What is alkaline diet? Just one of those latest dietary fads? According to Rational Wiki, "Alkaline diets are light on science and heavy on bullshit". Well, I've done some research and actually got two doctors separately confirm to me that we should indeed do something to change the pH value of the body, at least when it comes to the intestines, and that it can be changed through food.
My entire life, I've been plagued by digestive problems, such as bloatedness and diarrhea. It's messy but you don't know the half of it. In essence, I couldn't leave the house for any longer period of time because I had to have a toilet right next to me; when the phone rang, I had to pick it up immediately. It came to the point I even carried around sheets of paper towels (no amount of toilet paper was enough) to wipe myself in case I had to use a public restroom or just go behind the bush, which did happen to me on occasion. In short, immense embarrassment 24/7.
I eventually felt a bump right between my butt cheeks. It did pop up over the course of years and it bled from time to time but I thought nothing of it. I did change the way I sit and started putting pillows beneath my butt to alleviate the pressure; eventually I'll even start sitting on my ankle just to make the discomfort tolerable. The bump itched, throbbed and overall made itself known at all times of the day. Eventually, it became permanent.
In February 2019, I decided I've had enough. I visited a dermatologist and asked her to please rid me of this pestilence. She confirmed that I had hemorrhoids and prescribed daily pills and an ointment to be used twice a day, both used continually for at least 3 months. She also asked, "How would you like to see a gastroenterologist?" I was thrilled to finally be making some progress towards solving what seemed like an intractable problem, so I accepted straight away. She sent me to her friend from college who happened to be employed in a nearby medical facility.
When I visited the GE, he asked me to lift up my shirt and touched my stomach. I flinched. He flinched too and said, "You shouldn't be this tense. I recommend a colonoscopy." Again, I was ready to do anything just to find out what's wrong with me. At that moment, GE asked if I was under stress, which I denied at first; only later will I realize just how much stress I was under.
Colonoscopy was a fun experience that should eventually get its own article but suffice it to say that the result came back clean and the diagnosis was IBS. In layman terms, "tummy has ouchie". GE did order a couple stool tests, among which was Candida. That one came back positive, with a comment by the lab technician "enormous quantities". Now we were finally getting somewhere. I knew Candida is a fungus that thrives on sugar, which I did indulge in all the time, so it made sense.
Going back to the same medical facility for an abdominal ultrasound (GE noticed discomfort during colonoscopy and thought prostate problems, which didn't turn out serious, just a case of chills), I showed the Candida lab report and asked the intern, "What do you recommend?" He said, "Candida is a nasty intruder, it's very hard to dislodge but you can make its life more difficult by buying baking soda in the pharmacy and taking 1/2 a teaspoon twice a day in a glass of water." He emphasized it should be the pharmacy one, not bought in a grocery store.
Later on, I'll visit the GE again, show the Candida report and get Nystatin as treatment, but the relevant part of our dialog was when I asked him, "What do you think about eating fruit?" I had been eating about a kilogram of apples a day since I was a kid. GE said, "Eating too much fruit can acidify the intestines and cause diarrhea. I recommend fruit in moderation." I was stunned. So, it was all my fault? Kfuc. Me.
Only a few months later will I learn about alkaline diet, mainly because I was commissioned a text on it. As soon as I spotted "baking soda" as one of the main ingredients in the alkaline diet, the dots connected and I knew it was legit. Alkaline diet and the notion of pH value, albeit in intestines, was confirmed to me independently by two doctors who I ambushed with my questions, giving me sincere, coherent and articulated responses that lined up with principles of alkaline diet. I'll take that over kfucing Rational Wiki and its reasoning of, what was it? Ah yes, "Alkaline diets are light on science and heavy on bullshit." Let's see, who were the Rational Wiki authors who wrote that article? FuzzyCatPotato, MastaPeanut, KnightOfTL;DR, Achilles911 and co. Thanks guys, what a splendid piece of writing, the web is truly a shittier place with you around.
