As your favorite feathered dinosaur has been struck with COVID-19, he hasn’t been up to writing new content, so I’m bringing back my turkey and tryptophan myth busting article. Just in time for Thanksgiving, which I won’t be celebrating because I’m sheltering in place.
The old Thanksgiving turkey and tryptophan causing sleep myth appears every year on the fourth Thursday in November when the United States celebrates a holiday called Thanksgiving. You’ll hear about it over and over and over.
Basically, after eating mountains of food, including turkey, one of the guests at the table (fully vaccinated, of course) will pontificate about how eating turkey, which they claim is high in tryptophan, makes everyone want to sleep after the meal.
Every time I go to the grocery store, I see shelves stuffed with alkaline water. I always shake my head, because I happen to know what the body does with any food or water that is alkaline or acidic. It buffers it to the normal pH of the body so that alkaline water doesn’t do anything. Well, it is expensive.
There are a lot of bogus reasons to drink alkaline water, but we’re going to focus on just one of the claims — it helps prevent cancer. I’ll make this simple, no it does not.
There are so many inaccurate, misleading, and harmful claims about cancer that I could spend years just debunking them. One of the most popular assertions is that acidic blood causes cancer — that is, if you lower the pH of the blood, it creates an environment to let cancer thrive.
And even if you do all of them, you just reduce your absolute risk, not completely eliminate it. You could randomly get a set of mutations – there are several trillion cells in the body, and even if genetic copying in cell division or transcription were 99.999% perfect, it still leaves millions of chances of mutations – that lead to cancer.
And then there are at least 200-250 different cancers, all with different causes, pathophysiologies, prognoses, and treatments. In other words, even if you found some miracle way to prevent one cancer 100% of the time, it probably will not affect the other 200 or so cancers. We have tended to conflate cancer as one disease when it is a large set of diseases that have the same general physiology but aren’t truly related.
Cancer is scary because it is so random. In many cases, the treatment is so harsh. And people are so interested in anything that may prevent cancer. And if it’s simple like “eat superfoods like kale and blueberries,” or “reduce acid in your blood,” the instinct is to try it out.
But let’s examine how and if acidic blood causes cancer. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t.
Let’s start right at the top (and without apology, a very scientific explanation)— what is the normal pH of blood? Firstly, pH is a numeric scale used to specify the acidity or alkalinity of an aqueous solution, such as blood. A neutral pH (that is, neither acidic nor alkaline) is 7.0.
To be honest, pH was my least favorite topic in college chemistry. Professors would say “more acidic” which means pH less than 7.0. And the lower the number, the higher the acidity. And, to make this even more complicated, “more alkaline” means pH higher than 7.0 — and the higher the number means higher the alkalinity.
My head spun around just writing that.
Basically (pun intended), pH measures the number of hydrogen ions in water, which causes acidity, while the lack of them (relatively speaking), causes alkalinity.
The pH of blood runs about 7.35–7.45 in healthy human beings. It’s slightly alkaline (very slightly), and controlled in a very narrow range. The balance between the acid and base of human blood is called acid-base homeostasis.
Essentially, the acid-base balance is tightly regulated by chemical buffers in the blood, the lungs, and the kidneys. They work together in a very complex manner to maintain the blood pH. For example, the lungs can expel more or less carbon dioxide to produce or reduce bicarbonate, which buffers acids. The kidneys help in the same process.
Breathing and kidney function change rapidly to keep the pH at a “normal” level. It is near-instantaneous. You don’t even have to think about it, it just happens.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to get into each of these, but an example of metabolic acidosis is when a diabetic becomes uncontrolled with extremely high glucose levels. This leads to a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a dangerous condition. However, even in the most life-threatening DKA, the pH of the blood drops to around 7.0-7.1, still neutral to very slightly alkaline. The reason why it’s so dangerous isn’t necessarily the acidity itself (the body doesn’t dissolve from the acidity), it’s because the lungs and kidneys are working overtime to increase the pH, which leads to other issues like drops in blood potassium.
My point here is that it takes a severe insult to the body’s metabolism and physiology to cause a big change in pH. You cannot simply change the pH of your blood if you’re in good health, which almost all of us are.
