I’m reliably informed that dear Gillian’s vanity is as fragile as her right to her title. Whilst admirers are allowed to gaze upon her fair form, contractual obligation, no less, states that her age must never be questioned…

Please note how I refrain from making the Dr Poo in her Turdis joke…

As for that cobblers abouit chlorophyll and that absolute tosh regarding Hydrogen ions… Does nobody check out this rubbish prior to transmission?

And why do people like this get away with it?? Because we let them, we are so eager to be told what to do. certainty in an uncertain world.

Carry this microchip, you’ll “be safe”. Give us your fingerprints for your “security”. take this pill to make your mind “right”. Give us your DNA, “just in case”. And the best laugh…. Look at your poo, it’s the wrong colour and texture, you’re gonna DIE….. QUACKERY pure and simple, worse it’s legal accepted quackery. certainty in an uncertain “war on terror” world.

Since they can’t excrete “metabolic acid” properly, and actually need to take oral alkali to “mop up” the metabolic acid, you would think they would be the absolute test case of people who would need to avoid “acidic foods”.

However, as far as I have been able to find out there is no hint these people are told to avoid “acid foods”. One US pediatric site with info on R Tubular Acidosis specifically said “diet changes to avoid acid foods don’t make any difference”.

- Implication being that the metabolic acid produced by your body going about its work is quantitatively more important than any acid in the foods you eat. reminds me a bit of dietary vs. “body-made” cholesterol.

The Doc stresses that people with these renal acid handling defects are v. rare – says she never saw one in 8+ yrs of hospital medicine, including a spell as a renal SHO (but had to learn all the syndromes periodically for exams…!).

Having said all the above, I HAVE dug up a learned opinion article in JASN (Journal of the American Soc Nephrol) which does argue that people should eat “alkaline foods”:

http://jasn.asnjournals.org/cgi/content/full/13/8/2186

[Ben - this paper also alludes to the evidence your email correspondent was probably talking about re acidity and bones, see their refs 34-36. ]

But…! …it turns out that eating alkaline foods equals – wait for it –

“increased dietary intake of fruits and vegetables ”

…hooray! Six portions of fruit and veg…again!

- I always like it when learned high-powered science turns out to support simple common-sense everyone-already-knews-this diet advice (“eat properly” – see above) rather than the obscurantist Boggleberry-bollocks of the alt “nutritionist” gang.

The real (Chinese-run) government in Tibet provides an appalling medical service which discriminates against Tibetans. If idiots in the West gave their surplus cash to helping proper medicine in Tibet rather than frittering it away on wolfberries, the world would be a better place.

Any chance we could persuade Dr McT to have the juice from a kilo of lemons instilled into her stomach via multi-barrel cannula, with repeat blood gas analysis and online stomach pH measurement?

Now that’s something I would set the HDrecorder for.

I doubt very much that you’d be able to significantly alter your acid/base balance with any food though – the body has some really amazing ways of correcting for a disturbance, and when they go wrong it’s fairly serious. Anyone we see on the wards with any degree of acidosis makes us run round shouting STAT! and things like that. We don’t need to, but it’s fun.

Seriously, though, any food sufficiently acidic to mess about woth your pH would make you feel very ill and vomit. Evolution is fucking brilliant like that.

Bill

This is an interesting point WRT the med students I teach, BTW – they love NUMBERS and TESTS and, at least when interpreting their “paper case scenarios”, tend to largely neglect more mundane “observations”.

On a more acid-base theme, becoming alkalotic by losing acid (vomiting) or acidotic by losing HCO3- (eg cholera) are also concepts students tend to find tricky to grasp.

I guess the thing this discussion shows wot we can ALL agree on is that acids and bases in yer body is a flddly business, about which G McTeeth knows F all squared.

Still on acids and bases: A medical Q for the MBChB gang: is it REALLY possible to acid-load yourself significantly by eating anything FOOD related (cf all the bleatings of the Alt nutrition lobby about “food acidity”?)

..And I mean a food food, not necking 100 grammes of Ammonium Chloride or something like that. Could you really give yourself a metabolic acidosis by eating loads of lemons? And how many would you have to eat in what time frame?

Conversion is urea 1 mg/dl = 0.357 mmol/l, Creatnine 1mg/dl = 88.4 micromol/l

I think I deserve bonus points because I worked it out having never had an Omega 3 Fish Oil capsule in my life. If only I’d gone to school in Durham….

Bill

anyway, yup, absolutely correct, a mixed metabolic acidosis from renal failure and an alkalosis from vomming, giving a weirdly unweird pH etc. fly moves dr gibson and apols dr aust about the confusing units..

Tough one though…

Bill

According to their booklet:
“Tibet Authentic Pty Ltd is the exclusive global distributor to the western world of the Tibetan Medical College (part owned by the government of Tibet). Tibet Authentic works closely with the Tibetan Medical college, the government of Tibet and the people of Tibet to bring to the western world Tibet’s most beneficial, valuable products and ancient secrets”.

I have been asked to look into the health benefits of Goji berries and was able to summarise the benefits in one sentence “I have been able to find absolutely zero good scientific evidence regarding the benefits of Goji berries”. This news was not well received.

110 (mg/dL) for creatinine
8.7 (mM) for urea

.. would look more “plausible”, both in normal range