Do Alkaline Foods and Alkaline Water Kill Cancer Cells? (A Scientific Analysis by Dr. Lim Ju Boo)

The blogger’s note:  Dr. JB Lim has written a very comprehensive and detailed article on “whether alkali can kill cancer cells” and this was posted previously on March 29, 2012 herein this blog (see: http://taionn.blogspot.com/2012/03/does-alkali-kill-cancer-cells.html).

In response to an enquiry from a lady who asked about the usefulness of alkaline water from a machine costing some RM 12,000 that her mother wanted to buy for “good health” and another former doctor colleague who sought his opinion on alkaline water and sour foods and their impact on health and disease, Dr. Lim has revised his earlier article and requested the blogger to repost as follows. 

A relevant email in connection with the revised edition of his profound article is also reproduced below this article for the benefit of understanding by readers.

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A medical doctor friend of mine once sought my opinion on claims by certain “health professionals” that eating fruits causes acidity, and that drinking “alkaline water” can cure cancer? I was asked my opinion. 

First of all, there are too many things being said and claimed by so-called “health experts” in the Internet about ‘cancer cure’ using “alkaline water”. It is not possible for me to answer and comment on every one of those statement as this will take pages after pages.

Since the main question whether or not taking alkaline foods and drinking alkaline water can kill cancer cells, I shall not want to answer an issue that has completely not a scrap of evidence. I shall elaborate on my former doctor colleague asked me about the health effects of acidic foods.

Let me tell straight away. This thing is not new. The belief that sour fruits being acidic are bad for health was already asked even during our student days in the mid 1960’s.

I hardly can believe it that half a century has already gone by, and yet with so much advances made in nutrition, biochemistry and medicine that people still ask if eating fruits which are sour and acidic would be bad for health, or that we need to drink “alkaline water” (whatever that water is?) instead of ordinary water to keep us disease free or to “cure” a diseased condition?

I think this is because some diseased conditions including cancers, the pH of the arterial blood was found to be slightly “acidic” (pH below 7.35).  Loosely speaking, lay people describe this as ‘acidic’. But I think it will not make an iota of difference to a pathological process by merely drinking alkaline water.

Medically or physiologically when the blood is slightly below an alkaline pH, it is called acidosis. A healthy arterial blood is always mildly alkaline at between 7.35 and 7.45. Alkalosis only occurs if the arterial pH is over 7.45.

Szent-Gyorgyi-Krebs Cycle:
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All properly qualified biochemists, nutritionists and medical doctors, must study biochemistry. It is where they learn of a very, very important biochemical pathway called Krebs cycle. This is sometimes also called Szent-Gyorgyi-Krebs Cycle, Citric Acid Cycle or Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle (TCA Cycle). It was named after a German-British physician and biochemist at the University of Oxford who discovered this cycle that won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1953.

The Krebs cycle is the most important metabolic cycle in the body because it is the generator and powerhouse for all metabolic activities in the body. Very briefly and in a very simplified way, this cycle produces a lot of acids called citric, succinic, fumaric, malic, etc.

However, they are destroyed by the help of the B groups of vitamins and enzymes such as thiamin (vitamin B₁), riboflavin (vitamin B2), nicotinic acid and nicotinamide, adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), etc.

The energy from food is derived via oxidative phosphorylation to drive ATP synthesis involving flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) whereby FAD is reduced by a redox cofactor into FADH2 which is an energy-carrying molecule. Later this is synthesized back to FAD.

But all these biochemical reactions can only be obtained from all the food we eat – whether from sugars, fats or proteins. All these nutrients must enter this important Krebs cycle for ultimate destruction with the help of the B group of vitamins to supply energy to the body.

This is a very important metabolic cycle, and all qualified nutritionists, biochemists, and medical doctors specializing in clinical nutrition and metabolic disease ought to know this.

Easily Metabolized Body Acids:

In this Kreb’s Cycle a lot of various types of organic acids are produced, but they will they ultimately be destroyed in this continuous metabolic cycle. Just keep this Kreb Cycle in mind. We will come back to this as we go along.  What about alkaline-based foods or water? Can they induce ‘alkalosis’, and are they good for health? We get back to this question later.

Respiratory Alkalemia:

It is important not to confuse ‘nutritional alkalosis’ (‘nutritional alkalemia’) with another physiological condition called respiratory alkalosis which is the result from increased alveolar respiration (hyperventilation) leading to a decreased plasma carbon dioxide.

The term ‘alkalosis’ is used only to describe a large increase in the pH (>7.45) of the blood, but this term should not be used when the blood pH is only slightly elevated up to 7.45. The pH of blood in health is tightly regulated between 7.35 and 7.45. Bear this in mind.

In fact there is no such condition called ‘nutritional alkalosis’ or ‘nutritional acidosis’ caused by eating any food – whether fruits or plant based foods, or animal proteins or meat. I have used them under parenthesis just to simplify a physiological description.

