I’m indebted to Dr. Jef­frey Moss for pro­vid­ing these inter­est­ing excerpts from the research lit­er­a­ture on diet, the use of potas­sium bicar­bon­ate sup­ple­men­ta­tion and their rela­tion­ship to meta­bolic aci­do­sis and chronic illness.

1

The fol­low­ing is an abstract of an arti­cle by Drs. RC Mor­ris Jr, O Schmidlin, M Tanaka, A For­man, L Fras­setto and A Sebas­t­ian that appeared in Sem­i­nars in Nephrology.

Com­pared to the pre­his­toric diet, the mod­ern human diet con­tains not only exces­sive NaCl and defi­cient K+, but also defi­cient pre­cur­sors of HCO₃- and some­times exces­sive pre­cur­sors of non­volatile acid. The mis­match between the mod­ern diet and the still ancient bio­log­i­cal machin­ery of humans sub­tly but chron­i­cally dis­or­ders their inter­nal milieu, giv­ing rise to a pro­longed state of low-grade potas­sium defi­ciency and low-grade meta­bolic aci­do­sis whose sever­ity increases with age. Sup­ple­men­tal KCI can­not redress this mis­match and cor­rect this state.

How­ever, the mis­match is redressed and the state cor­rected by restor­ing intakes of K+ and HCO₃- to lev­els approach­ing those in the diet of our pre­his­toric fore­bear­ers, with either fruits and veg­eta­bles or with sup­ple­men­tal KHCO₃. So restored, KHCO₃ can: 1) atten­u­ate hyper­ten­sion and pos­si­bly pre­vent its occur­rence by sup­press­ing the phe­nom­e­non of nor­moten­sive NaCl-sensitivity, in part by its natri­uretic effect; (2) pre­vent kid­ney stones by reduc­ing uri­nary excre­tion of cal­cium and increas­ing uri­nary excre­tion of cit­rate; (3) ame­lio­rate and pro­tect against the occur­rence of osteo­poro­sis by increas­ing the renal reten­tion of cal­cium and phos­pho­rus, and by sup­press­ing bone resorp­tion and enhanc­ing bone for­ma­tion; and (4) likely pre­vent stroke.

2

Another impor­tant arti­cle by Drs. L Fras­setto, RC Mor­ris Jr, DE Sell­meyer, K Todd, and A Sebas­t­ian appeared in the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Nutri­tion. Key state­ments from the abstract include:

Our group has shown that con­tem­po­rary net acid-producing diets do indeed char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally pro­duce a low-grade sys­temic meta­bolic aci­do­sis in oth­er­wise healthy adult sub­jects, and that the degree of aci­do­sis increases with age, in rela­tion to the nor­mally occur­ring age-related decline in renal func­tional capac­ity. We also found that neu­tral­iza­tion of the diet net acid load with dietary sup­ple­ments of potas­sium bicar­bon­ate (KHCO₃) improved cal­cium and phos­pho­rus bal­ances, reduced bone resorp­tion rates, improved nitro­gen bal­ance, and mit­i­gated the nor­mally occur­ring age-related decline in growth hor­mone secretion–all with­out restrict­ing dietary NaCl.… We argue that any level of aci­do­sis may be unac­cept­able from an evo­lu­tion­ar­ily per­spec­tive, and indeed, that a low-grade meta­bolic alka­lo­sis may be the opti­mal acid-base state for humans.

3

In addi­tion, arti­cles in the Jour­nal of Nutri­tion have stated that mod­ern (“West­ern­ized”) diets can lead to a sub­stan­tial decline of potas­sium intake com­pared with tra­di­tional food habits, and a large frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion might now have sub-optimal potas­sium intake. A high potas­sium intake was demon­strated to have pro­tec­tive effects against sev­eral patho­logic states affect­ing the car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, kid­neys, and bones.

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