Plenty of people keep a box of baking soda stashed away in their drawers – and it’s not always for baking their favorite brownies. This is because, when it comes to do-it-yourself home remedies, baking soda ranks as one of the top effective ingredients. From scrubbing away stubborn stains and keeping roaches at bay to teeth whitening and treating an itchy scalp – baking soda has become our regular go-to.
Beauty and household solutions aside, it turns out that baking soda is also an age-old cure for various digestive and health disorders. The next time your grandmother advises you to drink baking soda on an empty stomach – don’t roll your eyes. Here are four fantastic ways in which that piece of advice holds true.
How Drinking Baking Soda On An Empty Stomach Keeps You Healthy
1. Maintains A Healthy pH Balance
An acidic environment in your body is a thriving playground for all sorts of health problems and diseases, namely acid reflux, cancer, osteoporosis, and arthritis. To keep your health in good shape, your blood needs to maintain an almost neutral pH of 7.3 and 7.4 – which leans a little to the alkaline side. Baking soda is alkaline in nature and can be easily absorbed and circulated by your blood. Drinking baking soda with water on an empty stomach can, therefore, help your blood maintain a healthy pH, and can be very helpful in curing acid reflux, indigestion, and heartburn.
2. Prevents Kidney Stones
These stones are crystals made of acids that are too large to be filtered by the kidney and pass out of the body through urine. Since these often get stuck in the ureter, one can only imagine how painful this can become over time. Kidney stones can cause back pain, nausea, passing of blood in the urine, and renal failure and are definitely something you want to avoid.
As mentioned earlier, baking soda, being a strong alkali, can help to dissolve these crystals over time to make them smaller so they can pass out of your body easily. Also, if you continue to drink baking soda with water on an empty stomach, you can naturally bring down the acidity levels in your body so that there is no chance for a kidney stone to develop in the first place!
3. Protects You From Urinary Infections
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the easiest for people to contract. It used to be possible to cure UTIs with antibiotics. However, frequent treatment over time has caused the infection-causing bacteria to become antibiotic resistant. This poses a threat to our health because stronger and more adaptive bacteria can only lead to more serious infections.
Enter baking soda. Again.
Baking soda works to neutralize the acid levels in your urine. This automatically helps your body take care of infection-causing bacteria. Baking soda is also a natural detoxifier and helps cleanse your kidneys. This way, it prevents the infection from spreading to your kidneys and causing further damage.
Note: If you are with child, stay away from ingesting baking soda, for it could harm both you and your baby.
4. Provides Natural Antacid Benefits
Your stomach contains acids that are essential for healthy digestion. Sometimes, these acids can flow into your food pipe from your stomach and cause an uncomfortable, burning sensation in your throat – a condition known as acid reflux. This backwash of acid from your stomach can also lead to heartburn – another uncomfortable condition that can make you feel like the overall region between your abdomen and the base of your throat have been set on fire.
Being alkaline in nature, baking soda acts as a natural antacid. It neutralizes the stomach acid and fights stomach gas buildup and can, therefore, also help reduce the burning sensation.