Similarly, the term ‘acidosis’ leading to a clinical condition called ‘acidemia’ is used only when the blood pH is less than 7.35 due to increased production of H⁺  by the body or the inability of the body to form bicarbonate (HCO3⁺) in the kidney.

Metabolic alkalosis - chloride-responsive and chloride-resistant alkalosis are medical disorders requiring another 10 pages to explain, and we shall not want to deal with this here. Suffice to say it has little or no relation to mild alkalinity of blood in health. Metabolic alkalosis is a huge chapter in biochemical respiratory physiology. A short note on their causes below will do.

Causes of Metabolic Alkalosis:

The causes of the alveolar hyperventilation and respiratory alkalosis are entirely different medical physiology, and they include the following causes or conditions.

·         Anxiety, hysteria and stress

·         Moving into high altitude areas, when the low atmospheric pressure of oxygen stimulates increased ventilation

·         Pyrexia (fever), stimulates the respiratory centre in the brainstem

·         Drugs, including doxapram and large doses of aspirin also stimulate the respiratory centre

·         CNS causes, including stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, meningitis

·         Pregnancy

·         Hypoxic drive in lung disease, such as pneumonia

·         Caffeine overdose and coffee abuse

·         Sexual activity due to excitation

None of these types of respiratory alkalemia are good for health. It is due to an existing disease condition, including intake of certain drugs, and, or adverse physiological changes.

We are talking about mild ‘alkalemia’ (alkaline blood and biological fluids) brought about by consumption of alkaline-base fruits and vegetables. To make nutrition biochemistry short and simple, fruits and vegetables if consumed regularly do cause the blood, biological fluids and tissues and cells to be slightly alkaline.

Once again, for the sake of simplicity, we may use the term ‘alkalosis’ and ‘acidosis’ very loosely to describe a very mild increase or decrease in the blood pH respectively above or lower their normal range (pH 7.35 – 7.45). The blood is normally alkaline in nature even in disease. Bear this in mind, albeit not clinically correct, we shall only use these terms loosely.

The Huge Buffer Capacity of the Body:

Unfortunately, a lot of people do not know that the body has a very huge capacity to buffer any changes in the alkalinity or acidity. In short, this means it is not easy to change the pH (measure of alkalinity and acidity) by simply adding alkali and acids into the body.

This can be illustrated by considering an old but famous experiment called the Swan & Pitt Experiment where dilute hydrochloric acid was infused into a dog.

The Swan & Pitts Experiment:

In this experiment, dogs received an infusion of 14 mmols H+ per litre of body water. This caused a drop in pH from 7.44 ([H+] = 36 nmoles / litre to a pH of 7.14 ([H+] = 72 nmoles / litre.  That is, there is a rise in [H+] of only 36 nmoles / litre.

So, if you just looked at the change in [H+] then you would only notice an increase of 36 nmoles / litre.  You would then wonder what had happened to the other 13,999,964 nmoles per litre that were infused?

Where did the missing H+ go?

They were hidden on the buffering system in the body, and so these hydrogen ions were hidden from view. Let me explain a tiny bit of biochemistry below:

An Analogy:

Before we proceed, let’s just make sure we appreciate what this experiment reveals. The dogs were infused with 14,000,000 nmoles / l of H+ but the plasma [H+] only changed by a bit over 0.002%. By any analysis, this is a system which powerfully resists change in [H+].

An analogy on appreciating the magnitude of this is to use the analogy of depositing Ringgit 14,000,000 in the bank, but then finding that after 'bank charges' the account only went up by just RM 36.

Make no mistake, the body has:

A HUGE buffering capacity, and

This system essentially has IMMEDIATE effect

For these 2 reasons, physicochemical buffering provides a powerful first defense against drastic acid-base perturbations.

Buffering hides from view the real change in H+ that occurs:

However, this huge buffer capacity has another not immediately obvious implication for how we think about the severity of an acid-base disorder or the implication if eating alkaline or acidic foods or drinking the so-called “alkaline water” has any impact on health in general, let alone on cancer. You would think that the magnitude of an acid-base disturbance could be quantified merely by looking at the change in [H+]. This is not so.

Because of the large buffering capacity, the actual change in [H+] is so small it can be ignored in any quantitative assessment, and instead, the magnitude of a disorder has to be estimated indirectly from the decrease in the total concentration of the anions involved in the buffering. The buffer anions, represented as A-, decrease because they combine stoichiometrically with H+ to produce HA.

A decrease in A- by 1 mmol / litre represents a 1,000,000 nano-mol / litre amount of H+ that is hidden from view and this is several orders of magnitude higher than the visible few nanomoles / litre change in [H+] that is visible.

Hence in the Swan & Pitts experiment, 13,999,994 out of 14,000,000 nano-moles / litre of H+ were hidden on buffers and just to count the 36 that were on view would give a false impression of the magnitude of the disorder.

