Daily Shots of Baking Soda May be of Help against Autoimmune Diseases
Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University have now found evidence linking daily consumption of baking soda and an anti-inflammatory environment in the body.
NaHCO3 is the chemical makeup of bicarbonate of soda, commonly known as baking soda. Splenic refers to the spleen. Cholinergic refers to choline, a primary component of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine found in nerve fibers, are thin plate-like calls that cover the walls of fluid containing cavities within the body. The team has some of the first evidence of how this cheap, over-the-counter antacid can encourage our spleen to promote instead an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease.
The study demonstrated how when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there’s no need to mount a protective immune response.
“It’s most likely a hamburger not a bacterial infection,” is basically the message, says Dr. Paul O’Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University
and the study’s corresponding author.The team thinks, drinking soda, tells the spleen – which is part of the immune system, acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored – to go easy on the immune response. “Certainly drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen and we think it’s through the mesothelial cells,” O’Connor says.
In a study with both rats and healthy people, researchers found that after drinking a baking soda solution for two weeks, the macrophage population shifted from M1, or pro-inflammatory macrophages, to M2, or anti-inflammatory macrophages, in the spleen, blood, and kidneys. Researchers also observed increased production of regulatory T cells, which help balance the immune response so it doesn’t overreact, causing autoimmune disease, or underreact, letting an infection run rampant. The anti-inflammatory “shift” was preserved for at least four hours in humans and three days in rats.
Another benefit that the team found was that the spleen increased its size after consuming baking soda. The group believed that the body part increased due to the anti-inflammatory stimulus it produces. O’Connor is optimistic about the study’s findings and believes that it would help people that are struggling with autoimmune diseases.
“You are not really turning anything off or on, you are just pushing it toward one side by giving an anti-inflammatory stimulus,” he says, in this case, away from harmful inflammation. “It’s potentially a really safe way to treat inflammatory disease.”
