Podcast 482: pH Balance

Life Enthusiast

Podcast 482: pH Balance

On today’s episode, we’ll explore how our bodies manage acids through critical metabolic pathways. Our metabolism constantly produces acids, mainly hydrogen ions (H+) and carbon dioxide (CO2). We can breathe out CO2, but H+ needs to be either combined with CO2 with bicarbonate or removed through urine using phosphate and glutamine/ammonium pathways. Join Martin and Spencer as they discuss these metabolic pathways, their health implications, and a new way to support your body’s naturally acidic systems with Bicarbamet.

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MARTIN: Well, hello there. This is Martin Pytela at Life Enthusiast podcast. And with me today, Spencer Feldman. Spencer is the CEO at Remedy Link. And Spencer, wouldn’t you believe it, has found a way to dive into the most persistent problem we have faced, which is the pH balance, acidosis, alkalosis, knowing where we are and working on it. But there’s so much to it. I would rather have Spencer kind of dive into it. But the main point that I want to make is when your pH balance is off, your mineral stores are affected and your mineral stores are in your bones. So if you’re suffering with thinning bones, you may have an issue with pH balance.

MARTIN: And this talk will probably interest you a lot. Spencer, what do you think?

SPENCER: Hey, Martin, I have got a lot to share about pH, so here we go. Okay. So it’s one of the things you hear in the alternative medical spheres is, oh, you should be more alkaline and kind of, right? You don’t want to be completely alkaline. You need stomach acid to break down proteins and sterilize the foods you eat. You want the colon to be acidic to make good short chain fatty acids. But yes, as a general rule, we are too acidic.

MARTIN: Let me just butt in here before you get in. Because this is my metabolic typing hat. We know that there are some people who wake up overly alkaline. Over-alkalinity is represented in your emotional world as dark moods, unmotivated, procrastinating, and even depressed.

SPENCER: I wouldn’t agree with that. I’ve seen plenty of people that are, I see plenty of people that have great metabolic acidity with the same symptoms.

MARTIN: I know that when we have acidity, people are short tempered, anxious, ragey, easy to anger, that sort of thing. Now, if you see them swinging back and forth, that would be because their meals are affecting them. I promise you that if you’re an oxidizer, you’ll be alkalized by fats, and if you’re autonomic, you’ll be alkalized by carbohydrates on your plate, in your food. And this will swing.

SPENCER: Okay.

MARTIN: Anyway, the main point is, what’s your overall situation? Right?

SPENCER: So as a general rule, if you check most people’s pH and through their urine and saliva pH, I’ll tell you a bit about that later. Almost everybody I find is acid. And the people that look like they’re alkaline, it’s a false alkalinity because they’re getting ammonia from an infection with a background of acidity that the ammonia is masking, but that’s a little more complex and we’ll get there in a minute. First, let’s start at the beginning, which is 50,000 years ago. So upper Paleolithic Stone Age humanity was eating roughly 87% alkaline food. Well, what does that mean? What does it mean that a food is alkaline? Well, the first thing we did when we tried to figure this out is people would burn food and take a look at the ash. And if the ash was primarily sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium, the alkaline elements, they said that’s an alkaline food. And if the ash was primarily iron, sulfur, iodine, and chloride, then they said that’s an acid food.

SPENCER: Okay, that’s a good rough sense of it. But then we got a little more sophisticated and realized some foods that are acidic have an alkaline effect on the body, like acetates, citrates, and so forth and so on. So what we really want is to know, at the end of the day, after you eat a particular food, does it make you more or less alkaline, more or less acidic and how much? And we’re pretty good at that now. And as a general rule, all fruits, with the exception of plums, figs, dates, and a couple of others, are alkaline forming. And all vegetables, with the exception of some of the oxalate things like chard and spinach, are also alkaline. And then all animal products mostly are acid forming, as are grains and beans, with the exception of, I think, oats, quinoa, wild rice and lentils.

