Is Baking Soda an Anti-Aging Elixir?

In my video on testing your diet with pee and purple cabbage, I talked about how an acid-forming diet can result in age-related muscle loss, whereas an alkaline diet may help preserve muscle mass in older adults, but muscle health is not the only thing affected by our dietary acid/base imbalance. For millions of years, before we learned how to hunt and mine salt, our ancestors ate a net neutral or alkaline-generating diet. The shift towards an acid-generating diet may predispose one to a wide range of disorders including kidney stones, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, as well as anxiety and gout. This new dietary acid load may help explain our modern epidemic of kidney disease.

A higher dietary acid load has been associated with significantly higher risk of leaking protein into our urine, an indicator of kidney damage. This could help explain why people eating plant-based diets appear to have better kidney function, why being randomized to a more plant-based diet can significantly improve kidney function markers, and why plant-based diets have been shown to be successful in treating chronic kidney failure. Under normal circumstances, a vegetarian diet alkalinizes the kidneys, whereas a nonvegetarian diet carries an acid load. Surprisingly, this proved to be true even among vegetarians who consumed processed meat substitutes, such as veggie burgers. Those unwilling to reduce their meat consumption are encouraged to eat more fruits and vegetables to balance out the acid load.

What role might the excess acid stress play in aging and longevity? An editorial entitled, “Is baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) an anti-aging elixir?” pointed out that kidney patients that develop acidosis have higher mortality rates than those who don’t. Even in people with healthy kidneys, a higher dietary acid load is associated with death from all causes put together. Those with acidic or neutral urine (pH ≤ 7) were more than twice as likely to die prematurely than those with alkaline urine (pH >7). Other observation studies, however, found higher mortality at both ends of the extremes. In terms of putting it to the test, neutralization of the dietary acid load was able to significantly lower cortisol stress hormone levels, but the only interventional studies on longevity have been done on rodents. Give mice alkaline water to drink and their telomeres elongate and survival increases compared to controls. Athletes doping with baking soda to improve performance report gastrointestinal upset, including nausea, stomach pain, diarrhea, and vomiting, not to mention the excess sodium. It’s therefore preferable to alkalinize from the produce aisle.