this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Not defending pseudoscientific health regimens, but the acid in "a spritz of lemon" doesn't neutralize an arbitrary amount of alkalinity
No, but it does reveal a distinct lack of understanding on her her part as to what these pseudoscientific health products even are that are supposedly doing things for her. Like saying "I always drink decaf coffee and pop a shot of 5 hour energy in the morning." "I drink skim milk with a splash of double cream." "I love honey on my keto toast." Like, even if it's not enough acidity to completely negate the alkalinity, it's literally antithetical to the supposed goal.
I am reminded of the detail in The Office where Michael Scott is stirring sugar into his diet coke.
All the posts advocating for combining baking soda and vinegar for cleaning.
I mean... if you want to clean up a bunch of salts you're creating.
I think it was Angela Collier that did a pretty basic test with a common store bought alkaline water, a lemon and some test strips. The water doesn't start very alkaline at all.
edit: Yep, here we go. https://youtu.be/rBQhdO2UxaQ
It's an amusing video.
That girl can rant. Love her work, but always watch it at 2x to maximize the frustrated-teacher vibe.
Even regular neutral water shifts to slightly acidic (5.6) as long as it has contact to air (CO2 dissolving). Would be interesting to know how long those store bought alkaline water becomes base or acidic.
True, but your body will not enjoy water that's very alkaline, so there's a chance it's sufficient since lemon is pretty acidic.
Plus, if the whole point of it is to be alkaline, why directly counter that with what you add?
It turns out, that for the values we are talking about here, it actually more or less does! A lemon has a pH of around 2.5, while "Flow" has an advertised pH of 8.1. This means roughly that to neutralize 1L of this water you need approximately 0.4mL of lemon juice or about 8 drops/half a gram. It's hard to tell how much a "spritz" is intended to be, but a single lemon contains about 60mL of juice, so this represents about 0.67% of the total juice inside.
It's a surprising consequence of using a logarithmic scale for pH.
No. But thinking it does sure helps inflate egos.