The Alkaline Grift

There’s a man sitting in a California state prison right now because he convinced cancer patients that baking soda IV drips would save their lives. He’s also the reason half of Hollywood has a $4,000 water machine on the kitchen counter. Welcome to the alkaline diet.

The pitch is simple. Your body is too acidic, and that acidity is what’s making you sick, tired, or overweight. Eat “alkaline” foods like kale and lemons, cut “acidic” ones like meat and dairy, and you rebalance your pH into a state of glowing health.

It sounds like chemistry. It isn’t.

Here’s the part that actually annoys me: there’s a genuine scientific idea buried under all this, and it’s decades older than the marketing. Back in the 1960s, kidney researchers studying patients with chronic kidney disease found that diet could shift the acid load their damaged kidneys had to process.

Somewhere along the way, that got stretched into a theory that a similar effect might explain osteoporosis in healthy people too. It’s a fair hypothesis to test. It just didn’t hold up. A 2011 systematic review found no causal link between dietary acid load and bone disease, and no evidence an alkaline diet protects bone health.

Legitimate science never took the idea any further than that. Then a man named Robert O. Young got hold of it and turned it into a religion.

Young published “The pH Miracle” in 2002. It’s sold more than four million copies. His pitch went well past diet: he claimed the body’s health depends on a balance between acid and alkaline states, and that an “acidic” body causes cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, the flu, and just about anything else you can name. He also believed red blood cells could transform into bacteria. That is not how biology works, and never has been.

None of that would matter much if Young had just sold books. He didn’t. He ran a 46-acre ranch in Southern California where he treated terminally ill patients, some paying up to $100,000, with intravenous baking soda infusions, while telling them it could cure their cancer.

A British Army officer named Naima Houder-Mohammed paid him thousands after her breast cancer returned. She died. Kim Tinkham appeared on Oprah with Young after he told her he’d cured her cancer. She died too.

A 2018 civil jury awarded cancer patient Dawn Kali $105 million after Young convinced her to skip chemotherapy in favor of his treatments. A judge later reduced that to about $25 million. A prosecutor in his 2016 trial called him the “Wizard of pHraud,” which might be the best pun in the history of cancer fraud litigation.

Young has now been convicted three separate times over thirty years for practicing medicine without a license. His first real prison sentence, in 2017, was three years and eight months. He served forty days.

He was back at it within a few years. In February 2025, a jury convicted him again, this time for treating an elderly woman for liver and thyroid disease while pretending to be qualified. He was sentenced that May to five years and eight months, and as of this writing, he’s serving that sentence in a state prison in Chino, California.

That covers where the idea came from. The comeback tour is a separate story.

The alkaline diet already had one comeback in the 1990s, riding the low-carb wave. Young’s book relaunched it in the 2000s. Then in 2013, Victoria Beckham tweeted a photo of an alkaline cookbook, and the whole thing caught fire again.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, Kelly Ripa, Jennifer Aniston, and Elle Macpherson have all put their names behind some version of “eating alkaline” over the years. Tom Brady built alkaline water into his TB12 diet. Mark Wahlberg and Sean Combs invested in an alkaline water company, and Paltrow partnered with another.

You don’t need a conspiracy to explain any of this. It just takes famous people repeating something that sounds plausible to an audience that trusts them, and an entire industry of water ionizers and pH strips happy to cash the checks that follow.

Now, the part nobody selling you a water ionizer wants to talk about: the actual science. Your blood pH sits in a tight, narrow range, and your lungs and kidneys defend it constantly, no matter what you eat.

A 2016 systematic review in BMJ Open searched more than 8,000 studies for evidence that alkaline diets or alkaline water affect cancer risk or treatment. They found exactly one study that met their standards. It showed no association. The reviewers concluded that promoting the alkaline diet for cancer prevention or treatment isn’t justified by the evidence.

So is there anything good here? Sort of, but not for the reason they’re selling it. The diet pushes you toward fruits, vegetables, and legumes, and away from processed food and sugar. That’s just good nutrition wearing a lab coat it didn’t earn. The benefit comes from fiber and nutrients, not pH.

The risk shows up in how far people take it. Stricter versions cut entire food groups, which can leave you short on protein, iron, B vitamins, and vitamin D. If you have kidney disease or take medication affecting potassium, the “alkaline foods are high in potassium” part can turn dangerous fast.

And if you’re testing your urine pH every morning to check whether the diet is “working,” you’re not tracking your health. You’re funding a company that sells test strips to people who don’t need them.

The worst outcome isn’t a vitamin deficiency, though. It’s someone with a treatable cancer choosing baking soda over chemotherapy because a man with no medical degree convinced them their tumor was an acid problem. Young sold that choice to real people, more than once. Some of them didn’t survive it.

References

1. Robert O. Young — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_O._Young
2. Founder of pH Miracle Diet Sentenced to Prison for Practicing Medicine Without a License — CBS8 — https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/founder-of-ph-miracle-diet-sentenced-to-prison/509-f0b4f911-4e06-476b-9fac-259b800d2590
3. Valley Center Author Found Guilty Of Practicing Medicine Without License — KPBS — https://www.kpbs.org/news/health/2016/02/04/author-found-guilty-practicing-medicine-without-li
4. ‘pH Miracle’ Author Admits He’s No MD, Microbiologist or ‘Trained Scientist’ — Times of San Diego — https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2017/04/12/ph-miracle-author-admits-hes-no-md-microbiologist-or-trained-scientist/
5. The Dying Officer Treated for Cancer With Baking Soda — BBC — https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/magazine-38650739
6. PH Miracle Dr. Robert Young Strikes Again — Escondido Grapevine — https://www.escondidograpevine.com/2017/01/20/ph-miracle-dr-robert-young-strikes-again/
7. The Doctor Behind the Alkaline Diet Is Facing Jail Time — Fox News — https://www.foxnews.com/health/the-doctor-behind-the-alkaline-diet-is-facing-jail-time
8. Alkaline Water Is the Latest Trend and Big Soda Is Pouring In — The National — https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/alkaline-water-is-the-latest-trend-and-big-soda-is-pouring-in-1.873247
9. Acid Ash Hypothesis — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_ash_hypothesis
10. Nutritional Disturbance in Acid-Base Balance and Osteoporosis — Bonjour, 2013 — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828631/
11. Systematic Review of the Association Between Dietary Acid Load, Alkaline Water and Cancer — Fenton & Huang, BMJ Open, 2016 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4916623/
12. The Alkaline Diet, the Acid-Ash Hypothesis and Bone Health — Fenton et al., 2011 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291885822_The_alkaline_diet_the_acid-ash_hypothesis_and_bone_health
13. The Alkaline Diet: What You Need to Know — MD Anderson — https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/alkaline-diet–what-cancer-patients-should-know.h00-159223356.html
14. Alkaline Diet Plan: A Science-Based Review — Forbes Health — https://www.forbes.com/health/nutrition/diet/alkaline-diet-review/
15. Alkaline Diet: Detailed Guide — US News Health — https://health.usnews.com/best-diet/acid-alkaline-diet