Now back to the Kreb’s cycle:

Despite little change in the body’s pH noticed in the Swan & Pitts experiment in the regulation of Acid-Base Equilibrium, the Kreb’s cycle does produce a lot of organic acids. 

Are these harmful to health? Not at all as the Swan & Pitts experiment showed. Not only just that, the acid used in the Swan & Pitts experiment was a very powerful and a very corrosive mineral acid called hydrochloric acid, whereas all the types of acids produced in the Krebs Cycle are actually salts of very weak natural organic acids such as citrate acetic acid, fruit acid like malic (malate), succinic acid (succinate), fumaric acid (fumarate), etc.

They are almost no acid at all to the body. First of all, they are produced by the body through its natural Krebs cycle for the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

Secondly, they are so weak organic acids against the body’s powerful buffering acid-base balance.

These acids are easily handled and metabolized by the body, and they leave almost no acidic residue at all to cause disease even if we overeat huge amounts of carbohydrates with little B group of vitamins in the diet.

Excessive eating may produce a huge quantity of these metabolic acids which the body’s buffering mechanisms just cannot cope especially in vitamin B deficiencies  that are needed  for the  the Kreb’s Cycle to proceed smoothly.

Fruits leave an alkaline base:

We can safely say eating fruits, no matter how acidic or sour they taste, or even drinking vinegar (acetic acid) do not leave any acidic residue. They do not make the blood more acid than drinking plain water.  Neither does drinking “alkaline water” makes the blood or urine more alkaline.

Urinary alkalinizers:

In fact if we want to make the blood or urine more alkaline, we might as well take potassium citrate or sodium bicarbonate or sodium citrate which is used in medicine to increase the pH of blood and urine.

These are called urinary alkalinizers that have the benefit of combating mild urinary infections, besides the beneficial effects of potassium in potassium citrate to lower blood pressure by acting as a diuretic that are used in managing heart failure, liver cirrhosis, water intoxication, and in certain kidney diseases. A diuretic is an agent that promotes urine production.

Coconut water:

Alternatively, instead of “alkaline water” natural coconut water is far more superior because it is completely sterile and clean, so natural and has high potassium content. In fact coconut water is so clean, so sterile and so isotonic, that WHO has even recommended its use as an intravenous hydration fluid when medical saline was unavailable especially in poor rural regions of the world where medical facilities are unavailable, and where infantile mortality rates are high due to diarrhoea. 

Isn’t natural coconut water far better than all those so-called “alkaline water” made in factories? I have much to write on coconut water as the best drink. But we shall leave that for the moment.

Fruit juices:

The other alternative is drinking unsweetened fruit juices. The consumption of fruits or fruit juices always leaves an alkaline base no matter how sour or acidic the fruit may taste. Once the fruit acids (citric, malic, oxalic, etc) are metabolized in the Krebs cycle, they always leave behind an alkaline base (potassium) behind, and if in excess, they are excreted through the kidneys.

Hence eating sour fruits do NOT cause ‘acidosis’; in fact it is the opposite.  Consumption of fruits and vegetables cause the blood to be only slightly more alkaline than usual. Eating fruits and vegetable with high potassium content is far better than drinking the so-called “alkaline water”.

By leaving a lot of indestructible alkaline-base elemental potassium, sodium, and calcium as metabolic ashes in the body they promote physiological biochemical health. 

If fruits and vegetables are consumed regularly, they do make a difference in the regulation of the acid-base balance by making the blood slightly more alkaline than usual. These elements, especially potassium which is very rich in fruits and vegetables cannot be destroyed and they always leave behind an alkaline base.

Elements are Indestructible:

Elements are indestructible by ordinary chemical and metabolic reactions. Elements like potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, iron are all elements. They are inorganic salts and serve as electrolytes that play a role in the regulation of heart rate, cardiac rhythm, nervous electrical transmissions, and muscular contraction and relaxation. They are all non-destructible elements required by the body.

Elements are unlike carbon compounds and organic salts (esters) and metabolites and hundreds of other organic compounds like lactic, citric, carbonic pyruvic acids, urea, uric acids, creatinine, and intermediary alkaline compounds like ammonia of protein metabolism, etc.

These are metabolic wastes easily excreted from the body by healthy kidneys.  Organic compounds including drugs and food additives human consume too are broken down and excreted.

Elements also cannot be destroyed by the liver or by metabolisms. Elements like potassium, sodium, calcium or iron can only be retained or excreted through the kidneys, while heavy metals like mercury and lead cannot even be excreted. They accumulate in the body like slow poisons and ultimately damage the brain and nervous system and kidneys.

Only in Nuclear Reactions:

Only nuclear reactions as in the Sun and stars, or in a nuclear reactor where the temperature are in searing hundreds of millions of degrees, can elements be transmuted into other elements. Elements in contrast cannot be changed by ordinary chemical reactions in or outside the body.

