‘ALKALINE’ DIET THEORY IS JUST ‘TWADDLE’
Tom Brady is a great quarterback, but no expert in nutrition
He doesn’t eat strawberries. In fact, he avoids all fruits except for the occasional banana. No sugar, no white flour, not even a sip of coffee pass his lips. He doesn’t eat tomatoes or green peppers or any other “nightshade” vegetable. Everything he eats must be organic and conform to an “alkaline” diet. He is Tom Brady, one of the most successful quarterbacks in football history. What Brady is not, however, is an expert in nutrition. Neither is his “lifestyle guru,” Alex Guerrero, whose academic background is a degree in “traditional Chinese medicine” from a defunct institution. Guerrero has been fined by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States for presenting himself as a doctor, claiming to cure a variety of diseases, including cancer and AIDS, with the dietary supplement Super Greens. That didn’t stop him from giving poppycock another go with Neurosafe, a beverage that supposedly protected against “sports-related traumatic brain injury” with its content of creatine, magnesium, zinc and ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA). None of these ingredients have any evidence for recovery from head trauma, but nevertheless Brady endorsed the product: “Neurosafe makes me feel comfortable in that if I get a concussion I can recover faster and more fully.” The FTC wasn’t as comfortable and confronted Guerrero, resulting in Neurosafe being taken off the market. As far as nutrition goes, Guerrero’s philosophy is revealed in his book Balance for Life: Understanding and Maximizing Your Body’s pH Factor. This was basically a rehash of Robert O. Young’s 2002 epic twaddle, The pH Miracle, the basic tenet of which was that an “acidic” body is susceptible to disease, and eating “alkaline” foods not only protects against illness but is curative. Where did Young’s scientific expertise come from? Well, he does have degrees from the Clayton College of Natural Health, an unaccredited diploma mill that has since ceased operation. There is no scientific validity to disease being caused by an acidic pH, and in any case, blood is a “buffered” system, meaning that it resists any change to its normal pH of about 7.35. Neither diet nor supplements can alter this to any significant extent, and to suggest that “alkalizing” can cure cancer is criminal. Young eventually found that out the hard way. In 2014, he was charged with practising medicine without a licence, along with various other crimes, including theft. The alkalizing guru was accused of steering patients away from conventional care and charging high fees for his own treatments. He was convicted of practising medicine without a licence, sentenced to three and a half years in prison and had to openly declare that he had no degrees from any accredited institution and was not a scientist of any kind. He was also sued by Dawn Kali, a former breast cancer patient who claimed that Young had presented himself as a medical doctor and advised her to forgo surgery or chemotherapy in favour of “pH injections.” On Oct. 31, a jury awarded Kali a stunning US$105 million, finding that Young had been negligent and his treatments fraudulent. While Tom Brady’s adherence to an alkaline diet is based on faulty theory, the diet itself may have some benefits in that it features lots of vegetables and limits red meat, processed foods, sugar, soft drinks and alcohol. Eliminating fruits, though, is misguided. But what about Brady’s worship of organic foods? That would seem to be supported by a recent study in France that had close to 70,000 adults fill out questionnaires about their diets, specifically asking whether 16 specific foods were consumed in their organic or conventional versions. They were then followed for up to four and a half years and asked to report any diagnosis of cancer. Publication of the study triggered a media frenzy with headlines screaming that eating organic foods can reduce the risk of developing cancer by 25 per cent. While that is sort of true, in science the devil is often in the details. After correcting for confounding factors, such as physical activity, family history, processed-food intake and redmeat consumption, the incidence of cancer in the quartile of the subjects that consumed the fewest organic foods was 2.2 per cent, while that in the highest quartile group was 1.7 per cent. The difference between these is about 25 per cent. More realistically, according to this study at least, for every 1,000 people eating organically, five cases of cancer may be prevented. That still sounds pretty good. Close examination of the data, however, reveals that levels of significance were only reached for women, and only for post-menopausal breast cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Furthermore, perhaps the key finding, one that was skimmed over in the media accounts, was that among participants who had a diet of high overall quality, namely eating lots of fruits and vegetables, there was no difference in cancer rates. The real take-away message from this study then is to eat your fruits and vegetables, whether they be conventional or organic. And that includes strawberries and nightshade vegetables. Passing on these has no impact on your passing.