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A Well-Established Balancing Act

18 Oct 2024

Some things can be classified with high acidity, like lemon juice, or low acidity, like bicarbonate. Acidity is often measured on a pH scale. This is because Danish chemist Søren Peter Lauritz...

The Fountain of Youth and Alligators

18 Oct 2019

Funny the things one remembers. Like “Don’s Fountain of Youth,” a short cartoon I saw some time back in the 60s. “Don” was Donald Duck and the story was all about taking his nephews on a Florida...

The key to cleaning your teapot is chemistry

22 Feb 2019

Do you ever try to wash a mug only to be confronted by tea stains that just won’t budge? A little bit of chemistry may be just what you need to get your mugs back to white....

Is Carbonated Water Bad for Your Teeth?

13 Nov 2017

It's a well-known fact that soda is bad for your health. We've all read the reports and articles detailing how the sugar in pop will rot our teeth, cause obesity, or give us diabetes. So perhaps,...

Alkaline Nonsense

20 Mar 2017

It is so seductively simple.  If you want to avoid cancer, just make sure your body is “alkaline!”  Here is the rationale.  When a cell becomes cancerous it reduces its use of oxygen and cranks up...

Alkaline Water Nonsense

20 Mar 2017

It is not often that I’m left speechless.  But sometimes you run into a situation where words just fail you.  Absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous, preposterous, comical, and farcical come to mind, but...

Alkaline Food Bunk

20 Mar 2017

There is lots of bluster on the Internet about "acidic" and "alkaline" foods usually based on some story that cancer cells can only survive in an acid environment and it is therefore advisable to...

Chemistry lesson for The Food Babe… and everyone else #19: Alkaline Diets Do Not Cure Disease

17 Mar 2017

The best treatment for people prone to swallowing woo is a dose of chemistry. And one of the wooiest ideas out there is the one about alkaline diets curing disease. Gives me a headache. So let’s...

Alkalizing the Body?

15 Feb 2017

The human body carefully maintains the pH of blood at about 7.35, which is slightly alkaline, or basic. This is also the pH of the cells in all our organs that depend on the blood supply for their...

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