The Baking Soda Experiment That Sent Me to the ER

Breaking down 6 baking soda myths, the alkalization-cures-cancer story, and where bicarbonate actually has a place.

At 4 AM I woke up with cramping in my stomach. Steady, gripping pain, the kind that doesn’t let you find a comfortable position and doesn’t respond to deep breathing. I hadn’t felt anything like it in years, if not decades, and it was not going away.

After years of effortless digestion, any pain that lingers registers as something worth investigating. It also scares you a little. When you’re used to comfort, you definitely notice the absence of it fast.

By 10 AM I was in the ER.

They checked my enzymes, and other markers, and everything came back perfect. The abdominal ultrasound was textbook normal too. No stones, no sludge, no gallbladder wall thickening, no duct dilation, and nothing abnormal noted in the liver, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, or other visible abdominal structures. They followed with a CT scan with IV iodinated contrast to rule out anything ultrasound might have missed and all came back clean.

So the question was: if structurally everything was fine, what was producing six hours of cramping in a system that had been working perfectly?

I’ll tell you what.

The experiment I ran on myself

A week earlier I started something I’d been resisting for a while. Half to one teaspoon of baking soda in half a glass of water before bed.

The trend has been gaining traction for a while, and the claims are big: it supports CO2, alkalizes the body, fights lactic acid, boosts mitochondrial function, shifts the immune system in an anti-inflammatory direction, and, in the more extreme versions, even prevents or treats cancer. I’d read the popular posts as they appeared, identified the mechanistic problems in each one, and built a clear theoretical case for why daily oral bicarbonate doesn’t deliver what people claim. The rebound hypersecretion mechanism is standard gastroenterology. The kinetics of CO2 absorption don’t support the bioenergetic claims. The research cited for the more dramatic claims (immune modulation, cancer survival) is narrow, preliminary, and badly overstated in popular interpretation.

But I decided to run a controlled self-experiment, because reading about a thing and feeling it in your own physiology are different forms of knowledge, and I take both seriously.

Seven nights. By the end of the week, ER.

I’ve always told my readers that I test things on myself before writing about them. This one gave me more than enough reason to finally break it all down.

Here’s the soda mechanism, where the big claims fall apart, and what to actually do with this information.

What baking soda does to gastric physiology

First some basics. The stomach defends its acidity tightly because that acidity is doing real work. Protein digestion needs pepsin, which only functions in an acidic environment. Mineral absorption (iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc) depends on adequate acid. B12 absorption also depends on stomach function: acid helps release B12 from food, and the stomach produces intrinsic factor, the protein needed to absorb B12 later in the small intestine. The acid barrier itself is the first line of defense against microbes coming in with food.

When you neutralize gastric acid with bicarbonate, the body notices. G-cells in the antrum, the lower stomach, respond to the higher pH by releasing gastrin. Gastrin tells the parietal cells to make more HCl, the hydrochloric acid in stomach acid. With repeated use, this can turn into a compensatory acid response: short relief first, more acid pressure later.

By the end of the week, my stomach was producing more acid than it had been before the experiment started.

This basic compensatory logic is standard gastroenterology. Rebound acid hypersecretion is well documented after sustained acid suppression, and gastric alkalinization itself can stimulate gastrin.

What baking soda does to the duodenum and biliary system

The duodenum (the first stretch of small intestine right after the stomach) runs a careful signaling system. When acidic food leaves the stomach and enters the duodenum, it triggers cells there to release a hormone called secretin. Secretin tells the pancreas and bile ducts to release bicarbonate-rich fluid to neutralize the acid. Fats and proteins trigger a second hormone, CCK, which contracts the gallbladder and helps relax the valve (the sphincter of Oddi) that lets bile and pancreatic enzymes flow in.

The whole cascade runs on acid and food signals arriving in the expected proportions and the expected sequence.

When you’ve been loading the system with bicarbonate for some time, what arrives in the duodenum isn’t what those receptors expect. The acid signal is dampened. Secretin release drops. Gallbladder contractions become weaker and less coordinated. The sphincter of Oddi, which is exquisitely sensitive to neural and hormonal coordination, can spasm when normal signaling gets disrupted.

A functional spasm of the sphincter of Oddi can produce a biliary-colic-like picture: right upper quadrant pain, episodic, lasting hours, and partially responsive to antispasmodics. It’s one of the most common mechanisms behind unexplained upper abdominal pain in people with structurally clean imaging.

What probably caused my episode (and what could happen to anyone else doing this)

What imaging told me clearly: no stones, no sludge, no anatomical inflammation, no obstruction, no structural pathology of any organ. That ruled out the dangerous stuff and let me go home.