The reason the body maintains the pH so carefully is that our body’s proteins, enzymes, and other biochemicals are stable at that narrow pH range of 7.35-7.45. Once the pH goes below or above that level, the various biochemicals become unstable or quit working as they’re supposed. Proteins can begin to denature, making them useless to the body’s physiology. You simply cannot adjust your body’s pH that much without dying.
Let’s take a look at a simple example of consuming something that you would think would cause your blood pH to change. The pH of Coca-Cola is around 2.5, fairly acidic, mostly in the form of phosphoric acid. If you drank 1 liter of that product, which is quite a bit, you’d not affect your blood pH. Now as it hits the mouth, sure, it’s acidic enough to have some very temporary local effect. But a systemic effect on your blood? No.
Even though a pH of 2.5 sounds very acidic, it is actually 15 times less acidic than gastric juices which have a pH of 1 (just since someone is checking my math, pH is logarithmic, so 2.5 is approximately 15 times lower acidity than 1.0). Proteins and other chemicals in your stomach generally buffer the gastric acid before it moves too far into the intestines, which means drinking soda all day is not going to change your blood pH.
The same thing can be said about alkaline water — no matter how alkaline the water is, the body will buffer it. That alkaline water will be neutralized the instant it hits the very acidic stomach. Depending on what chemical is added to your bottle of water to make it alkaline, usually, sodium bicarbonate, once it combines with the stomach acid it will form salt and carbon dioxide gas. You’ll burp a lot.
This is important to note – nearly everyone has normal blood pH. Even diabetics who are well controlled have normal pH. If something is causing your blood pH to vary from normal, the blood pH itself is probably not going to be the biggest worry, but what is causing it to do that will be.
<figure>Photo by Arnie Watkins on Pexels.com</figure>
Why does acidic blood cause cancer?
The short answer is “it doesn’t.”
There is some evidence that some cancers may require an acidic microenvironment, meaning the few cubic millimeters around the cancer cells. Moreover, it’s not the body itself that creates this microenvironment, it’s the cancer cells, through independent mutations, that have created it.
Furthermore, the way that some cancers can consume energy through glycolysis can create an acidic microenvironment. This doesn’t mean that the acidic environment causes cancer or that cancer survives because of it. The acidic microenvironment is a result of how some cancers consume glucose.
So treating cancer may (and there’s no robust evidence) involved attacking the cancer site with an alkaline agent. But read that carefully – attacking the cancer cells themselves. More importantly, this evidence is a mouse model. And let me keep repeating this point – very few therapies that work in mouse models work in humans. And we’re not even sure of anything in the current research.
Furthermore, there’s this belief out there that if you can kill a mouse cell with some substance, then eating a bunch of that substance will kill cancer. Nevertheless, the cancer pseudoscience pushers have leaped onto the “acidic blood causes cancer” nonsense, which leads us to alkaline water. There is simply no evidence that in the earliest stages of cancer, the blood of the patient has any different pH, other than normal.
In the study I linked above, by Robey and Martin, the researchers suggested that a dose of approximately 12 g of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, a base or alkaline) per day would buffer the acid produced by cancer that is around 1 cubic mm in size. In other words, if you could increase the pH around a tiny, almost invisible, cancer, you’d need to deliver that 12 g of baking soda to that site.
And you could not possibly consume enough alkaline, like sodium bicarbonate, in sufficient quantity to generally increase the pH of your blood. First, sodium bicarbonate is toxic at high doses (it is a very safe compound, but as we’ve mentioned here before, the dose makes the poison). For a normal 65 kg adult, 30 gm of baking soda can cause serious health problems, as a result of the excess sodium and gases released when the baking soda hits the acidic environment of the stomach.
Once again, the stomach is going to buffer the alkaline water, since it will hit a pH 1.0 environment in the stomach. One more thing, even though the stomach is a pH 1.0 microenvironment, stomach cancer is quite rare.
People have this enduring belief that what we eat or drink has some significant impact on our health. Even if kale could prevent one of the 200 or more cancers, you couldn’t possibly consume enough to have any impact on that cancer. And besides that, the intestinal tract breaks that kale down into simple sugars, amino acids, and nucleic acids that are indistinguishable from all other simple sugars, amino acids, and nucleic acids from all other foods.