MARTIN: Okay, I would really like to butt in here with, this is described as an autonomic person would see it. If your dominance is autonomic, then you will react exactly like this.

SPENCER: Okay.

MARTIN: And if you’re an oxidizer, you will have a different reaction, I promise. Go on.

SPENCER: Okay, so we are not eating like the upper paleolithic. We’re not eating 87% of our foods as alkaline forming. You know, there’s this idea that hunter gatherers were wildly successful in eating meat all day long. If you actually go to the few hunter gatherer cultures that still exist on the planet, maybe every three days they get meat. They’re not successful on every hunt. So 87% sounds about right. So unfortunately, we eat the other way. We eat 87% acidic. Now, the body has an ability to get rid of acids, right? So acids in the most fundamental form is of protons, a hydrogen proton, that’s an acid. That’s the most simple acid.

MARTIN: You mean like H+?

SPENCER: Yeah. And so we can get rid of acids in a number of different ways. One thing we can do is we can exhale CO2. That’s a form of release of acids. And then the other thing is we can push hydrogen out of the body. Using some of the alkaline elements, like sodium and potassium. And then you can also have bicarbonate. And the bicarbonate, when it meets up with an acid, gets neutralized, and then it can be removed from the body.

MARTIN: Yeah, I mean, the bicarbonate is the quickest way to take CO2, carbonic acid, combine them, and now you go from acidity to alkalinity.

SPENCER: Right. So the body uses bicarbonates as the main way to buffer acids.

MARTIN: Right.

SPENCER: And bicarbonates do a number of things. I mean, there’s some very fascinating things it does. Are you familiar with phase four water and the work of Pollock, doctor, Pollock?

MARTIN: Yeah, we talk about it a lot. Exclusion Zone, or water that has been unclustered, declustered, energy removed. So it actually doesn’t stick together.

SPENCER: Right. That requires bicarbonate for that to happen. Another thing that people don’t realize is mucus itself, which the body has lots of mucus in it. And it’s not a bad thing. Right. You need some mucus for the lungs to clean themselves out. You need mucus for the microbiome to live. It fluffs out a thousand fold in the presence of bicarbonate.

SPENCER: So a bicarbonate deficiency, the mucus shrinks down a thousand fold. And then the lungs can’t clean themselves properly. And the gut isn’t all that healthy. Bicarbonate does a lot of stuff. So one thing we talked about is it neutralizes acids. Another thing it does is the small intestine is supposed to be alkaline. So bicarbonate is actually secreted in the bile and in the pancreatic enzymes, in the juice of the pancreas into the small intestine to neutralize stomach acid.

SPENCER: So the bicarbonate that comes there actually keeps the stomach acid from burning the rest of the small intestine and neutralizes it. But it also activates all the enzymes. All the digestive enzymes in the small intestine have to be in an alkaline environment to work. Enzymes are very pH dependent. So an enzyme that works 100% at a pH of say, 7.5, which is mildly alkaline, might only work at 10% at a pH of 6, which is a little acid.

MARTIN: Right. So it will do nothing in your stomach, it will do its work in your small intestine.

SPENCER: Right. So we have people that will take digestive enzymes by the handful, hoping to improve their digestion. But they don’t realize that if their small intestine isn’t alkaline, those enzymes won’t do anything or do very little, maybe 10%. So there’s also an enzyme in the small intestine called intestinal alkaline phosphatase. And what that does is it actually binds to lipopolysaccharides and helps with the health of the small intestine. So if someone, listen to the name of it, intestinal alkaline phosphatase, it has to be alkaline for it to work. So again, if the small intestines aren’t alkaline, then what happens is we not only don’t digest food properly, but we lose the protection against SIBO and other things. So it’s pretty important to keep the body alkaline.

So first thing is, well, how would you know if you need it? Well, if you have access to a blood test, you can look at your CO2 levels. And what CO2 actually is on a blood test, it’s not really a measurement of CO2, it is a measurement of your bicarbonate, which is the main way that CO2 is bound in the blood.