So, what does alkaline diet say? Acidity or alkalinity of the immediate vicinity enables or disables certain body processes and, as I've experienced myself, allows for overgrowth of dangerous microorganisms. By changing the pH value, meaning by ingesting edibles that alkalinize the intestines, pests like Candida can be curbed and their regrowth controlled or stopped. To me, this part is indisputable and I would need a tremendous set of proofs to convince me otherwise. So, what's the contentious part? Well, nobody knows if alkaline diet can change pH value of, say, the brain or that that's a good thing to begin with.
What critics of alkaline diet do say is that the body has more than enough ways to alkalinize itself; any experimenting with alkaline diet can only cause problems. This is what I mostly agree with but I don't find criticisms of alkaline diet balanced or constructive; a healthy body has enough ways to alkalinize itself but an ill one doesn't. All right, let's take a different approach to understand what's going on – what does one eat on alkaline diet?
Foods that are considered alkalinizing are Allium vegetables, meaning garlic, onion and all the relatives, which can count in the thousands. It's impossible to be exhaustive, so you should try discovering the relation of a vegetable you're eyeing with Allium vegetables and go for a taste test. Another alkaline food group is Cucurbitaceae, meaning cucumber, pumpkin, squash, zucchini etc. Again, varieties here can be enormous so do study a bit on what you're eating and its Latin name.
Brassicaceae family contains cabbages, meaning kale, cauliflower, broccoli but also turnips, radishes etc. Finally, Apiaceae contains carrot, celery, parsnip and others. Here we actually find toxic plants that can be dangerous to health if eaten in excess but in general it's all known effects. Even then, these foods are filling to the point you simply can't overdo them but let's check if carrots do actually have toxins. The real Wikipedia says this:
Falcarindiol is a polyacetylene found in carrot roots which has antifungal activity. Falcarindiol is the main compound responsible for bitterness in carrots.
I wonder in what way falcarindiol works against fungus, perhaps by changing pH value to make its life more difficult? So, alkaline diet essentially recommends eating onions, cucumber, kale, cabbage, pumpkin, broccoli, zucchini, carrots and other supremely safe vegetables that satiate and have barely any calories. How in the world is Rational Wiki against alkaline diet? What is the reasoning behind their takedown? As you can imagine, Rational Wiki has to ramp up the edginess to make the article on alkaline diet even remotely readable; the problem is that it shaves off nuance.
This is the approach called "strawman", meaning the writer associates a weak position with the opponent and then knocks it down, proclaiming victory. In this case, it's a coral calcium supplement sold by a certain Bob Barefoot, who noted one ingredient in it to be "alkalinizing". Apparently it's not enough that we have cucumbers and carrots seeing how people feel the need to buy scraped off pieces of coral to eat. To me, the coral calcium problem shows that people like to experiment with their food, which is why I noted Latin names of foods; investigate, learn and have fun tasting vegetables. It's not a bad way to eat, as long as you know what's edible.
Rational Wiki also has to concede that alkaline diet contains so many healthy foods that it basically randomly improves health while still maintaining the thesis that the diet itself is terrible because some guy harvested coral and ground it for calcium supplements. Check out this section off of Rational Wiki's article on alkaline diet that admits through gritted teeth that it aids weight loss while maintaining that the diet itself is worthless:
"Browsing the list of acid and alkali foods, it should become instantly apparent that the foods to avoid are those classically associated with a high calorie diet (dairy products, fizzy drinks, confectionery, fast food, and just about all fats), and those marked as alkaline are generally fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. If you avoid eating gobs of fat and sugar and otherwise keep the same lifestyle, your weight goes down - who'da thunk it?"
Just come out and say it: "Alkaline foods are healthy but charlatans latch on to the name and sell their overpriced products with no proven health benefits while also endangering the environment". I'd respect FuzzyCatPotato, MastaPeanut, KnightOfTL;DR, Achilles911 and co. much more if they just came out and admitted that the world isn't black and white. As I said, there's little nuance in the Rational Wiki writing because the name sets out the tone and hampers what FuzzyCatPotato, MastaPeanut, KnightOfTL;DR, Achilles911 and co. can do with the topic at hand – they simply have to join ranks and attack it or the poor reader might get confused. Any nuance leads to an actual debate and then we might learn something new; we can't have any learning.