It is for this reason that elements like potassium found richly in fruits and vegetables if consumed regularly leave an alkaline base.

Health Protective Fruits & Vegetables:

One of the reasons why dietary fruits and vegetables are very protective and superb for good health is because fruits and vegetable leave an alkaline base in the body. It is just one of the reasons why ‘a fruit a day keeps the doctor away’.

A diet that is health-promoting should contain about 70 % alkaline forming foods that include lots of fruits, green vegetables, seeds, nuts, beans, peas, lentils, herbs and spices.

Acid-forming foods are meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products, seafood such as mackerel, anchovies, codfish, haddock, herring, shrimp, sardines and scallops contain a large amount of purine. Some vegetables such as asparagus, dried beans mushrooms, peas, and spinach are also rich in purines but they have not shown their relationship with gout as in a meat-based diet.

A health-protective diet should contain 30 % or less of these products as they produce a lot of urea, purines, uric acid, creatinine which are acidic in nature. They may precipitate gout.

There are also many other reasons why fruits and vegetables are good for health.  They contain an abundance of phytochemicals and antioxidants.  They occur in a huge spectrum of molecular weights.

Most of them cannot be absorbed and utilized by the human body. In other words there are not bio-available, except the very low molecular weight ones like vitamin C, E, folic acid, carotenes, etc.

Those phytochemicals and antioxidants where the molecular weights are above 30,000 are only available to the plants to protect them from free radicals caused by ultra-violet light from day-long exposure to the rays of the Sun needed for their photosynthesis. 

Plants leave only very small amounts of very low molecular weights of phytochemicals and antioxidants for humans and animals. The rest they keep.

Endo & Exogenous Antioxidants:

They are not bio-available, meaning they cannot be absorbed through the intestines and made available to humans, unless their molecular weights are in the low range of between 200 – 400 such as vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamins E, B2, carotene,catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids.

Anything where the molecular weights are higher than 400, they cannot be transported across the intestinal membrane even by active transport mechanisms. They are only bio-available to the plants themselves that manufacture them within their system.  They don’t absorb them through their roots like small intestines in humans.

They are thus endogenous (inside the body) antioxidants similar to superoxide dismutase (SOD) catalase, and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) produced by our liver. 

Their molecular weights of most antioxidants in plants (fruits and vegetables) are extremely high (> 30,000). These are not available to us even if we consume them from natural food sources. 

That is why SOD can only manufactured inside the human body as they cannot be absorbed from outside.  Moreover, even if SOD is injected, their retention time in the body is only for a few hours.  It is thus useless trying to consume SOD as a food supplement

Alkaline Metabolic Residues:

Since elements like potassium and magnesium found richly in fruits and vegetables all leave an alkaline base, this does not mean we can drink alkaline solutions of ammonia or caustic soda.  These are highly toxic to the body.  The most alkaline substance known is the highly corrosive caustic soda (potassium hydroxide). We cannot eat or drink that.

Neither can we drink the next most powerful alkali known - washing soda (sodium carbonate), or consume slate lime (calcium hydroxide). Any health freak or health extremists who advise others to do this  ‘to cure cancer’ will die on agonizing pain and suffer serve caustic chemical burns to the entire gastrointestinal tract within hours of consumption of such strong alkali. This includes drinking ammonia solution. Don’t ever try that.

Mild Alkalinity of Blood:

What is important is, even in optimal health the blood is only very slightly alkaline, between 7.35 and 7.45 only; where pH 7 is neutral, below 7 is acidic, and above pH 7 is acidic. There are a series of buffers in the body that help the plasma resist any change in pH. Some of them include hemoglobin in the red blood cells, other plasma proteins, the bicarbonate buffer and the phosphate buffer.

Strictly speaking as a reminder,  the term ‘alkalosis’ actually refers to a condition where the hydrogen ion concentration of arterial blood plasma is greatly reduced to give rise to a clinical condition known as alkalemia.

Generally alkalosis is said to occur when pH of the blood exceeds 7.45. The opposite condition is acidosis.

The pH of the blood or any solution is: pH = -log (H+).  This is a measure of how acidic or basic the blood.  There are many physiological processes that influence the pH of the blood, but one of the largest contributors is the carbon dioxide content in the blood. CO2 + H2O = HCO3 (-1) + H (+1).

Nutritional Deficiencies and Accumulation of Acids:

On the other hand, nutritionists know that a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1) can cause an accumulation of lactic acid and pyruvic acids to accumulate in the blood, brain stem and cerebrospinal fluid. This compromises the heart function and the heart becomes enlarged (wet beriberi) due to the accumulation of pyruvic acid. It also affects the brain particularly the gray matter of the cerebrum around the third ventricle. The nerves are also affected and become irritable with weakness, anemia, and the loss of appetite.