Again, if certain cancers do create an acidic microenvironment, scientists are going to figure out the best way to get an alkaline agent to that cancer directly. It could be as simple as injecting sodium bicarbonate into the tumor mass. Or much more complicated.
But it’s never going to be as easy as eating a spoonful of baking soda – it will not change the pH of the blood in any meaningful way. To the body, that spoonful of baking soda will combine with the acid in the stomach to form water, salt, and carbon dioxide. You’ll burp a lot. But you still have the same risk of cancer.
If you’re reading some pseudoscience on Joe Mercola’s for-profit website about how making your blood more alkaline will prevent cancer? It’s false. Your blood is slightly alkaline, and there is no way to change it. Well, other than having some other medical condition that changes blood pH that will be more acutely critical than worrying about cancer.
Let’s make this simple:
There is no evidence that the acidic environment is either causal to cancer or promotes its growth. It’s merely a consequence of the metabolic process of cancer cells.
Even if you could limit the growth of the cancer cells by neutralizing the acidic environment, that would take a locally targeted therapy, not a diet change.
A peer-reviewed neurosurgery journal published a COVID-19 denier editorial that peddled false statements about the COVID-19 pandemic without any scientific and unbiased evidence to support the claims.
I am not sure what possessed the journal to publish a COVID-19 denier article, maybe something to do with false balance or something else, but you know that this article, by appearing in a peer-reviewed journal, will be used by the anti-vaccine forces as a justification for the COVID-19 denier nonsense.
Let’s take a look at this article and refute the claim presented in the COVID-19 denier editorial. This should be easy.
The editorial, by Russell Blaylock, MD, was published on 22 April 2022, in Surgical Neurology International, and included numerous false statements about COVID-19 and the pandemic.
Who is Russell Blaylock? He is a retired neurosurgeon who seems to be attached to right-wing politics. Blaylock currently sells supplements called “Brain Repair Formula” on his website (like many of the other quacks who are COVID-19 deniers) and writes for the conservative news outlet Newsmax.
Blaylock has spread misinformation in the nutrition world, claiming that certain food additives are “excitotoxic” to the brain in normal doses. Many have credited the former neurosurgeon for starting the health scare around monosodium glutamate (MSG is safe) after writing in his 1994 book, Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills, that it could be linked to brain damage and neurodegenerative diseases.
The opinion piece, entitled “COVID UPDATE: What is the truth?” stated that the COVID-19 pandemic was “one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history.” Blaylock claimed that the pandemic was characterized by false information from government officials and medical societies. He also claimed giant pharmaceutical companies are manipulating the media to push false information about the pandemic and vaccines.
Even though this article was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Blaylock did not have any evidence that supported his claims. I’m not sure why Surgical Neurology International published it, but it makes it appear that they tacitly support what he wrote.
He is definitely anti-vaccine, stating that the swine flu was a human-made virus, and promoting cold showers as a remedy to counter the “dangerous effects” of the H1N1 flu vaccine. Cold showers? No, I’m not going to explain.
To be fair, Blaylock does cite references in his COVID-19 denier opinion piece. Unfortunately, a big chunk of them is from Robert F Kennedy, Jr’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Blaylock says that the Kennedy book is not a reliable source, yet he uses it extensively. It’s kind of hard to overlook that.
Otherwise, Blaylock uses citations that are either conspiracy websites/blogs or actual articles that refute his claims. It’s troubling that the journal accepted this.
Setting that aside, let’s look at some of his other claims.
“Hundreds of thousands” of people have died from the COVID-19 vaccine. This is based on a bad analysis of VAERS and should be dismissed out of hand.
Masks. Blaylock claims that “wearing a mask for over 4 hours (as occurs in all schools) results in significant hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels) and hypercapnia (high CO2 levels).” However, the source that he cites says that there’s no statistical difference between mask-wearing and non-wearing groups.
Advertising. Blaylock claims that “Television media receives the majority of its advertising budget from the international pharmaceutical companies.” The source he uses for this states that Big Pharma spent around US$7 billion on advertising, which is about 3.5% of the total advertising of US$200 billion in the US alone.
Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Blaylock claims that “the majority of these deaths could have been prevented had doctors been allowed to use early treatment with such products as Ivermectin, hydroxy-chloroquine and a number of other safe drugs and natural compounds. Hydroxychloroquine does not do anything to treat COVID-19. Neither does the horse dewormer ivermectin.
