than the herbal form." NS


"Mary Marino, "FDA Ban Of Ephedra A boon for Drug Companies" The Health Crusader News, July 23 2004. July 28 2004

[Alive]

Thank you TD for letting me know that for normal people food ash acid / alkaline balance is unimportant, this knowledge will make it easier for my kids to be able to eat a wider range of foods.

I do wonder though that if someone had a slow, damaged and/or overused metabolism then they might have difficulty maintaining this balance, and hence benefit from help from diet. Might this be especially be true for those who, while on a modern carbohydrate-based diet, had a long term predominance of acid forming microbes which stressed their bodies alkalinity balance functions ?