There is also atony (loss of muscle tone and strength) in the gastrointestinal tract, and hypochlorhydria (insufficient stomach acid). All these signs and symptoms are due to incomplete combustion of the carbohydrate from lack of vitamin B 1 needed for the working of the Krebs cycle.  Here you can see the relationship between a nutritional deficiency disease and the accumulation of acids in the blood and in other parts of the body.

Pathological Accumulation of Ammonia:

Ammonia is highly alkaline substance. The presence of ammonia in the body does NOT mean the body is in good health. In fact it is highly toxic to the body.  It is present in very small amounts. The normal range in the body is only 15 - 45 micrograms per deciliter (mcg / dl).

Ammonia (NH4 +) is produced by cells throughout the body, especially the intestines, liver, and kidneys. Most of the ammonia produced in the body is used by the liver in the production of urea. Urea is also a waste product but is much less toxic than ammonia.

Ammonia is especially toxic to the brain and can cause confusion, lethargy, and sometimes coma. The presence of ammonia in the body is commonly tested to diagnose and monitor hepatic encephalopathy, a severe liver disease. Conditions that can increase ammonia levels include:

·         Liver failure

·         Severe congestive heart failure

·         Erythroblastosis fetalis

·         Gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding - usually in the upper GI tract

·         Genetic diseases of the urea cycle

·         Leukemia

·         Pericarditis

·         Reye syndrome

·         Certain drugs

None of the above disease conditions where ammonia is present in the blood and body means that the body is in good health. Neither can it kill cancer cells in the body. In fact the presence of alkali ammonia indicates the body is in a very serious health condition.

Capitalization by Commercial People:
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Having said all that, we may face the problem with all those unqualified half-cooked food and health faddists, food extremists who call themselves ‘nutritionists’ and ‘health experts’ who begin to capitalize on just the alkali side of the story. They then come out with products such as alkaline water or alkaline food supplements. 

They will quote that nutritionists, scientists and health experts telling us that alkaline-based foods like fruits and vegetables leave alkaline base (ash) like potassium when metabolized, and are good for health, and ‘can kill cancer’. They will then start claiming that their ‘health products’ can also do the same, and are even better than natural fruits and vegetables.

‘Alkaline Foods and Alkaline Water’:

Health freaks capitalize on this to make money from the ignorant lay public by offering all sorts of ‘alkaline foods’, ‘alkaline water’ and even ‘alkaline nutritional supplements’ for sales. Maybe they do this by adding soda into the products.

They went to the extent to make claims that their products can make the blood and body more alkaline for better health. The induction of alkalosis in the body is actually a pathological (diseased) condition. 

They will claim their products are good for health because when people use their products, the blood will become alkaline without needing to eat any more natural fruits and vegetables.

They may not realize that no person in Malaysia can make any misleading nutritional and medical claims whether through advertisement or labeling of any product. Such claims are illegal in this country and in most countries.

This law has been enforced in Malaysia since March 2004. A guide book on the interpretation of these regulations is contained in a guide book published by the Food Quality Control of the Ministry of Health Malaysia. 

Even without all these “alkaline foods” and “alkaline water”, the buffering system in the body always ensures the blood always stay slightly alkaline, over a small range of alkalinity.

Consumption of fruits shifts the pH of the blood only slightly higher towards the alkaline scale. Not just natural fruits and vegetables can do this, they contain hundreds of various types of antioxidants and phytochemicals that are protective from all types of chronic diseases.

Most people are taken in by sweet talks of sales people. Potential buyers should always consult qualified nutritionists, dieticians, and related health professionals for their professional opinion before buying any health products. 

Proper Scientific Evidence-Based Study Needed:

Let me put this further. I have already said that in all disease state, NOT just cancer alone, the blood is only slightly ‘acidic’, and in health state, the blood is only slight alkalinity. This is true for ALL physiological and biochemical situations in health and disease. It is not just in cancer cases that the blood is acidic as claimed.

We do not even have the research paper and the journal where such claims were published except all sorts of health claims ‘published’ in the Internet. 

Any claim requires proper studies. Such studies need to be well designed and the data collected require proper statistical analysis, and un-bias interpretation. Medical research is not as easy as that, especially in clinical trials where tens of thousands of human subjects need to be involved in a shorter cross-sectional study, or in a long-term longitudinal cohort study monitored over generations after generations.

Such a study is not only technically extremely difficult, but would involve dozens of researchers, and costing billions of US. It is not so easy to claim health benefits of any foods or health supplements.

Unscientific:

If only people who understand how complex the pathogenesis of cancer is, involving an understanding on the dynamics of molecular biology, DNA transcription and translation, cell signaling, apoptosis, chains of highly complex phosphorylation, the molecular chemistry of angiogenesis, DNA damage and repair, will they stop making a fool of themselves and a laughing stock of themselves.

Notwithstanding what I have just said, there may be a glimmer of scientific truth if what was initially observed, may give some promising results even in just a few patients.