Uterine cancer. Blaylock writes that a physician “found a frighteningly high incidence of highly aggressive cancers in vaccinated individuals, especially highly invasive melanomas in young people and uterine cancers in women.” Where was this published? Natural News, do I need to say more?
Anthony Fauci blocked autopsied of people who died after vaccination. I do not know what Blaylock thinks is Dr. Fauci’s power over autopsies, but he has no power over them. It’s just one of the dozens of crazy conspiracy theories in the editorial.
There is so much more, but my brain is losing neurons reading his nonsense. But let me leave you with this screenshot of his vaccine conspiracy:
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I could write five articles about this alone. But I won’t waste your time. I have debunked many COVID-19 vaccine myths before.
My thoughts
I have no clue why Surgical Neurology International published Blaylock’s unscientific screed, but they did. Maybe it decided to do it because of their extremely low impact factor of 0.86. That’s one of the lowest I’ve seen in a while, outside of junk predatory journals.
Of course, the journal states that the articles it publishes must be “fact-based,” but added that it “understands that facts may be interpreted differently by different readers.” Facts are facts, they aren’t subject to interpretation. Vaccines are safe and effective, that’s settled science.
Let’s be clear about this article. It is an editorial, it is not based on clinical or epidemiological evidence. It is clear that Blaylock, a true COVID-19 denier, used the platform to push conspiracies, disinformation, and FUD about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. That’s it. This is not science, not even close.
However, I am certain that I will see this referenced by anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 deniers everywhere, and they’ll claim it’s a peer-reviewed article. It is not. And it was published in a minor, not highly respected journal.
I didn’t know it was a thing, but I guess some people claimed that there was a link between a COVID-19 vaccine and shingles. But in the name of science, researchers published a study that refuted the link between the COVID-19 vaccine and shingles.
I’m glad it’s not linked, even though I never thought it was. So, as I always do, let’s review the study and see what it says.
I wanted to go back to vaping, and the safety of electronic cigarettes (EC, to save my typing fingers). ECs were originally developed as a tool to quit cigarette smoking, which is factually linked to lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. And if that’s all they did, then this article would be very short. But we really need to look at the science of the safety of vaping, and that’s going to take a lot of writing.
ECs have become much more than a tool to end smoking, they have evolved into a popular subculture phenomenon known as the “vaping community” that, in many respects, seems to parallel the marijuana advocates. The vaping community continues to push a belief that ECs are safer than traditional cigarettes, have little health risk to the vaper (electronic cigarette smoker), and is much more socially acceptable than smoking cigarettes or cigars.
During the 2022 midterm election, California voters decided to support a ban on flavored tobacco products, including flavored electronic cigarettes. That’s a step in the right direction to keep people, especially children and teens, from thinking that it’s like candy.
What are the dangers of electronic cigarettes? Are there any at all? Has the safety of vaping ever been adequately researched? This article is going to dig into it. And we’re going to have a boatload of fun from commenters because I have got a feeling that their beliefs matter more than science with respect to the overall safety of vaping.
As I wrote previously, statins are important in preventing cardiovascular disease and mortality, but people continue to push dietary supplements as a better alternative to statins. Well, a new study blows that claim out of the water — statins are better for your cardiovascular health than dietary supplements.
I keep writing about supplements, and rarely do I find powerful, robust, and repeated evidence that supplements have any positive effect on one’s health. Occasionally, some research might show a small clinical benefit, but mostly, taking supplements means you have very expensive urine since most of it is removed by your kidneys.
As most of you who read this blog know that I love reviewing these articles, so you have the bullet points for the results. Of course, the article is linked, so you can get into the weeds if you want. Here we go.
Your skeptical and feathered ancient dinosaur has been broken by life. And I do need your help in any way you can.
Over the past 36 months, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. It’s like Murphy and his law are standing on my shoulders making everything go wrong.
I don’t mean to be whiny and make it seem that I’m the only one who goes through trials and tribulations, but I’m too old to do this. I’m supposed to be enjoying life, but there are days I want to give up. But here is just a sampling of what I’ve been through over the past year and a half:
A romantic breakup.