Besides, choosing to attack the most absurd position is just so straightforward. Why do any research when the opponent exposed his Achilles' heel and the Rational Wiki writers just have to let the verbal arrow loose? Consider that I had to actually buy a tiny cup and spoon in the pharmacy for taking a stool sample, carry it to the lab, pay for the test, pay for the ultrasound, pay for GE consultation and ask the questions to finally reveal just a tiny bit of information and then pour all of that into an article to publish; Rational Wiki writers can just point and laugh for free, but that's not how we should be debating.
We should be bringing forth the distilled wisdom of our lives, things we learned from experts we interacted with rather than discussing the most absurd aspects of ideas. Imagine if FuzzyCatPotato, MastaPeanut, KnightOfTL;DR, Achilles911 and co. each visited 2 doctors, asked them the same question about Candida/apples I did, collated their answers into a wiki article on pH value in intestines as it relates to Candida/apples and then used that as a basis to debunk Bob's supplement. Now that would be a magnificent article, one worth printing and framing but typical wiki rules forbid what's known as "original research" because Wikipedia was originally built under the assumption that its editors are hackers, hence the pseudonyms meant to protect writers' identities.
I'll probably make a separate text on Wikipedia, but a tenet rule of it is that it doesn't recognize any expertise as valuable, hence the "anyone can edit", and it's easy to see that's the case with Rational Wiki too – none of the writers there are experts. Wikipedia actually had experts ragequitting because they were considered just another editor who did "original research", meaning they had actually useful information to add. In the case of Rational Wiki, the fact that none of them know anything on the topic of dieting is covered up by edginess, incessant desire to verbally humiliate and emotionally degrade whoever they feel justified in doing so. Rational debate is impossible when nobody wants to expose his personal life while endlessly strawmanning abstract concepts to knock them down.
Alkaline diet has a tremendous property that isn't immediately apparent, namely that it helps a dieter that's trying to wean himself off of junk food by giving him a novel approach to meals. For example, someone who wants to stop eating pizza might try a healthy diet and quickly get bored. Now what? Without a novel dieting idea, he'll just go back to pizza and be even more miserable but with alkaline diet, meaning a diet themed around cucumber, carrot, pumpkin, onion and other foods, all of a sudden he finds a whole new universe of food that keeps him away from pizza for just one more day, but perhaps that's all he needs to break free.
Rather than recognizing there are people out there who genuinely need help dieting to the point they'll eat coral calcium, Rational Wiki opts for slapping coral calcium onto alkaline diet and then shooting the entire package down for easy ego points. Why not delete everything from the article save the only thing that they, the skeptics, found valid in alkaline diet: it helps weight loss? That's it, just put that conclusion in bold letters front and center and remove all the other fluff. Imagine how much of a positive change that could have made. But no, that's never going to happen because Rational Wiki is merely a place to stir up drama, coat it with quasi-scientific babble and plaster it on the internet, which I just conclusively proved through this one text explaining the one topic I happen to be familiar with and interested in.
Dieting isn't hard, it's slow. The key is simply powering through each day eating whatever isn't highly processed gunk until the old dieting habit is weakened or broken. It takes years or decades to restore a healthy body weight but who has the patience to do that? In that irrational desire to be healthy, people experiment with unproven or toxic substances but the tragedy is that there is a wealth of provably healthy, satiating and safe foods that are great for experimentation. That's what Rational Wiki could have done, simply stated that dieting takes time but with proper foods it's doable, nudging people off of coral calcium towards kale, cucumber and carrot. Why not make Rational Wiki a collection of smart, useful ideas that genuinely help people? We can't have that because then FuzzyCatPotato, MastaPeanut, KnightOfTL;DR, Achilles911 and co. wouldn't be scoring any easy ego points. Oh well, nomen est omen.