But we need to extrapolate that into large studies involving huge population of several hundred patients or healthy individuals with a control group running parallel in the study,  and that all factors such as sex, age, body weight, ethic group, occupation, health and nutrition status, lifestyles, etc, need to be matched or standardized.

The data collected will be subjected to a statistical analysis, and the results compared for statistical significance, and cautiously interpreted.

Whether or not an alkaline medium kills cancer cells is only a hypothesis. But this needs to be confirmed by a properly designed study; the larger the population, the better.

Sometimes the initial observation, say in cancer patients may have acidic blood, compared to healthy individuals. This initial casual relationship may be used as a test bed or a platform for further intensive investigations. That way it is okay, but cannot be taken as some kind of scientific truth or scientific law. It is just a hypothesis based on some casual observation and nothing more.

Scientific Truth vs. Traditional Truth

(Experimental Evidences vs. Empirical Evidences):

Nevertheless, there are certain traditional practices which always work with or without any need for further scientific investigations. Many traditional practices in medicine, health and nutrition practices have been shown to work. Such practices by all cultures, nations and civilizations have been there for tens of thousands of years.

For instance, all scientists no matter how stringent their analytical minds have to accept that drinking water and eating rice (or any food) sustain life without which all living things must die.

This observation is absolutely valid and completely true to the last iota ever since life was implanted on this planet some 5 billion years ago. We don’t require any scientist to conduct any experiment or trial to prove that food and water is absolutely essential for life.

This is based entirely on inborn automatic biological urge to eat and drink for the sustenance of life.  It then automatically becomes an automatic practice backed up by tens of thousands of years of empirical evidences.  There is no need for any scientific evidence or unnecessary experimentation to demonstrate this. It is just pure Gospel truth.

Specificity in Disease Aetiology:

Not all diseases are caused by acidity in the blood, nor acid in the blood causes disease.  Malaria for instance, is caused by the bite of a female anopheline mosquito what injects a parasite of the Plasmodium family into the blood, and that tuberculosis is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis. Similarly, diabetes mellitus is caused by either reduced insulin production or poor insulin metabolism, depending on subtype.  There are so many other causes of diabetes.

None of them are caused by alkalinity or acidity in the body. At best we can observe is that when we get these diseases, or any diseases, including cancer, a mild drop in arterial blood pH may be observed. The blood is normally alkaline in nature even in disease (pH < 7.35). In short, acidosis is the outcome of a disease condition, but the reverse is not true.

Not Easy to Cure Cancer:

It is not as easy as that. First of all, we do not even know if the acid condition triggers off cancer, or was it the other way round – the cancer causes the blood to become acid?

I cannot think of any situation or mechanism whereby acidity causes  cancer, and that the alkalinity kills off cancer cells, at least not that I am aware of from my understanding of chemistry, biology, physiology, nutrition, medicine, biochemistry, pharmacology, cellular dynamics, and molecular medicine.

Current Cancer Therapies:

Currently cancer is treated by three major modalities: surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Depending on the staging, surgery offers the best approach. The five year survival period is used as a yard stick by oncologists to determine if the cancer is in complete remission after treatment.

Alternative medicine in cancer treatment:

There are a number of alternative medical approaches to cancer management.

This includes cytotron therapy, immunotherapy using dendritic cells ,and autologous immune enhancement therapy, high doses of vitamin C by infusion, combined with herbal medicine as such Sabah snake grass, lemon grass and turmeric, etc. These offer the best and the most promising approaches.  But they need to be carefully evaluated, and the combination and doses need to be tailored and tittered.

For more details and where to find a centre or a doctor to get such treatment, cancer patients need to email me through this blog.

Conventional medicine in cancer treatment:

Currently cytotoxic drugs are used in cancer management. These include several generations and classes of anti-neoplastic agents. Very briefly some of them are:

·         Alkylating agents

·         Anti-metabolites

·         Plant alkaloids and terpenoids

·         Vinca alkaloids

·         Podophyllotoxin

·         Taxanes

·         Topoisomerase inhibitors

·         Antitumour antibiotics

·         Monoclonal antibodies

·         Hormonal therapy

Without going into the details on the pharmaco-dynamics (mode of action) of all the above generations and classes of anticancer agents; they are not very effective in the long run.

The truth about anti-cancer drugs:

The cancer cells initially suffer DNA damage or mitosis inhibition when bombarded by the above cytotoxic drugs. Unfortunately the normal cells in the rest of the body are also all damaged at the same time by these drugs.  If badly damaged, the normal cells may be unable to self repair, and become cancerous later.

Unfortunately the damaged cancer cells DNA maybe able to repair themselves, after which they become even more aggressive. That’s where cytotoxic drugs (chemotherapy) fail. It is clearly stated in all standard textbooks on pharmacology that all cytotoxic drugs are carcinogenic (causes cancer).  Yet oncologists still use them, because the drug companies offer them no other choice.

