Helen Donnell says, "Your post on urine pH and exercise tolerance was a game-changer
for me, but anytime I miss a dose of bicarb, I'm right back to 5.
Any long-term concerns with taking bicarb two to three times a day, any suggestions
for other ways to get my system pH up?"
Well, I will say in my case that I stopped taking the bicarbonate when I figured out
that I had a zinc deficiency.
So, for people who don't know the backstory here, Google "Masterjohn urine pH" and you'll
probably get that blog post to come up.
It's called "How Normalizing My Urine pH Helped Me Love Working Out Again" or something like
that.
The backstory in brief is, when I was going through the mold and barium toxicity crisis
of turn of 2016 into 2017, I got to the point where even after I was very on the way to
recovery, I still could only work out once every five days, and that was because—when
I was in the midst of the crisis, I couldn't work out at all.
When I was at this point, I could work out, but then I'd be floored, I'd lay in bed for
hours, and I wouldn't have the, number one, the energy to go back to working out until
five days later, but also I couldn't afford to be laid out in bed for three hours every
day of the week or every other day, like I could only afford that time once every five
days, as well.
And so, what happened was I realized—oh, in looking at some lab tests, a Genova ION
Panel had some findings that suggested pH imbalance problems.
And that was based on, the only thing abnormal in my ION Profile was that my glutamine-to-glutamate
ratio was really screwed up.
The glutamate was really high, and the glutamine was really low because of the kidney freeing
ammonia by breaking down the glutamine and turning it into glutamate to make ammonia
that would balance the acidity.
So I looked at that, and I said, that sounds like a pH issue, and I was talking with a
friend of mine that led down the same rabbit hole, and I put two and two together, and
I thought, okay, maybe the reason the workout is tanking me is because of all the lactic
acid, and my system can't handle the lactic acid.
So, I started measuring my urine pH, and the urine pH was very, very low, like it was way
less than 5.
I had to get different strips that go down further to see where it actually was.
And it was staying there for a long time, so when I started the bicarbonate dosing,
I was taking a quarter teaspoon at a time, and my first workout, I was totally laid out,
and I'd take a dose of bicarbonate, then I'd get up out of bed, and I'd go pee, and I'd
measure my urine pH again, and it wasn't going anywhere.
I'd just lay back down, get up, take bicarbonate, pee, lay down, get up, take bicarbonate, pee.
It just wasn't going anywhere until at some point, all the sudden I shot up out of bed,
and I was like, I want to work.
I felt amazing.
I went and measured my urine pH, and it was 6.
So, it was like it just went nowhere until I got enough bicarbonate in that it crossed
the threshold getting into 6, and all the sudden I felt amazing.
That was the first big clue, and then I replicated things over time and found that it was a consistent
effect.
So, I took bicarbonate consistently to match the dosing and frequency that would keep my
urine pH, except for first time waking up in the morning, between 6.4 and 6.8.
So that meant taking some every day on rest days and taking more during workouts by doubling
up a dose before I worked out and then following it up and so on.
What turned things around for me was when I realized that my zinc was low, and that
was because when I started putting on muscle mass—so basically the bicarbonate allowed
me to work out more.
Working out more allowed me to gain muscle.
Gaining muscle made me get patches of dry skin.
Well, what do patches of dry skin mean?
Well, first of all, patches of dry skin are the first, earliest sign of zinc deficiency
in experimental zinc deficiency.
When they lock volunteers up and give them a zinc-deficient diet and just watch what
happens, patches of dry skin are the most common early symptom.
Well, what does working out do to your zinc needs?
It increases it because every pound of muscle mass that you put on requires X amount of
milligrams of zinc extra to sustain because you're making new tissue, and you have to
keep the zinc concentration of the tissue standardized across your body.
And what does zinc do to pH balance?
Well, zinc is a cofactor for carbonic anhydrase, which is one of the main enzymes in regulating
pH.
As soon as I started—so I saw this, I started supplementing zinc immediately, then I went
and tested my plasma zinc within three days, and even though I had been taking zinc for
three days, my plasma zinc was still borderline at the level that I associate with deficiency,
which it was around 70.
And that confirmed for me that I was even more zinc-deficient three days earlier, and
once I started supplementing zinc, the pH problems went away.
So, zinc is a big one that I would look at.
I'm not saying that there aren’t others.
But I would definitely look at zinc, and if zinc doesn't work, I'd just keep going down
the rabbit hole and try to do a comprehensive analysis, like the kind that I do with Testing
Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet.
Harms of bicarbonate, well, alkalinizing the stomach is the big one, so you definitely
want to take it as far away from food as possible.
And I do think that chronic use, the biggest potential problem is going to be alkalinizing
the stomach, and that's going to mean lower ability to kill pathogens in the stomach,
so greater potential for overgrowth of bacteria in the stomach or in the small intestine,
and it's going to mean less efficient digestion of your food, so I think, again, the number
one thing you could do is take it as far away from food as possible, but I do think that
you don't want to be stuck on taking bicarbonate all the time every day forever.
I would feel more comfortable about using it as a bridge to get from point A to point
B and fixing the underlying regulatory problems as the destination.