MARTIN: Meaning that if you don’t have enough carbonates, your CO2 will go up?

SPENCER: It goes down. So low bicarbonates means you have low CO2, which means your bicarbonate stores are down. But if your CO2 is high, that’s really more an issue of the lungs not being able to, the alveoli starting to fail. And then you’re looking for a lung detox. But barring having a blood test, you can go get some 6 to 8 pH paper or 5.5 to 8 pH paper. And you can check your pH levels with your urine and your saliva.

SPENCER: Now, your urine represents the acids coming out of you and your saliva represents your bicarbonate store, your reserves.

MARTIN: Right.

SPENCER: So easy to check your urine first thing in the morning. You just pee on it, shake off the excess pee and look at the color pretty quick. And the pH paper changes color. And based on a little chart, it’ll say, oh, it’s this color. So it’s this pH.

MARTIN: Right.

SPENCER: You really want, optimal is 6.5. But I think anything 6 and above is fine. If you’re getting below six, that’s a lot of acids your body’s having to dump.

MARTIN: Dumping acids like it’s out of style.

SPENCER: Right. And eventually, the body won’t be able to do that anymore. Right. There’s only so much you can ask of the kidneys. So the other thing is you could check your saliva. And the way you do that is first thing in the morning, before you brush your teeth, you rinse your mouth out with some water and then spit it out, and then kind of gnaw on your tongue a little bit until it’s into a little bit of saliva comes. And check that, i should be 6.8. Yeah.

MARTIN: This is an important point. If you start thinking about food, your enzymes in your mouth will change, your saliva will change. So you need to actually be quite conscious doing this, because if you, for example, check your saliva just before breakfast or after breakfast, it’s going to be all over the map. You need to actually really do this as described here.

SPENCER: Right. But if you’re not sure, you could do it several times during the day, you’ll see it move around. What you want is you want to see that the saliva never goes below 6.8. And what they found in studies is a saliva of 6.6, which is just a little bit acid, has increased the risk of metabolic syndrome, and that would be insulin resistance, high blood pressure, obesity, high triglycerides, low HDLs, and things like that. So if you see that your urine is dropping below 6 or your saliva is 6.6 or lower, that’s an indication that your body is getting more acid than it can handle. And now, how might this play out? Well, there’s this tissue inside the body called connective tissue, and it’s a packing material between all the cells. It’s actually the only thing that touches a cell.

SPENCER: Blood vessels don’t touch cells. Nerves don’t touch cells. Capillaries don’t touch cells. The connective tissue is what surrounds every cell in the body, and all the nerves go through it, and all the blood vessels and capillaries go through it. And what happens is the capillaries irrigate the connective tissue, they leak slightly, so they’re irrigating, and all the nutrition goes into there. And then the connective tissue says, okay, this can pass and this can’t. If it’s something it doesn’t like, it’ll hold onto it. So it’s another filtering mechanism.

SPENCER: And if it fits something it wants to pass on to the cells, it will. And then the cells use it in their function, whether it’s sugar or lipids or proteins. And then the cells have a waste product, so they release their waste products back into the connective tissue, and then from there into the lymphatics, and then it leaves the body. So that’s how that whole system works. So it’s really important that your connective tissue is happy. And it’s a very ancient system. It predates almost every other system in the body. Now, a lot of people think that we can’t store water soluble materials, that you can store fat soluble materials in the liver and the fat, but not water.

SPENCER: Well, the connective tissue stores water soluble materials. So it’s actually also a storage system. So it’s a filter, it’s a storage system, it’s protection. And one of the things it can do is it can store extra toxins. So if there’s a lot of acids, because the person is eating very acidic food, and their kidneys are finally unable to keep up with it, and they’re not getting enough bicarbs, then these acids go into the connective tissue. Now, remember, I said bicarbs are in the fourth phase of water. This is one of the reasons why juicing vegetables is so good for you.