This is the reality with anti-neoplastic drugs. It may not be just a case of metastasis from the primary site to other distant parts of the body, but it may be also the case of what were once normal cells in other parts of the body, becoming cancerous due to damage done to their DNA by anti-cancer drugs. It could also be both ways.

Radiotherapy is also not much different. The radiation damages all the surrounding healthy cells and causes them to become cancerous later.

Conventional medical treatment for cancers is just slash (surgery), poison (chemotherapy and cytotoxic drugs) or burn (radiation).  What else can doctors offer unless they free themselves from the mindset that only cytotoxic drugs have the answer? I think oncologists need to seriously start looking at other safer and more effective alternative modalities?

However surgery is still the best management provided the cancer has not spread.  

If the lesion is not carefully removed in totality, it may spread the diseased cells into the blood stream through bleeding.

It is like attempting to cut a membrane-protected fish roe in a bowl of water (similar to blood and biological fluid in the body), and expecting not a single fish egg (cancer cell) leach out into the bowl of water (dispersed and spread into the blood and travel elsewhere through the blood stream).  But if the cancer has not spread everywhere, and can be carefully removed, it is very effective because surgical intervention offers the best approach. 

Cellular cancers:

Any cancer cells that have escaped can easily be dealt with by the body’s natural immunological response just like in a normal healthy body.  After all, everybody get microscopic cellular cancers every day throughout their lives.

There are 10,000 to 1,000,000 molecular lesions per cell per day. They damage the DNA, but the DNA through its wonderful well-programmed repair mechanisms made it whole again.

It is because of repeated damages due to bad lifestyle, radiation, drugs, free radicals, damaging nutrition, etc that impairs the repair mechanisms and cause the cells to mutate into cancer cells. Else everybody gets cellular and microscopic cancers in the body all the time. 

Surgery remove most of the masses, and let the body natural defenses such as T-cells, natural killer (NK) cells, dendritic cells,  CD4+ T helper 1 (T_H1) cells, etc,  take over with the microscopic ones. At the same time we must be willing to change our eating habits and lifestyle such as managing stress, avoid or stop smoking, control anger, ensure we have adequate rest, and avoid negative thoughts.

None of these integrated approaches has anything to do with the acidity or alkalinity of the blood.

A diet rich in antioxidants:

A daily diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables is not only very cancer-protective, but cardio-protective at the same time. There are tens of hundreds of various types of fruits and vegetables that contain tens of thousands phytochemicals in them; each working under various modes of actions and dynamics to protect us from cancer.

For instance, curry leaves and curry powder mixtures contain extremely high contents of salicylates (aspirin), and turmeric are highly cardio-protective and highly protective against colorectal cancer.

Acidic, yet…

Salicylate is an ester (organic salt) of salicylic acid.  It is not an alkaline, and yet salicylates in curries and curry leaves like in aspirin protect us from heart and certain cancers.  Organic acids in fruits are easily metabolized, and leave absolutely NO acidic residue. And yet, fruits and vegetables are anti-cancer and cardio-protective foods.

It is our multiple bad life-styles and habitual consumption of health-damaging foods that are the root causes of most chronic diseases. Change that. Those are the real root causes. 

Lim Ju Boo

BSc, Postgrad Dip Nutr, MSc (Food Safety). MD, PhD (Med), FRSM, FRSPH

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Friday, 22 August, 2014 7:29 PM

From: Lim Juboo

Dear Gwen,

On your question about “alkaline water” machine your mother wanted to buy, please ask her not to waste her precious money on such stuff.  You asked me that question in a separate mail a few days ago. But I reply it here because of my attachment to Ir TO Lau.

People are making money out of ignorant public. Even if that machine produces alkaline water as claimed, I do not know how this can be done without adding harmful chemicals into it? There is no way she will be able to know whether or not the water that come out is alkaline, unless she buys yet another machine called a pH meter from somewhere else to check. That leads on to more and more machines she needs to buy just to check.  Isn’t that foolish, unnecessary and wasting more money?

Furthermore, even if the machine produces “akaline water” (whatever that is?), there is no guarantee it will continue to produce akaline water forever? How is she going to know? How is she going to check, unless she sends the water to a chemical analytical laboratory for analysis every now and then? Don’t you think this is completely idiotic? It is also idiotic for any person who believes such a health claims.

There are many communities in the world where people lived well past 100 years in good health by drinking just plain boiled water from their village wells. You find such aged people in China, Korea, Japan, Russia and many other countries where peasant worked hard in the fields. Their lives are very simple.  They worked hard, eat as little as possible, and thrive mainly on cereal grains, roots, nuts, fruits and vegetables. Their life spans are doubled with no ill health than those who live in cities with TVs, radios, computers, i-pads, and drive around in air con cars and take up office jobs, and come down with all kinds of chronic ills before they reach 50.