What imaging does not show is functional disruption. A clean CT can still miss mucosal irritation, duodenal irritation, biliary discoordination, sphincter spasm, and heightened visceral sensitivity.

A week of repeated acid neutralization may have increased acid pressure enough to irritate the stomach or duodenum. Altered duodenal signaling may have disrupted the timing between acid, pancreatic bicarbonate, bile release, and sphincter relaxation. And a gut that had been calm for years may have registered that disruption as serious pain.

I’m not trying to pin down which mechanism mattered most in me. The bigger issue is that daily bedtime bicarbonate can disturb several upstream signals at once. The outputs vary by person, but the pathways being pushed are the same.

What baking soda does to motility

There’s another effect that may show up in people doing the bedtime soda protocol over a few weeks: slower, drier stool.

The mechanism follows logically. Bicarbonate blunts the normal acid signal entering the duodenum, which changes the timing of pancreatic secretion, bile flow, and motility. Bile release becomes less coordinated, and bile itself is one of the gut’s natural motility signals. When the body gets a weaker or poorly timed meal signal, the post-meal motility response drops too. Between-meal bicarbonate dosing also interferes with the fasting-state rhythm of the gut, including the migrating motor complex. With repeated dosing, the sodium load and acid-base shifts add another layer of disruption.

The result is the opposite of what the trend promises for “digestive support.” People drinking bicarbonate for digestive health frequently end up constipated.

If you’ve been doing this and your stool has slowed down, that’s the actual physiological response, and it’s a useful early signal that the system isn’t happy.

The negative reports are there

After my ER trip, I went looking through health communities to see if my experience was unusual. The same pattern kept showing up. People start the bedtime soda protocol. The first few days feel fine, sometimes even good. Then the reports start drifting in: constipation, worsening reflux, upper abdominal pain, gallbladder-area discomfort, irregular stool, and bloating.

Some people connect the symptoms to the soda, stop the protocol, and watch things improve over the following weeks. Others blame food, stress, hormones, or whatever else changed that week.

That is how negative signals disappear in wellness culture. The glowing testimonials get posted as proof. The bad reactions get buried in comment sections and private threads.

None of this means baking soda is uniformly harmful. Physiology varies. Someone with a specific clinical picture may get real short-term relief. My point is more specific: daily bedtime oral dosing as a general wellness practice for healthy people is being promoted on claims that do not hold up.

The popular claims, one by one

The trend usually comes down to a few claims. Each one starts with a real piece of physiology, then the interpretation falls apart under scrutiny.

Claim one: baking soda supports CO2 and mitochondrial function.

This claim falls apart in two places.

When bicarbonate hits stomach acid, the reaction produces CO2 gas, water, and sodium chloride. Most of that CO2 leaves as belching, so the molecule the body would actually use never makes it into circulation. A small amount of bicarbonate gets absorbed and briefly raises blood pH. The lungs sense this shift within minutes and respond by exhaling more CO2 to bring pH back down. Whatever short bicarbonate elevation you create gets neutralized by faster CO2 loss through breathing. Tissue CO2 ends up the same or slightly lower than where you started.

Sustained tissue CO2, the kind that actually matters for bioenergetics, comes from one of three places. Ongoing metabolic production, which is what healthy oxidative metabolism does (good thyroid function, adequate carbohydrate, low lactate output). Breathing patterns that tolerate higher CO2 (nasal breathing, breath retention practices). Or direct exposure through skin in carbonic acid baths. Oral bicarbonate isn’t on this list. It’s the wrong route and the wrong substrate.

Claim two: it alkalizes the body.

Blood pH stays within 7.35 to 7.45. The body has three buffering systems and active lung and kidney regulation defending this range. You cannot meaningfully or sustainably shift blood pH through diet or supplements, and if you could, you’d die, because pH outside 7.0 to 7.7 isn’t compatible with life.

What changes with diet is urine pH, which reflects the kidneys excreting acids or bases to keep blood stable. Urine pH does not equal body pH. The popular “alkalize your body” concept is marketing language with no physiological substance behind it.

Claim three: it buffers lactic acid.

A brief primer on lactic acid for context. Lactate is a byproduct of glycolysis, the cellular pathway that breaks down glucose for energy. Under normal aerobic conditions, lactate gets recycled through oxidative metabolism. Under heavy demand (intense exercise) or impaired metabolism (hypothyroidism, mitochondrial dysfunction), lactate accumulates faster than it can be cleared. Locally elevated lactate lowers tissue pH, interferes with enzyme function, and contributes to muscle fatigue. Pro-metabolic thinking treats chronically elevated lactate as a marker of poor oxidative metabolism, which it is. The popular claim is that bicarbonate buffers this lactate and therefore supports metabolic health.

