In the spleen, as well as the blood and kidneys, they found after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of immune cells called macrophages, shifted from primarily those that promote inflammation, called M1, to those that reduce it, called M2. The conversation, which occurs with the help of the chemical messenger acetylcholine, appears to promote a landscape that shifts against inflammation, they report. 'Certainly drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen and we think it's through the mesothelial cells,' O'Connor says. They have little fingers, called microvilli, that sense the environment, and warn the organs they cover that there is an invader and an immune response is needed.ĭrinking baking soda, the MCG scientists think, tells the spleen - which is part of the immune system, acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored - to go easy on the immune response. About a decade ago, it was found that these cells also provide another level of protection. Mesothelial cells line body cavities, like the one that contains our digestive tract, and they also cover the exterior of our organs to quite literally keep them from rubbing together. Paul O'Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University and the study's corresponding author. 'It's most likely a hamburger not a bacterial infection,' is basically the message, says Dr.

They have shown that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there's no need to mount a protective immune response.

They have some of the first evidence of how the cheap, over-the-counter antacid can encourage our spleen to promote instead an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease, Medical College of Georgia scientists report in the Journal of Immunology.

Natron bicarbonate