If your mother wants natural alkaline water, coconut water is the best. It is very, very clean, completely sterile, very rich in potassium, and electrolytes, cleanses the kidneys and urinary system, improves urination, lowers blood pressure, and slows down the heart.

Don’t you think such natural water from a living tree 60 metres high will screen out every molecule of water through its living branch all the way up to the top to give that living water to its “baby” (the coconut) like mother’s milk to a baby to ensure no toxins or poison get to the top to poison its “baby” before it can be “born” into a new tree (sprout into a new coconut tree in another island).

Don’t you think Mother Nature knows best what kind of living water to give to itself and to baby?  Don’t you think this is absolutely logical, scientific and plain natural goodness Mother Nature program to protect itself?

Coconut water is so clean and free of toxins after being filtered so thoroughly over a column  of 60 metres of living tissues (the tree trunk) that even WHO recommends the use of coconut water as a life-saving fluid and electrolyte in remote regions of the world where dextrose-saline intravenous infusion fluid are unavailable?  Don’t you think this, as well as fruit juices are the most health-protective drinks on this planet?

Don’t you think only unscrupulous people will claim their factory-made “alkaline water” is good for health? Only complete idiots will believe in this.

Anyway, I have revised an article about alkaline and acidic foods and water which I have asked Ir. Lau Tai Onn to put in his blog.

However, I will appreciate it a lot if you could kindly acknowledge that article with your comment whether useful or not, good or bad, inside his blog once he has published it. We will inform you.

Give your comment inside his blog so that others can share it.  No point writing it here as a personal reply.  

Others must also share your views and ideas.

I hope that article which I have taken a lot of time and effort to write for your and mother’s sake will be acknowledged with your reply and comment inside Ir. Lau blog later.

Just don’t buy absolute rubbish water. RM 12,000 is a lot of money to buy rubbish of all things. Give it to the poor and needy if you have that kind of money to spend on rubbish.

Drink just plain, boiled and natural water as God has given us. God is never wrong.  He does not put things in natural food and water to harm us.

It is those factory people that rob and harm us.

Regards,

Lim ju boo

(Footnote:  The blogger has spent no less than 6 hours today on Saturday, August 23, 2014 in searching and adding illustrative pictures and highlighting keywords to the above post.  He felt privileged to be able to enhance Dr. JB Lim’s profound article and kind advices and considered the time spent to be for a worthy cause.)
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The blogger is delighted to receive the following prompt feeback from the Great Sifu as follows:

Sunday, 24 August, 2014 3:21 AM

From: Lim Juboo

To: Tai Onn Lau

Dear Sifu Ir Lau,

Thank you very much for your 6 hours effort looking for pictures for my article. This is why I have included you as my co-author at least for the illustration. I hope you can put our joint names. It is okay with me as I neither gain, nor lose anything sharing with you.

  

There is no commercial value in my articles, except just for knowledge sake. Of course I have spent a lot of money (almost a fortune) over so many years of my younger life learning across various universities to gain various knowledge. But that was only for my scientific research career.  I also need to earn back all those educational investments. But now I am retired.  I do not need to earn back anymore. I just want to share my experience with anyone who wishes to share with me.

Just remember a lot, a lot of people have also done the same thing. They too have written a lot of info inside the Internet. They too have spent a lot of time and effort sharing whatever they know. They too are not paid for their effort.

So do put your name there as a “joint account” except I cannot withdraw the “savings”.  Only you have the password as it is your blog.

I just wonder why you do not wish to delete my older edition.  What I gave you is a better version with updated info. Don’t you think you would be duplicating almost the same article in the same blog?

In fact I could have inserted the latest one into my own blog. But if I were to do that, then I would be duplicating yours. That’s why I did not want to do it, but just ask you to replace that earlier version. This is also partly because more things are added, example – about coconut water which was not in the older edition.

Furthermore, I do not want to write too much about myself with my CV there, my education background, or my previous appointments in the Government Service (Ministry of Health). I don’t even remember writing that in the earlier version. I just signed my name as plain lim ju boo as I am already retired. I am not applying for any job to give my CV. For what?

  

I can understand why you feel painful to delete your previous article. I think it was because of those pictures you have scouted around.  I can understand the time and effort.

But if you look at my own blog, I don’t even put a single photo or picture there, except an old family photo with me last in the row.  I am also not good in art.

Actually what you could have done was just “copy and paste” all your illustrations from the old ones, and merely paste all of them into the revised article. Why take the trouble to search for new ones? 

Only my text needed to be revised. I don’t think there is a need to “revise” illustrations because there is nothing wrong with your old ones. Old or new they fit very well with either version. Anyway, I leave that to you.  

Just put your name there as my co-author.

Regards,

Lim ju-boo

The blogger’s response:  By inserting this email, it is more than adequate to be bestowed with the honour of being a “co-author” of the above article.