Our Longevity Diet

It pains me to see intermittent fasting lumped in with crazy fad diets and other foolish notions. Today I saw a site touting ‘ionized water’ for use while on your ‘water fast’ — which is distinguished from a ‘juice fast’. If you are drinking fruit juice, you are not fasting — you are on a highly restricted diet.

These sites also tout long-term fasts for weight loss and curing diseases — from seven to forty days fasting. That kind of starvation diet should not be confused with intermittent fasting. Any weight lost during such a fast would be rapidly regained when you resume eating. Nor have I seen any scientific evidence that long-term fasting might cure disease — but then again it doesn’t exactly sound like something main-stream science is likely to conduct controlled experiments on. I’m willing to remain open-minded but uncommitted on that; if nothing else the placebo effect can yield wonderful results at times.

The part that really got my goat, however, was the sales-pitch for a machine to produce ‘ionized water’ which is purported to have all sorts of wonderful effects. Well the scientifically proven effects of intermittent fasting are wonderful too — so I can hardly let that be a criteria for condemnation. In the case of intermittent fasting, the old adage that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t gets broken all to smithereens. Ionized water is another matter altogether though. There is a good, detailed, refutation of the entire idea here — I’ll quote just the summary — read the entire page if you are interested in the details.

• “Ionized water” is nothing more than sales fiction; the term is meaningless to chemists.
• Most water that is fit for drinking is too unconductive to undergo significant electrolysis.
• Pure water can never be alkaline or acidic, nor can it be made so by electrolysis.
• Groundwaters containing metal ions such as calcium and magnesium can be rendered slightly alkaline by electrolysis, but after it hits the highly acidic gastric fluid in the stomach, its alkalinity is gone.
• The idea that one must consume alkaline water to neutralize the effects of acidic foods is ridiculous; we get rid of excess acid by exhaling carbon dioxide.
• The claims about the health benefits of drinking alkaline water are not supported by credible scientific evidence.
• There is nothing wrong with drinking slightly acidic waters such as rainwater. “Body pH” is a meaningless concept; different parts of the body (and even of individual cells) can have widely different pH values.
• If you really want to de-acidify your stomach (at the possible cost of interfering with protein digestion), why spend hundreds of dollars for an electrolysis device when you can take calcium-magnesium pills, Alka-Seltzer or Milk of Magnesia?
• Electrolysis devices are generally worthless for treating water for health enhancement, removal of common impurities, disinfection, and scale control.

That is the scientific analysis. Note that it covers ‘alkaline water’ as well, which is just another variant on the same mumbo-jumbo theme. Don’t confuse scientific evidence with pseudo-scientific jargon. The entire ionized water pitch is illogical and improbable, and one need only look as far as the price tag for the ionization device to find the motive. Snake oil would be more effective at half the cost.