SPENCER: Not only are you getting the alkaline elements, sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, which help push out the acids out of the kidneys, but you’re also getting bicarbonates as the fourth phase of water in the juice, which helps you exhale it out as well. So, great if you can drink vegetable juice. But most people are getting more acids than their body can deal with. And so the connective tissue starts storing it. And, you know, it’s not a good long term phenomenon. Now, have you ever done, like, survival training where you made cordage or made yarn by spinning together threads?

MARTIN: Yeah, in my youth. Yes, of course, the boy scout days.

SPENCER: Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to make rope or you want to make yarn, you basically spin together fibers and they get stronger, and then you twist those stronger fibers together, and each time it gets bigger and bigger and eventually you have a rope. So our body does it all the time, and that’s what tendons and ligaments are. And so we’re making tendons and ligaments by spinning together connective tissue fibers, however, they attach to each other with something called a hydrogen bond. And if there’s already lots of hydrogen there in the connective tissue, because that’s what acid is, it’s hydrogen. Then, instead of the connective tissue bonding to other connective tissue, it bonds to the hydrogen.

SPENCER: And then the spitting of these fibers doesn’t work very well, and we make weak fibers. Now, if you’re over 40 years old, you may have the experience of hurting yourself for no good reason. You know, you pulled your back, you twisted something. You twisted a knee. And it’s not like you had any fun doing it. It’s not like you were out playing racquetball or hiking. You just walked and turned slowly, and something ripped. And then you thought to yourself, wow, I’m getting old.

SPENCER: How did I hurt myself, just from walking? Or maybe you’re, like, sleeping in bed. And you turn and you’re like, oh, you turned a little funny, and you ripped something. How does that happen? That wouldn’t happen when you were young. Well, what happens is the acids are building up, and the binding capacity of the tendons and ligaments is weakening so that you’re getting these frays, these very weak connective tissue, ligaments and tendons. And then it just tears with the littlest bit of pressure. So one aspect of aging gracefully is getting the acids out of the connective tissue so that our tendons and ligaments are strong and we can move about without hurting ourselves and comfortably and with strength. As an example of this, take a look at the skin of a 90 year old person. It’s fragile and it’s transparent and it’s thin.

SPENCER: Why is that? Well, skin is the connective tissue you can see. So you’re seeing the effective acids on the connective tissue for 90 years. And even though that’s what you can see, that’s actually what’s happening inside. The connective tissue inside the body looks just like the skin on the outside.

MARTIN: It’s frail and weak, fragile.

SPENCER: Right. So what we want to do is we want to protect our connective tissue so that it’s strong and healthy and vibrant. And also because it can function to protect the cells. And so to do that, we want to remove the acids. And bicarbonate is the chemical reaction that neutralizes acids and lets you get rid of them in the body.

MARTIN: Yeah, I’m just spinning in my head. You’re talking about pH of below six or whatever in the mouth. I’m just visualizing all the decline and mineralization and stuff like that. Right?

SPENCER: Sure. So there’s some other fun things we can talk about for bicarbonate. One is it removes fluoride. And fluoride is the toxin that the Nazis used in concentration camps to sedate the people in the concentration camps so they would become kind of like zombies and wouldn’t fight back. Destroys the ability to. It interferes with the parts of the brain associated with free will and spiritual connections. So we know that fluorine is being used in the water supplies, and it’s kind of hard not to, you buy organic vegetables and fruits and vegetables. Well, they’re probably, if they’re irrigating it with fluoridated water, you’re getting fluoride that way.

SPENCER: It’s hard to avoid it. But bicarbonates will displace fluoride. Bicarbonates also have a chelating effect. They can get rid of toxic metals, but there’s other things better for that. Now, to close on bicarbonate, I’ll tell you a personal story. So my first interest in bicarbonates was based on the work of Dr. Simoncini, who was using bicarbonate injections with cancer.

MARTIN: Yeah.

