With all the talk of acid reflux in week 12, I wanted to get clarification on bicarbonate of soda. I have a colleague who recently told me he suffers quite seriously from time to time from acid reflux. In the last episode of it, he started taking bicarbonate of soda, one teaspoon in water with half a lemon squeeze three times a day. He says it really helps him, I imagine only with the symptoms, but some people take bicarbonate of soda anyway because they think it’s good on several levels. It got me thinking about bicarbonate of soda. There’s so much chat about it online, bathing in it for detox, bathe in huge amounts, and equal good-quality sea salt. Can you be damaging yourself or making your inner chemistry imbalanced taking it internally so often or is it pretty harmless? In terms of reflux, is it just neutralizing the acid in the esophageal tract and that’s good or bad? Is it suppressing acid in the stomach? Will it lead to low stomach acid too?

Chris Kresser: The answer is, as you suspect, that yes, it is not really that different in principle than taking antacid drugs. It can help if the acid that is being produced in the stomach is going back up into the esophagus and it is causing discomfort, then certainly taking any kind of antacid, whether it’s bicarbonate of soda or a proton pump inhibitor (PPI), or some other kind of acid-blocking drug that’s going to deal with the symptoms, but it’s not going to deal with the underlying problem and it could potentially make it worse, as we discussed earlier.

As to whether it is advisable to take high doses of bicarbonate, if there is any potential harm in terms of imbalancing blood chemistry or internal chemistry, yes, it can actually. I’m not sure if you’ve read my articles or seen my presentation about the acid-alkaline myth. In that presentation and in those articles, I mentioned that the body tightly regulates the pH of our blood and extracellular fluid, and we can’t influence our blood pH by changing our diet.  However, the exception is that very high doses of sodium bicarbonate can temporarily increase blood pH, but it would cause pretty uncomfortable GI symptoms in the process. In other words, you’d have to take so much of it that it would cause some pretty rough GI symptoms before you’d experience that increase in blood pH. But nevertheless, it’s not a good therapeutic strategy. It’s certainly not functional medicine. You know in a pinch it might be helpful for just dealing with some of the discomfort, but it’s not at all a long-term solution.