bella-sara replied to your photo:There are a lot of Gatorade commercials out there…

“with this being said, how do you feel about high pH (8-9.5) waters? useful or hokey

This is one of these common cases of company’s taking a little truth and tweaking it into a product that they try to sell. Basically as your body starts to exercise at higher and higher levels. The body starts to create energy with anerobic pathways ( energy made without the use of oxygen) These systems are awesome because they are able to produce energy for the body very fast. Faster than aerobic systems. But the down side to this is that it also produces a bi product of lactic acid which brings with it Hydrogen Ions (H+) these hydrogen’s lower your blood PH. Up to a certain point your body is able to process this extra acidity and deal with it through differen’t systems. But at a certain point the acidity is too great and it exceeds what is called your bodies lactate threshold. This is the point where you get that burn and you start to fatigue very fast. You can no longer go at the intensity you are once you reach this point. The idea of this product is that if you drink water that is higher in PH it will help counteract the Low PH created by anaerobic exercise. The problem here is that a small amount of high PH water isn’t going to have any effect on delaying this lactate threshold. An example of why it is silly to expect it works is in the case of people using sodium bicarbonate or baking soda before they work out. Some runners often ingest large amounts of sodium bicarbonate before running in order to improve the bodies buffering systems. This actually does in fact help. But the problem is that with most people the amount of Sodium Bicarbonate you have to ingest for it to have a positive effect you often will make yourself sick and give yourself stomach cramps. So the idea that a bottle of water can effect PH enough from drinking it is crazy when you think about how much sodium bicarbonate you would have to take to have an effect normally. This is just one more case of real science being twisted to make a profit.