SPENCER: And I wanted to find a way that people could do strong doses of bicarbonates without having to find a doctor to give them intravenous bicarbonate. Now, there’s a lot of ways you can get bicarbonate into the body. You can mix it in water and drink it. That’s baking soda. But then you neutralize the stomach acid. So that’s not good.

MARTIN: Yep. It just wipes out the digestion.

SPENCER: Right. You could take baths with it. You could take two cups of sodium bicarbonate and put it in a hot bath and soak in it. And that’s definitely better. But what I did as an experiment was, I injected some subcutaneously. I gave myself, I was trying to figure out how much bicarb can I take without it stinging. At 4.8% it is about as good.

SPENCER: And 8% hurts. So I injected it into lymph nodes in my groin on either side, like 20 ml of 4.8% sodium bicarbonate. And a couple of interesting things happened. So that evening, I woke up multiple times during the night with persistent and very strong erections. There’s no other way to say that. And I’m 55, so that’s not something that typically happens in your fifties. And that’s more a thing when you’re a much younger man. And so I woke up, and I’m like, what the heck was that about? That was like being a teenager.

SPENCER: And then I had to look it up. Is there any connection between erections and sodium bicarbonate? And indeed, there is. Another thing that happened is the lymph nodes. I’ve had some swollen lymph nodes in my groin for my whole life. And they started going down the first time in, like, 30, 40 years, which is a whole other conversation to have.
MARTIN: So this is a consequence of you injecting baking soda.

SPENCER: Subcutaneous liquid bicarbonate. Which I’m not suggesting people do, but I’m just giving you the story of how I came up with this, what I’m about to tell you. So I’m looking up, I’m like, bicarbonate and erections, what’s there in the literature? And this could be a whole talk on its own, but here it is. Okay, in order to get an erection, two things have to happen. And again, erections don’t just happen for men. Women have their own version internally, another conversation. So blood has to go into the penis, and that’s arterial, and then it has to not get out.

SPENCER: And that’s venous. So the blood goes in, and then as the blood goes in, it pinches off some veins, which keeps the blood from coming back out. Now, a great number of people have a degree of erectile dysfunction or impotence as they get older. A man who lives long enough is pretty much guaranteed to become impotent. It’s like 40% of men in their forties, 50% of men in their fifties, something like that. So it’s not a small thing. And a lot of guys won’t talk about it because they’re embarrassed about it. They won’t talk to their doctor about it.

MARTIN: Well, they go buy the blue pill and hope for the best.

SPENCER: Well, we’re going to talk about what that means, right? So I would divide it into saying that there’s two types of impotence. Right? There’s arterial, meaning the blood’s not getting in. And that’s sort of like if you imagine you have a flat tire in your car and you have a hand pump, but the pump doesn’t work, your tire’s not gonna get filled. That would be arterial.

MARTIN: You can’t fill it.

SPENCER: Right. It won’t fill it up. And that’s much more rare. Right? That’s associated with a much greater age, heart disease, diabetes, arterial blood issues. And for that, you could take a look at some of the arterial cardiovascular detox protocols we talk about. The far more common is the venous side, what I would call venous impotence or erectile dysfunction, where you are pumping the tire up, but the tires got a leak in it, and no matter how much air you put into the tire, it leaks out. And this is what most men experience.

MARTIN: Yes, you can get it up, but it won’t stay up.

SPENCER: Right. So this is what most men experience once they start getting older in their years and probably a lot younger than they’d like, is that their erections aren’t as strong because the pressure never builds. And it doesn’t last very long because it leaks out again. Now, what some people do is they’ll take either supplements or drugs to raise nitric oxide. Supplements could be like arginine and drugs. There’s a couple of drugs. It’s a $3 billion a year worldwide industry. There are special cells in the penis called smooth muscle cells that are involved in relaxing and allowing pressure to go against the vein to keep the blood from leaving. But we lose these cells every year. And when you lose about 15% of those cells, there’s not enough there to apply enough pressure to cause the erection to stay.

