Has your water got sufficient ions?

Beware sarcasm

After so many years of neglect, water appears ready to emerge as a cutting-edge health food.

Perhaps it's the fault of Gatorade, that Technicolor concoction of salt, sugar and water people guzzle to "replenish their electrolytes." The Gatorade inventors, some dweeby physiologists, were just trying to keep football players from collapsing in the Florida heat. They could not have foreseen what was to transpire in the decades ahead as the concept of the "sports drink" took hold, and then, more bizarrely yet, water itself became a symbol of health and status.

With each iteration, beginning with bottled waters derived from glaciers (tres European) to the recent "enhanced water," H2O has moved closer to the first-class cabin. But the latest version is a real head-scratcher: ionised, alkalinised water.

Companies are in the game to sell you a gizmo to run your tap water through. The devices contain electrodes that purport to realign your water, split off some hydrogen atoms along the way, and rid it of various pesky problems so that it will taste better and be healthier and your arthritis will go away. In a week. Maybe two.

Water, in the western world at least, is a strange target for an expensive course in self-improvement. Top-notch plumbing remains perhaps our greatest achievement. We confront many ubiquitous environmental risks daily, but water is not among them. It is safe and unobjectionable. Plus it's cheap - and yet Americans spent $21 billion last year on bottled water.

So why all the excitement about ionised water? And didn't we go through this already with air? We were going to ionise air, too, to purify it - until that didn't work out so well. In fact, Sharper Image, a purveyor of one of these air ioniser products, lost a large lawsuit because of their too optimistic claims.

Having read many articles and viewed countless videos about ionisation and alkalisation of water, I remain uncertain how the technology being hawked will help a single soul. There isn't even a crummy clinical trial to criticise. Nothing.

Even by health fad standards, the science around ionisation and alkalinisation is remarkably thin. Here is the claim: We are ingesting food and drink that is set at a disadvantageous pH. You remember pH, the measure of acidity and its opposite, alkalinity (or baseness, as in acid-base balance), where perfect Swiss neutrality is 7.0. Any number below 7.0 refers to an acidic substance and any number above, alkaline.

A more important pH to remember is this: 7.4. That's the pH of the human bloodstream. We work very hard to stay exactly there. Every chemical reaction, all trillion or two our cells crank through daily, is optimised for 7.4. The body does not work well outside a tight range between 7.35 and 7.45; indeed much more variation and you're liable to drop dead. Here's an example of how seriously our body takes its ambient pH. People with emphysema retain carbon dioxide in the distorted nooks and crannies of their lungs, and the carbon dioxide converts to a mild acid that would upset the body's entire acid-base balance. Your heroic kidneys compensate for the extra acid by hanging onto bicarbonate, thereby maintaining the 7.4 pH and keeping the body from collapsing.

The body has a floating buffer system that shifts back and forth from the mildly alkaline (bicarbonate) to the mildly acidic (carbonic acid), depending on the need. The stomach, though, is a factory of harsh acid, creating a pH of 2 or so - the better to denature bacteria and viruses and anything else that might make you sick. So the idea that moving some water from a pH of 7.0, where it usually lives, to a pH of maybe 8.5 and claiming a major health triumph is quite puzzling. The premise, I think, is that slightly increasing the pH in your stomach will keep the stomach from having to secrete so much acid and in turn spare the pancreas from squirting out so much bicarbonate, thereby giving all your organs a bit of a holiday. And that holiday means we don't have pains or arthritis or die, maybe.

So that's alkalinisation. Ionising water for health is even more difficult to comprehend, but here goes: The ioniser splits water into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen. The idea is that cleaving emancipates enslaved atoms from water's neutral charge (hydrogen is positive and oxygen is negative) and that this liberation is salutary. You're suddenly full of electricity, and everything feels better! This view that more ions are welcome stands in direct opposition to the free radical theory of disease. There, the bad guy is - you guessed it - a rogue negative charge looking for some unsuspecting molecule to glom onto and destroy, making you age and get arthritis and grey hair and all the problems that ionisation sets out to cure.

Water ionisation and alkalinisation is another fad without science to support it or even a particularly interesting group of nuts pitching it.

But so what? One could argue that there is nothing wrong with snake oil, that the crime is victimless but for the money lost. Surely it is unlikely that people will ionise or alkalinise their way to illness. There is harm, however, in all of this, similar to the harm that comes from tolerating a parallel universe of chronic Lyme and antioxidant cures and autism-causing vaccines and countless other persistent, willful misconceptions of what cold-hearted, gimlet-eyed science long ago has disproved.

Medicine and science are fragile entities, easily tarred and assaulted. People love to hate conventional remedies and advice, the schoolmarmish admonishments to eat less, exercise more and wear a seat belt for gosh sake. How much more fun to embrace a retro-futuristic water ioniser that does whatever it does and makes the willies all go away. Stacked up against that sort of promise, what chance does methodical, earthbound science really have? Eventually it is the physician who seems the narrow-minded, dim-witted charlatan stuck on boring Earth, heavy shoes pulled down by gravity. Because it turns out that it is not science that people want but science fiction.

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Parkinson's drug 'helps' the elderly think younger and reap the rewards from the choices they make

At least this is a study of actual live people --JR

A drug used to treat Parkinson’s Disease could help older people make better decisions, say researchers.

As you get older you begin to lose the ability to learn from experiences, meaning you are less likely to be able to predict the chance of getting a reward from choices made.

This part of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens, is responsible for interpreting the difference between expected reward and actual reward.

These predictors, which come from a brain chemical called dopamine, helps us learn from our actions and in turn make better decisions in the future.

However, a drug widely used on Parkinson’s sufferers could help reverse this process helping older people think as they did when they were younger, according to a new study published in journal Nature Neuroscience.

Dr Rumana Chowdhury, who led the study at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, said: 'We know that dopamine decline is part of the normal aging process so we wanted to see whether it had any effect on reward-based decision making.

'We found that when we treated older people who were particularly bad at making decisions with a drug that increases dopamine in the brain, their ability to learn from rewards improved to a level comparable to somebody in their twenties and enabled them to make better decisions.'

Researchers used behavioural testing and brain imaging techniques, to investigate the decision-making process in 32 healthy volunteers aged in their early seventies compared with 22 volunteers in their mid-twenties.

Older participants were tested on and off L-DOPA, a drug that increases levels of dopamine in the brain known as Levodopa, widely used to treat Parkinson’s.

The participants were asked to complete a behavioural learning task called the two-arm bandit, which mimics the decisions that gamblers make while playing slot machines. Players were shown two images and had to choose the one that they thought would give them the biggest reward.

Their performance before and after drug treatment was assessed by the amount of money they won in the task.

Dr Chowdhury said: 'Older volunteers who were less able to predict the likelihood of a reward from their decisions, and so performed worst in the task, showed a significant improvement following drug treatment'.

Researchers also looked at brain activity as particpantsn played the game using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

They measured connections between areas of the brain that are involved in reward prediction using a technique called Diffusor Tensor Imaging (DTI).

The findings reveal that the older adults who performed best in the gambling game before drug treatment had greater integrity of their dopamine pathways.  Older adults who performed poorly before drug treatment were not able to adequately signal reward expectation in the brain - this was corrected by L-DOPA and their performance improved on the drug.

Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, said: 'This careful investigation into the subtle cognitive changes that take place as we age offers important insights into what may happen at both a functional and anatomical level in older people who have problems with making decisions.

'That the team were able to reverse these changes by manipulating dopamine levels offers the hope of therapeutic approaches that could allow older people to function more effectively in the wider community.'

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