We’ve posted here, in the past, a number of stories in which inflammation has been shown to play a part in causing and perpetuating a wide variety of diseases. Now, a new study shows that simply by taking a common antacid, you can reduce systemic inflammation and stop the inflammation cycle…
A spoonful of baking soda a day in a glass of water could help you avoid
the dangers of systemic inflammation…
Researchers at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University have demonstrated that simply drinking a glass of water with a spoonful of baking soda in it every day can help reduce or even stop harmful systemic inflammation – a cause of, or contributor to many abdominal and other ills.
Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University have shown that, when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal, and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there’s no need to mount a protective immune response.
“It’s most likely a hamburger not a bacterial infection,” is basically the message, says Dr. Paul O’Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University and the study’s Corresponding Author.
In the spleen, as well as the blood and kidneys, they found after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of immune cells called macrophages, shifted from primarily those that promote inflammation, called M1, to those that reduce it, called M2. Macrophages, perhaps best known for their ability to consume garbage in the body like debris from injured or dead cells, are early responders to a call for an immune response.
What it means…
“You are not really turning anything off or on, you are just pushing it toward one side by giving an anti-inflammatory stimulus,” he says, in this case, away from harmful inflammation. “It’s potentially a really safe way to treat inflammatory disease.”
The treatment, once codified, could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of conditions ranging from kidney disease to rheumatoid arthritis.
My take…
It just makes sense to me, when science, in all its intricate and arcane glory, comes up with a simple, straightforward finding like the baking soda – inflammation connection. I hope this discovery, so far demonstrated successfully only in lab animals, can be adapted for human use.
Meanwhile… I’m going to take a glass of water with a teaspoon of baking soda every day for a week and see if I notice any difference…
~ Maggie J.