MARTIN: Yeah, you leak.

SPENCER: Right, right. You leak. Exactly. So what they try to do with these nitric oxide drugs is they try to, and the body does this itself also, to a degree, it tries to ramp up the nitric oxide to a point where it’ll kind of overcome that for a while. Here’s the problem. Nitric oxide has a dark side to it. It turns into one thing called peroxynitrite. And then there’s another thing, which is oxygen-nitrogen (ONOO-)

SPENCER: It’s a whole bunch of things. And if you look at the formula, and they haven’t named this thing, but it’s ONOO-. So I call it, “Oh no”.

MARTIN: Oh, yeah, that’s totally it. ONOO-, you have that.

SPENCER: The “oh no” chemical. So you don’t want peroxynitrite, and you don’t want the “oh no” chemical, because what these do is they’ll actually accelerate the destruction of the smooth muscle cells. So it’s a fly now, pay later plan. Right. If the reason that they ended up buying these things is they lost these smooth muscle cells with age, and then they’re taking the drug, which temporarily boosts them and gives them more nitric oxide at a cost of making these chemicals that then make you lose more of these smooth muscle cells.

SPENCER: And then, eventually then nothing.

MARTIN: So you have your moment of fun, and the next time, it’s going to be even harder to get it.

SPENCER: So here are some thoughts, right. One, there’s a very natural way to raise nitric oxide. Sodium bicarbonate raises nitric oxide in the body. And number two, we want to neutralize the peroxynitrite and the ONOO molecule, and sodium bicarbonate breaks down the peroxynitrite and the ONOO molecule. So if God ever gave us something for male sexual longevity. It’s baking soda.

MARTIN: So here’s a cheap trick, then. If you do use the blue pill, make sure that you follow it with?

SPENCER: Yes, Sodium bicarbonate. So you’re right there. So there’s three people that could consider taking sodium bicarbonate. And then I’ll tell you how to do this without injections. Okay. Number one, you’re a young man, you’re 20, you got a healthy sex life. You’ve got all of your smooth muscle cells, and you want to keep them because every time you get an erection, even naturally, without any kind of help, you’re getting nitric oxide, some of which is turning into peroxynitrite and the ONOO molecule. And slowly but surely losing some of those smooth muscle cells.

MARTIN: It’s like driving at 60,000 miles.

SPENCER: Right. So you’re hearing this, and you’re like, I’m 20, I’m 30. I’ve got great sexual vigor. Wonderful. Would you like to keep it? Sodium bicarb. Okay. The second group of people, they’re like, oh, well, yeah, I actually do take a little, I do take some drugs or some supplements. Okay. If that’s where you’re at, make sure you take some sodium bicarb with it so that when the nitric oxide, which has a very short half life, breaks down into peroxynitrite and the, ONOO molecule, you can neutralize those pretty darn quick, and you won’t make it any worse.

SPENCER: And then if people need even a little bit more help, there’s things called shockwave therapy, which can vibrate the tissue in the penis and bring in stem cells. But you have to make sure that you have enough testosterone in your body. Because if you do have testosterone, then these stem cells that are recruited become smooth muscle cells. And if you don’t have testosterone, they turn into fat cells, and that isn’t going to do anything for you. Yeah, you wasted your, well, you might have made it worse, because now you have fatty tissue in there. Okay. Right.

SPENCER: So sodium bicarbonate. So what do you do? You don’t need to inject sodium bicarbonate, but what we do want to take it into our body and slowly build our levels back up, because most people don’t want to eat like a stone age hunter-gatherer, I don’t think you want to be chewing on roots and vegetables and tubers for 90% of your food and then have a little bit of meat. We’re going to eat the way we want to eat. So to do that, we’re going to have to neutralize it. We have to raise our bicarb levels, which you can measure with the pH paper. Right? I wanted to take bicarb orally, which is the easiest way to do it.

