Drinking Baking Soda Could Combat Autoimmune Disease
Strange, but true - a daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say.
Your body’s immune system protects you from disease and infection. But if you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake. Autoimmune diseases can affect many parts of the body, and are often hereditary. They are often hard to identify and even harder to treat.
But a recent report from scientists in the Journal of Immunology gives evidence of how baking soda can encourage the spleen to promote an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease.
The spleen, is part of the immune system that acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored. Drinking baking soda, scientists think, tells the spleen to go easy on the immune response.
Dr. Paul O’Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University, hopes drinking baking soda can one day produce similar results for people with autoimmune disease. He says, “You are not really turning anything off or on, you are just pushing it toward one side by giving an anti-inflammatory stimulus,” he says, in this case, away from harmful inflammation.
“It’s potentially a really safe way to treat inflammatory disease.”
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