Bicarbonate loading does buffer blood lactate, narrowly, in specific conditions. The protocol with evidence is 0.3 grams per kg of body weight, taken 60 to 90 minutes before short high-intensity exercise. For a 60 kg woman that’s an 18 gram dose, roughly two tablespoons, which causes GI distress in most people. Elite athletes use it for events where buffering muscle acidity for a few minutes makes a measurable difference.

A teaspoon at bedtime for “general health” is not this protocol. It does not produce the same effect. And chronically suppressing lactate accumulation, if you could, would only treat a symptom while ignoring the cause. High lactate signals impaired oxidative metabolism. The fix is improving mitochondrial function through thyroid status, B vitamins, minerals, and adequate glucose. That is the part worth addressing.

Claim four: it helps reflux and digestion.

Acutely, yes, for about an hour. Then rebound hypersecretion makes the underlying problem worse. The literature on PPIs and antacids shows this same pattern: short relief followed by long-term escalation of the symptom they were used to control.

Many people with reflux symptoms actually have low stomach acid, because food sits longer and ferments. Suppressing acid further makes the underlying picture worse over time. Bicarbonate fits this same pattern.

Claim five: it shifts the immune system toward an anti-inflammatory state and helps with autoimmune disease.

This claim rests on a single research line from a renal physiology lab at a US university. The team showed that drinking sodium bicarbonate solution shifts splenic macrophages from M1 (pro-inflammatory) to M2 (anti-inflammatory) phenotype in rats. They replicated some of this finding in healthy human medical students. The proposed mechanism involves mesothelial cells lining the spleen sensing the buffered environment and signaling the spleen via acetylcholine to downregulate inflammation.

The research is real, but very limited.

It’s one research group. Replication outside the original lab is sparse. The dramatic effects appeared in rat models of kidney disease and hypertension, where there’s chronic acidosis to correct. The effects in healthy humans were transient, lasting on the order of hours.

Translating a brief M1 to M2 shift in healthy medical students into “drink soda daily to treat autoimmune disease” requires several leaps the research doesn’t support. The first leap is from rats to humans, which is the standard problem with any rodent research. Rats with engineered kidney disease aren’t humans with autoimmune disease. The second leap is from a transient hours-long shift to claims of chronic disease modification. A spike in macrophage phenotype that resolves within a day is not the same as sustained immune modulation. The third leap is from a surrogate marker (macrophage polarization in the spleen) to a clinical outcome (autoimmune disease severity, symptom reduction, joint function, skin clearing, whatever the target condition needs). Surrogate markers shifting doesn’t automatically mean disease improves. The fourth leap is from a population with normal acid-base physiology (medical students) to patients with actual autoimmune disease, whose immune systems are deeply dysregulated in ways that go far beyond macrophage polarization. Pretending a finding in one population transfers cleanly to the other is the same overreach pharmaceutical research gets criticized for, only here it’s being made by wellness writers.

Claim six: it helps prevent or treat cancer.

This is the most dangerous version of the trend, and it has real but very narrow research behind it.

The reasoning starts with tumor microenvironment biology. Many cancers create an acidic microenvironment around themselves through glycolytic metabolism (the Warburg effect). This acidity correlates with invasiveness, metastasis, and resistance to chemotherapy. So researchers asked: if you could neutralize that tumor acidity through systemic buffering, would treatment outcomes improve?

The study that gets cited most is Hamaguchi et al., published in Anticancer Research in 2020. Twenty-eight patients with metastatic or recurrent pancreatic cancer received alkalization therapy (alkaline diet plus oral sodium bicarbonate, 3 to 5 grams per day) alongside standard chemotherapy. Among those patients, the ones whose urine pH rose above 7.0 had a median overall survival of 16.1 months. Those whose urine pH stayed at or below 7.0 had median survival of 4.7 months. The same research group later published a larger retrospective analysis in Cancers (2024) with 98 patients showing a similar correlation, though the p-value for the survival trend was 0.0639, which does not meet conventional thresholds for statistical significance.

The headline number gets pulled from this work and dropped into wellness content as if it shows baking soda extends life. What it shows is: within a treated population of stage 4 cancer patients receiving BOTH alkalization therapy and chemotherapy, those whose bodies responded by achieving high urine pH lived longer than those who didn’t respond as much. That’s correlation within a treated group. The data don’t isolate bicarbonate as the cause of the survival difference. Patients who can achieve higher urine pH likely have better baseline kidney function, better overall health, better tolerance of treatment. A healthier subset with better physiological reserve always has better outcomes on any cancer therapy.

There’s no control arm of pancreatic cancer patients who received chemotherapy without alkalization. There’s no randomization. The studies are retrospective and from a single clinic. This is preliminary, hypothesis-generating research.