SPENCER: But I didn’t want to wipe out my stomach acid. So what we did is we created a bicarb form that only opens up in the small intestine, which is where the liver and the pancreas are on their own dumping bicarb. So we’re mimicking how the body delivers bicarb to it.

MARTIN: Right. In the small intestine. Duodenum.

SPENCER: In the small intestine. Exactly. And someone might say, well, carnivores don’t do this. I’m like, yeah, they do. Carnivores get bicarb all the time. They’re eating the pancreas and the small intestine. That’s where all the bicarb is. It’s one of the first places they eat when they kill an animal.

MARTIN: Yeah. That’s the first thing they go after. They eat the guts.

SPENCER: Yeah. Right. Because that’s where all the bicarb is. Even animals know enough to do this as well. So, there’s a thousand reasons. And I haven’t even covered all the reasons why bicarb is important for the human body. It just goes on and on and on. It’s an incredibly overlooked deficiency.

SPENCER: And it’s incredibly easy to fix if you know how to do it. And you can monitor it. You can see for yourself: “Wow. Look! My saliva pH is 6.6. Hey now it’s 6.8.”

SPENCER: And all of a sudden, look what’s going on with my blood pressure. And I think I’m losing a little bit of weight. And the triglycerides are normalizing. And, oh, my God, my sex life is better. So bicarb is an important aspect of living a long and vital life.

MARTIN: And so the secret is the delivery.

SPENCER: Right. So we make a product called Bicarbamet, which is the potassium and sodium bicarbonates. In a way that they only release in the small intestine where we want them to. So you don’t wipe out your stomach acid. It mimics how the body naturally gives you bicarb.

MARTIN: Right. So it’s the packaging. It’s like having it in a capsule that will survive the stomach and then release right after that.

SPENCER: That’s the idea. We want it released over the course of the small intestine. So there’s ways in which we’ve got a special proprietary technology to release it in the way that I feel is the way it should be released at the place I want it released to. And then what happens is the body actually will reabsorb it at the end of the small intestine. It wants bicarb so badly that it’ll actually try to reabsorb most of the bicarb that is released at the top of the small intestine will reabsorb it back at the bottom. But most of us are so short on bicarb. And, yeah, it’s an important thing to understand how to have your optimal life.

MARTIN: So here’s an interesting sidebar. Sodium chloride is an important mineral, and doctors have been telling people to use less of it. But in fact, the Cl, the chloride is used in the stomach to make hydrochloric acid. And the Na, the sodium is used in your pancreas to build more sodium bicarbonate.

SPENCER: There was a study a while ago that said, oh no, look, we’re seeing blood pressure disorders with people that eat salt, and it was debunked. And what we now know is, yes, there are some people that have a reaction to salt, and there’s lots of people with high blood pressure, and there’s lots of people that don’t. And so unless you’re one of those people that when you take salt, your blood pressure skyrockets. Salt actually is incredibly important.

MARTIN: Needed.

SPENCER: Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. Is there much more to say about this?

SPENCER: Oh, sure. Hours.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. Take what? Take one with meals, or how do you do it?

SPENCER: Right. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to start one with meals, and you’re going to watch your saliva and your urine pH, and you’re going to raise it up until you get to the pH you like. Or if you’re getting too alkaline, back off a little bit and just wait. Because you’ve got 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years of acids to dump. Right. There’s no need to push it all out in one weekend. So you’re going to raise it up, reactable. Right.

MARTIN: You will have a bad reaction to it.

SPENCER: You can get too far the other way. Balance in everything. So you’re going to slowly increase the levels as your body allows you to. Watching your saliva and your urine pH. And then based on when that starts to normalize, you can slowly start to back off until you find the number you need to take; that equals,

SPENCER: So at that point in time you’ve cleared all the acids out of your tissue, and you’ve built up your bicarbonates. When you clear all the acids, your urine pH comes up. When you build your bicarbonate stores, the saliva pH comes up. And when those are both good and stable, then what you’re doing is you can back it down a little bit and find the amount of bicarb you need to neutralize the way you choose to eat. Right. If you say, hey, you know what? I like to eat really acid foods and I’m not going to stop. Have at it, you’re just going to need a little bit more bicarb. If you say, I’m not a really big fan of grains and beans and meat. I’m mostly vegetarian, and I drink lots of vegetable juice, you won’t need much at all.