My relatively new car decides to just fall apart just after the warranty expires. Of course.
My major source of income is this website, and it collapsed in readership in 2022 causing my income to drop to a tiny percentage of what it was in 2021. I wish I know what caused it, I think it’s a Google thing, but I have been unable to fix it. I still post 20-30 articles a month, way beyond what many bloggers do.
I was robbed three times, yes, three times. My nice camera equipment and other important stuff were stolen including my passport, credit cards, and other stuff. I cannot afford to replace my newer MacBook Pro, so I’m using an older one that I could afford, even though it makes it more difficult to do images and research.
And then there’s my 16-day stay in the hospital for cellulitis. I nearly died. I nearly lost my leg. I’m going to incur significant expenses for this. Even though I have outstanding healthcare insurance, I received care at a hospital that was not owned or contracted by my insurance plan. This is one of the flaws of the US healthcare system, a subject that I might write about later. I’m lying in the ICU, and the case manager has to discuss financial issues with me. I could barely concentrate on my leg, let alone what the hell is going on with insurance issues.
Finally, I started this fundraising to get closer to my children. That goal seems unattainable right now.
I know that the story of this feathered dinosaur isn’t close to what many people in the world go through. I’m not dying of cancer. I’m not scrambling to find my next meal. I’m not suffering from dementia. To many, I’m lucky and privileged.
I don’t want to compare myself to others, I can only communicate to my friends and strangers what I’m feeling, and that is I’m running out of energy. And I need your help.
There are three ways you can help me.
Number 1
The first way costs you no money, other than buying something on Amazon. Just click on the image/link and buy whatever suits your fancy.
All you have to do is go to my Patreon Page and my latest posts from here will appear there as if they were magic, without any advertising. You get the same articles that are here, but ad-free (which I know some people want). It only costs $5 to be a Patron, but more will help too.
Number 3
And the final way is on my GoFundMe page:
Bonus Number 4
Oh, there’s one really easy way to help me out. Please share my articles on any social media platform you like, that really helps all the time.
Many of you know who Dr. Leana Wen, MD, Research Professor of Health Policy and Management at George Washington University, is because she is one of the current voices in public health issues. She has written twobooks and she has been outspoken during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was also the CEO of Planned Parenthood.
However, you may be like me, and you may have never heard of her before. It’s possible I read something about her in the past, but I just don’t remember it.
Unfortunately, she has been a target of both sides of the political spectrum — during the first part of the pandemic the anti-mask and anti-vaccine community despised her because she supported COVID-19 restrictions. Lately, she has supported the relaxation of those restrictions and has been attacked by some who think that those restrictions should remain, especially masks.
To be clear, I support keeping COVID-19 restrictions, at least through this winter, but I do not advocate violence against anyone, including Dr. Wen. No matter what the source of the attacks is, and I am embarrassed that it is my side that is the attacker, attacking scientists is against everything I stand for.
This week, Dr. Wen was supposed to speak at a panel discussion at the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting in Boston that focused on countering backlash against public health. Ironic, isn’t it? At any rate, she withdrew because of “credible threats” against her.
Whether or not you support her public health policy statements, and I know a lot of my friends don’t, she is a credible scientist that shouldn’t be forced from an important public health forum because of reasons.
I enjoy repeating myself about the HPV vaccine, but another systematic review says it is effective in preventing HPV infections. And when we can prevent HPV infections, we can prevent a long list of cancers.
I know some of you think that your blueberry kale smoothies prevent cancer, but there are really only a handful of ways to prevent cancer. The HPV vaccine is one of the most effective methods to prevent cancer.
Let’s review HPV, the HPV vaccine, and this new systematic review.
Red No. 3 is a food coloring used in some foods, many of which will be familiar to you. As the name implies, it’s a red dye that makes candies and foods look better. It’s really not been in the news for decades, but then someone sent me an article about it, which piqued my interest.
Predictably, the chemophobia crowd, like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who thinks any chemical is a lousy chemical while ignoring the fact that every living thing on this planet is made up of billions of chemicals, is pushing the narrative that Red No. 3 causes cancer. You know what happens next, I go looking for any published evidence of whether the food coloring is linked to anything, including cancer.
Anyway, let’s take a look at Red No. 3 and find out what it does or does not do to humans.
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