Your body's pH balance: What you need to know!

I first heard of the alkaline diet a few years ago. A colleague of a friend mentioned it when we were helping ourselves to dinner at a party. It immediately made me cock my head to the side like a perplexed puppy. Say what? And it also made me realise we should never discuss diets when helping ourselves to a buffet at a party. Totally ruins the mood!

This guy went on to explain how we get sick if the body becomes too acidic. Apparently, eating alkaline food and drinks – like fruits, veggies and juices – helps bring the balance back while detoxifying the body and helping it recover more quickly. So…just another way of saying, “Eat your veggies”?

So it got me thinking about how the body’s acid-alkaline balance actually works and how it’s maintained. It turns out, it’s pretty fascinating and is happening inside us all the time in very complex ways but without us even knowing. Also, it just so happens that changing the pH balance in your body is not that easy and only happens in extreme conditions or if you’re very unwell. Before I give too much away, let’s start at the beginning.

What is pH? 

Here’s how Sciencebasedmedicine.org puts it: 

“From a chemical point of view, an acid is any molecule that can donate a proton or accept an electron pair in a reaction. A base (something alkaline) is the opposite – it can accept a proton or donate an electron pair. Acids and bases, therefore, neutralize each other. The measure of how acidic/basic a substance is is pH, with 7 being neutral, <7 being acidic, and > 7 being basic. This is also a logarithmic scale, so a pH of 5 is ten times more acidic than a pH of 6.”

Damn, I love that website so much! 

The body has many pH levels.

The pH level of our blood is around 7.4 within a range of 0.05 pH above and below, so it’s slightly alkaline. Our bodies take great care in making sure the pH of the blood stays there. Your lungs exhale carbon dioxide, which is slightly acidic and your kidneys filter out any excesses in the blood, whether they are acidic chemicals or basic. 

The fact is that your body is really good at maintaining its pH levels in a process called homeostasis. It’s through this process that your body maintains its chemical and hormonal balances way better than I can balance my chequebook. Makes me a bit envious of my innards, to be honest. The processes are incredibly complex and beyond the scope of this article, where I’m just trying to set the foundation for this topic. If you want to dive into this more, you can check out the details here and here. 

Even more fascinating is that each bodily fluid and tissue has slight variances in how basic or acidic they are, which is a function of what they do. Even that is kept in check, automagically, inside you. 

This basically (ahem) means your body isn’t affected much by what you consume, and even if it is, it will maintain its own balances anyway. It’s super hard to shake that balance unless something goes seriously wrong. 

How does your body balance its pH levels? 

There are a bunch of processes that all contribute to homeostasis, but there are two organs that contribute the most. 

1. Your lungs

   Carbon dioxide is slightly acidic. That’s why club soda has a slightly sour taste (It’s like having a little party in my mouth. Then, when party starts hopping, I start the popping! ;)) Your lungs’ main job is to take carbonic acid and carbon dioxide out of your blood so you can exhale it. As the acid levels in your blood rise and fall, so does the amount of carbon dioxide you exhale. Your lungs are doing this inside you right now, and you don’t even notice it! Just breathe, and your body is balancing out its pH levels through your lungs.

   If things go wrong: you get respiratory acidosis or alkalosis, where the CO2 level in the blood is too high or too low respectively. Symptoms of acidosis include (for both metabolic or respiratory) fatigue, sleepiness, shortness of breath, confusion, anxiety and even tremors or sweating. Alkalosis usually makes one feel confused, shaky, breathless or dizzy. This is usually when your lungs are unable to regulate carbon dioxide levels in the blood due to injury or illness like asthma, COPD, sleep apnoea or pulmonary fibrosis (thickening or scarring of the lung tissue). It’s usually sudden and hard to diagnose, but the kidneys can usually compensate.

2. Your kidneys
   Another super easy thing you do is pee. It happens all the time! (With me, a little more than most people – enough for my wife to roll her eyes and mutter, “Again?!” every time I head to the loo. But that’s because I stay well hydrated. And the consequence of that is that I need to dehydrate more frequently.) These magical beans in your back filter all of your blood and perfectly balance bicarbonates and acids with ridiculous accuracy. That’s why, even if you somehow manage to change your blood pH, your kidneys will just let you piss it out. That’s why, even if your pee comes out acidic, your blood will be exactly as it always was. Another reason why measuring urinary pH doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s going on inside you.

   If things go wrong: This happens if your kidneys can’t filter out the acids in your blood quickly enough. The most common reason for this is having too many ketones in your blood if you have diabetes, called Diabetic Ketoacidosis. So, if you have diabetes and thinking of trying the ketogenic diet, please talk to your doctor before doing anything. It can also be caused by strenuous exercise, lack of oxygen, or even severe dehydration. 

   If anything were to go wrong with any of these organs, tiredness, nausea, headaches and more serious symptoms could start setting in, and you would need to get taken to the hospital before you turn into a facehugger from the Aliens movies…you know? With the acidic blood that can burn through several decks of a spaceship? Okay, I’m kidding, but you get the point. The consequences of a pH imbalance in your body are far more severe than simply gaining weight or developing chronic diseases.

The pH of the food you eat

When you eat something – anything – your food goes into the stomach. Duh. Your stomach is filled with a soup (metaphorically speaking…unless you’re eating soup) of hydrochloric acid mixed with digestive enzymes that disinfect the food and start breaking it down. 

Then, the food moves into the smaller intestines where the gallbladder releases bile (an alkaline digestive juice produced by the liver) that neutralises the acid and continues to process the food. This essentially makes the food nearly neutral on the pH scale – at least enough for the rest of the digestive system and your gut flora to continue the process without feeling too uncomfortable. 

So whether you’re eating fried foods, vinegar (acetic acid), lemon juice (citric acid), baking soda in cakes (basic) or even an antacid tablet (basic), it all becomes acidic in your stomach. Then they all become neutral in your intestines. None of that affects your blood or any other body part in any way. Unless you get acidity, which is primarily in your stomach, and for that, you need to eat something alkaline like baking soda or some other antacid. But we’ll get to that in the next article.

Alkaline diets and water coming up next! 

So we’ve done the groundwork to understand the pH levels in the body and a bit of an idea of how things stay in balance. In the next article, we’ll do a deep dive into alkaline diets and drinks and see where they might work and where they won’t. 

In the meantime, do you have any questions about this? Or have you experienced acidosis or alkalosis yourself? Please share your story if you can. 

Until next time, always be rationable.