MARTIN: Yeah. There’s an interesting side effect to this. Your bones will get heavier, so you will actually be weighing more as your minerals are starting to get stored instead of dumped.

SPENCER: Right. Right. So the body will rob calcium from the bones to alkalinize itself. There’s a lot of emergency responses. The body has to metabolic acidosis.

MARTIN: What I’m pointing at is that when you weigh yourself on a scale, you will actually be heavier while becoming slimmer because you will be restoring your mineral stores. I mean, it’s not huge. It’s five pounds or whatever, but it’s going to make a difference. And, of course, well, especially women. But pretty much all old folks have this thinning bone problem that will likely reverse.

SPENCER: I don’t think it’s realistic or even desirable to eat like a Stone age person. No, but I do want Stone Age health.

MARTIN: Well, you know, stone age people died at age 37 or 38.

SPENCER: Well, yeah. I mean, well, what you have is a split. Right? You have people who died because they got injuries. But you also had guys, people who made it out to 80. And I’ll give you an example. If you take a look at wild animals, not the ones that are being fed laboratory chow or dog or pet food, other than looking at the receding of their gums, it can be very hard to tell how old they are.

SPENCER: Animals don’t age like humans. Aging the way humans experience it, or human pets experience. It is a very human phenomenon in the animal kingdom. A lot of animals, when they get older, they’re still vital and strong and capable.

MARTIN: They go all the way until it’s over, and then it’s over.

MARTIN: Right. And that’s how I’d like to go. I believe that much of what we’re seeing in human aging and the lack of that in animal aging is the bicarbonate levels.

SPENCER: So when I say I want to age like a stone age man, I don’t want to die by a saber toothed tiger. I want to age like a successful stone age guy who, who’s made it out to 80, strong as an ox, still has good vision, sharp mind, and is still sexually active. And then 80, 90s, like, all right, that’s it. Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. I would love to die surfing at 96.

SPENCER: That sounds great.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay, so the dosage is clear. This one does not have to be refrigerated or, yes?

SPENCER: So, no. But some of the tech we have in there to do what we’re trying to do would do better in a cold or.

MARTIN: Okay, so keep it cold. All right, so one to two to three. What’s the limit?

SPENCER: Well, the limit is how you feel, right? Everybody’s different. So you start with one. You look at your saliva and your urine pH. You could try a second one. And as long as you don’t feel bad from it, you can keep going up until the point where you’re like, okay, that’s too much. That doesn’t feel good.

MARTIN: Awesome. I’m looking forward to living my stone age man life. Really. It’s awesome. I have been puzzled by this because it’s really hard to get bicarbs into the body. People don’t realize it. We have been looking for something that is of this sort. We actually have had a supplement that tries to deliver bicarbonates, but it’s been kind of iffy.

MARTIN: This way is promising. Very promising.

SPENCER: Yeah. When I had the aha moment, I’m like, oh, my God, we could do it like this. I was so excited because, I mean, I can do injections. I’ll do subcutaneous bicarb injections for myself. But what do I do for my 80 year old mother who’s 3000 miles away? What do I do for clients? What do I do for friends and family? They’re not going to have access to the medical equipment I’ve got. And once I realized that we could do this, I was on cloud nine.

MARTIN: This is a major physiological breakthrough of the modern technological or industrial age man. Figuring out how to actually bridge the gap.

SPENCER: Yeah.

MARTIN: Now I really understand your excitement about it. Okay, Bicarbamet. This has been Spencer Feldman from Remedylink and Martin Pytela, life-enthusiast.com, by phone at [phone]. And thank you, Spencer.

SPENCER: Thanks, Martin.

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