This article published on McGill “Office for science and society” describes the alkaline diet as complete nonsense.
Alkaline Nonsense
Joe Schwarcz PhD | 20 Mar 2017
It is so seductively simple. If you want to avoid cancer, just make sure your body is “alkaline!” Here is the rationale. When a cell becomes cancerous it reduces its use of oxygen and cranks up its production of acids. These conditions then allow such cells to multiply quickly. To counter this, you have to ensure that cells get an adequate supply of oxygen and that the acids produced are neutralized. How? By introducing sources of oxygen such as hydrogen peroxide or ozone into the body and consuming “alkaline” foods. If cancer has already taken a foothold, then it may be necessary to dose up on cesium, the “most alkaline nutritional mineral.” So simple, and so wrong!
As so often happens, promoters of nonsensical therapies seize a few filaments of scientific fact and weave these into a tangled web that ensnares the desperate and the scientifically confused. In this case, it all starts with the work of German physician Otto Warburg who received the 1931 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on cellular metabolism. Warburg showed that that the growth of malignant cells requires markedly smaller amounts of oxygen than that of normal cells and that their metabolism follows an “anaerobic” pathway leading to the production of lactic acid. This notion lay dormant until the 1980’s when Dr. Keith Brewer, a physicist with no medical training, used it to support his perplexing theory of how potassium and calcium control the transport of glucose and oxygen into cells, and how irritation of the cell’s membrane interferes with this transport system. The result, Brewer maintained, is the “Warburg effect,” which lowers the cell’s pH, reduces its oxygen supply, and causes changes in DNA characteristic of cancer. He then went on to claim that cesium’s chemically similarity to potassium allows it to be readily taken up by cells, but that unlike potassium, it does not transport glucose into cells while allowing oxygen to enter. As a result, cancer cells are enriched in oxygen, deprived of glucose, form less lactic acid, become more alkaline, and as a consequence, die. Sounds good, but Brewer got the “Warburg effect” all wrong. Cancer cells do shift to a mode of metabolism that doesn’t use oxygen, but this happens even in the presence of oxygen!
Brewer went on to buttress his argument by claiming that cancer is almost unknown among the Hopi Indians of Arizona, the highland Indians of Peru and the Hunza of North Pakistan. Why? Because due to the cesium in the soil, they have a “high pH” diet. Whether these people actually do have a lower cancer rate is questionable, and even if this were the case, it could not be ascribed to cesium in the diet without further investigation. But then to take the cake (undoubtedly cesium enriched) Brewer in 1984 published a paper with the following claim: “Tests have been carried out on over 30 humans and in each case the tumour masses disappeared. Also, all pains and effects associated with cancer disappeared within 12 to 36 hours; the more chemotherapy and morphine the patient had taken, the longer the withdrawal period.” Not only had he discovered the cancer cure that had eluded the thousands of PhDs and MDs working in cancer research around the world, but he also showed that chemotherapy was actually harmful. Quite a claim!