There’s also urine pH versus tissue pH versus tumor pH, which are different things. Urine pH reflects what the kidneys excrete. It’s a marker of buffering capacity, not a direct measure of what’s happening in the tumor microenvironment, which can have pH dramatically different from what urine reveals.

The leap from “stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients on chemo, with urine pH variation, showed survival correlation” to “drink baking soda to prevent or treat cancer” is enormous. The study was done in a very sick cancer population under treatment. The wellness version strips away the chemotherapy, the clinical setting, and the monitoring, then leaves people with the idea that they can dose themselves at home and somehow fight cancer by raising pH.

And people have died from that thinking.

Robert O. Young, author of the pH Miracle book series, popularized the “alkalize the body to cure cancer” framework. Young built a multi-decade career claiming cancer is caused by acidity and can be treated with alkaline diets and intravenous baking soda infusions.

His ranch in Valley Center, California became the subject of an Investigation Discovery documentary in January 2026 titled “The Curious Case Of... Death by Detox?” focused on patients who died there after following his protocols. Multiple cancer patients underwent his alkalization treatments instead of conventional therapy. Eventually, the harm became too visible to stay buried.

In 2018 a civil jury awarded $105 million to Dawn Kali, a breast cancer patient Young had advised to forgo chemotherapy and follow his pH protocol with intravenous baking soda. Her cancer spread to her bones during the time she followed his approach. She survived but lives permanently with the consequences. In court she described “dozens of others” harmed by Young’s practice.

Kim Tinkham was one of them. A breast cancer patient famously featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Tinkham became a vocal advocate for Young’s protocol and refused conventional treatment. She died of her cancer.

This is why the alkaline-cancer claim bothers me so much. It is not just a harmless theory about pH. In its most extreme form, it has already convinced sick people to put their faith in baking soda and alkalization protocols instead of serious cancer care.

The research is interesting in its narrow context. It just cannot carry the claims being built on top of it.

Where bicarbonate actually works

Baking soda has real and useful applications.

Baths are the obvious one and where it shines. Baking soda changes the bath chemistry, softens the feel of the water, helps calm irritated or itchy skin, and can make tired muscles feel better.

Other defensible uses are narrow and specific. Acute one-time oral use for severe heartburn when nothing else is available. Pre-exercise loading for short high-intensity athletic events in trained athletes, using the actual evidence-based protocol. Urine alkalization for certain kidney stone protocols. Metabolic acidosis correction in chronic kidney disease, prescribed and monitored. Dental and dermatologic applications.

That’s where it belongs.

What to do instead for CO2 and metabolic support

If the underlying interest is bioenergetic function, the actual routes are slower but more effective.

Adequate carbohydrate throughout the day to keep oxidative metabolism running and lactate production low. Sufficient salt and minerals because cellular energy depends on them. Thyroid support if indicated, because hypothyroid metabolism produces excess lactate and inefficient CO2 generation. Warmth, light exposure, and circadian alignment because cold and darkness suppress metabolic rate. Carbonic acid baths if you want a more plausible route for CO2 exposure. Relaxed nasal breathing rather than the chronic mouth-breathing and over-breathing patterns that drive CO2 down.

Conclusion

What this experiment and all the research around it taught me is simple: chemistry is not physiology.

On paper, baking soda looks like a clean intervention. Bicarbonate neutralizes acid. It produces CO2. It raises pH. It buffers lactate in specific athletic settings. It can shift urine pH. All of that is real chemistry.

But once that chemistry enters a living system, it stops being simple. Once bicarbonate enters a living system, the system answers back. The stomach responds; The duodenum changes its signaling; Bile timing shifts; Motility changes; The lungs and kidneys defend blood pH. A simple reaction on paper becomes a whole-body compensation in practice.

Neutralizing acid is not the same as improving digestion. Raising urine pH is not the same as changing tumor pH. Buffering lactate during a race is not the same as fixing oxidative metabolism. Producing CO2 in the stomach is not the same as building tissue CO2 through metabolism.

Once I stopped the baking soda, the symptoms faded and my digestion settled back down. The experiment ended, and so did the problem.

This is what I’ve always believed: self-experimentation has value when you track carefully and are willing to publish what you find, including what does not work. It loses value when only the positive results get written up. So far, most of the articles I’ve seen praising baking soda are short, confident, and do not go deep into what actually happens inside the body. That is exactly how myths spread.

And if you still want to do the soda thing after reading all this, watch your stool. Watch your reflux pattern over weeks, not just the first few days. Watch for pain or discomfort. If something shifts in a bad way, that’s the signal. Stop the dosing, let the rebound run its course over a few days, support the mucosa with bone broth and gelatin, and probably put the box of baking soda back where it belongs: next to the bathtub.

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References

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