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I was having a heated debated with my mother (who has interests in nutrition) tonight. She was trying to convince me that not eating carbs - fruits and vegetables - would cause my body to become too acidic, and thereby unhealthy. I'm pretty sure she's wrong, since googling low-carb and acid alkaline together doesn't turn up much, but does anybody know of more concrete evidence, or if there are any problems like this? It seems like things should be fine as long as you supplement, but nutrition is a counter-intuitive subject.

You can easily do an alkalinity or pH test and find if she is wrong...

Just make sure that you eat the majority of your carbs as vegetables and you should be good.

triple wrote:She was trying to convince me that not eating carbs - fruits and vegetables - would cause my body to become too acidic, and thereby unhealthy. I'm pretty sure she's wrong, since googling low-carb and acid alkaline together doesn't turn up much...

Well, first, you should be eating plenty of vegetables on MANS. Just not the starchy, faux "vegetables" most people prefer: corn, carrots, and potatoes! Green, leafy stuff is what you're looking for.

I've been low-carbing for the better part of a year. I just had a blood test that showed my stats were almost entirely better than normal, particularly for someone who was obese in August of last year. Wouldn't a toxic level of acidity in my blood have shown up in a blood test?

Anyway, this smacks argument of the common myth regarding "acidic ketosis" or "ketoacidosis", with a healthy helping of the current "acid blood" nutritional fad floating around naturopathic circles.

First, "ketoacidosis". This is a life-threatening condition only experienced by diabetics, but frequently confused with the benign ketosis (also called lipolysis) experienced by people eating low-carb. I've discussed this before in Carbs and Ketosis. To sum up, yes, your blood pH is very slightly elevated, but still in the normal range, in a healthy person with normal kidney function while eating low-carb. However, this is due to acidic ketones -- acetone -- in your bloodstream. Your kidneys regulate your blood pH by extracting the extra ketones from your bloodstream and depositing it into your bladder for later disposal. The acetone molecules also easily pass out of your blood through your mucous membranes and skin. If you aren't on kidney dialysis and you aren't a diabetic, you have nothing to fear from ketones in your bloodstream. They are a normal by-product of fat metabolism... even in a low-fat eater or vegetarian, ketones will be released into the bloodstream while sleeping!

Second, "acidic blood". This is one of those pseudo-scientific gobbledygook phrases bandied about by many quack naturopaths, just like "mucoid fecale plaque", that's an excuse to sell you products (in this case, various alkaline supplements, but in the case of MFP, colonics). A human body works hard to maintain homeostasis; it takes an extraordinary upset -- read: a failing organ -- to cause wild swings from normal in a human bloodstream. Unfortunately, "acidic blood" and "mucoid fecal plaque" are concepts that seem simple, easy to understand, and yet are dead wrong, demonstrating either abysmal ignorance or calculated misunderstanding of human physiology.

When the doctors ran a tube up my ass to take pictures, they showed me the video. My intestines were clean as a whistle. As are yours. And those of just about everybody around you. Healthy, whitish-pink, and ready for action. The only people that might have anything resembling the "mucoid fecal plaque" bogeymen that some practitioners like to scare them with are people who are in acute organ failure already and need to be hospitalized! And if your blood pH is elevated beyond trivial, within-normal-bounds extents, you are probably in acute renal failure or have out-of-control diabetes and should also be hospitalized! All that colonics do is suck out your poop a few hours before you would have shit them out anyway. All that alkaline blood supplements do is cause your kidneys to shove more of the alkaline supplements into your bladder to maintain homeostasis with the acids in your blood already.

Quack test: if someone even says "mucoid fecal plaque" or "acidic blood" and isn't giggling at the sheer stupidity while doing so, lump their nutritional advice in with Toothless Jeb's advice on dental hygiene.

Acidic blood is a symptom of an underlying disorder. It is not a disorder itself.

Regardless, the burden of proof for any extraordinary claim lies with the claimant, not the person defending rationality. Your mother is claiming that eating a healthy diet, rich with vegetables and animal protein, devoid of fruits as would be the case when they weren't in season, similar to the evolutionary diet humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years while foregoing modern convenience foods like Twinkies and bread endangers your health? Really? Show me some evidence. Hell, stay on the diet for three to four months and then go compare blood profiles with you from before and you after. The results will be shockingly good.

Put any two people of similar age, height, weight, and sex up against one another in a blood profile test, one having eating low-carb for a year and one having eaten an equally-caloric typical American diet for a year, and you can almost guarantee the blood test will favor the low-carber across the board.