Studies suggest that sodium bicarbonate may make cancer treatments more effective by reducing the acidic microenvironment of thriving cancer cells. But more research is needed.
Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is a natural substance with a variety of uses. It has an alkalizing effect, which means it reduces acidity.
You may have read on the internet that baking soda and other alkaline foods can help prevent, treat, or even cure cancer. But is this true?
Proponents of the online baking soda theory believe that reducing your body’s acidity will prevent tumors from growing and spreading. Proponents also claim that eating alkaline foods will reduce the acidity of your body.
While it’s true that cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment, it’s worth noting that your body maintains a fairly stable pH level regardless of what you eat. Moreover, eating baking soda or other alkaline foods cannot prevent cancer from developing.
Some in vitro and animal research suggests that sodium bicarbonate might be helpful when used in combination with other anticancer therapies, as it can reduce the acidity of a tumor microenvironment.
This article examines the relationship between acidity levels and cancer, and how sodium bicarbonate might be used alongside conventional cancer treatments.
The pH scale measures how acidic or alkaline something is. The values for pH range from 0 to 14:
- Acidic: 0.0–6.9
- Neutral: 7.0
- Alkaline (or basic): 7.1–14.0
A pH level of 7 is neutral. It’s neither acidic nor alkaline.
The human body has a very tightly controlled pH level of about 7.4.
While the overall pH level remains constant, levels vary in certain parts of the body. For example, your stomach has a pH level between 1.35 and 3.5. It’s more acidic than the rest of the body because it uses acids to break down food.
Your urine is also naturally acidic. Testing its pH level doesn’t give you an accurate reading of your body’s actual pH level.
The typical pH levels for blood range from 7.35 to 7.45, which is slightly alkaline.
Cancer cells typically alter their environments. They prefer to live in a more acidic environment, so they convert glucose, or sugar, into lactic acid.
The pH levels of the area around cancer cells can drop into the acidic range. This makes it easier for tumors to grow and spread to other parts of the body, or metastasize.
Many research studies have looked into the relationship between pH levels and cancer growth. While the findings are complicated, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that baking soda can prevent cancer.
Cancer grows quite well in healthy tissue with normal pH levels. Additionally, naturally acidic environments, like the stomach, don’t encourage cancer growth.
Researchers have found that, once cancer cells begin to grow, they produce an acidic environment that encourages malignant growth.
For this reason, recent studies have explored what happens to cancer cells if the acidity of their microenvironment is decreased, and whether that might improve the effectiveness of anticancer treatments.
As mentioned in the previous section, cancer cells use sugar to make themselves more acidic. This doesn’t affect the inside of the cancer cells because they have special tools that help push the acid out to stay balanced.
However, this does create a very acidic space around the tumor, called the tumor microenvironment. This acidic microenvironment helps the cancer cells grow, spread, and hide from the immune system.
Scientists are looking at ways to stop cancer cells by blocking the proteins that remove acid or by making the area around the tumor less acidic.
Some studies even show that changing the body’s acid levels with certain medications or treatments might help the immune system fight cancer better.
For example, a 2020 study examined the potential therapeutic value of controlling acid-based balance in the treatment of cancer (oncology).
The study suggested that targeting cancer pH could be an effective adjuvant therapy because it would interfere with the ability of cancer cells to create an acidic microenvironment, and bolster the body’s immune response in a less acidic environment
As with most cancer cells, leukemia cells make a lot of lactic acid, which makes the area around them very acidic. This prevents the immune system’s T cells from working well.
When researchers in a 2020 animal study added sodium bicarbonate to the research animals’ water, it neutralized the acid and helped their T cells act stronger.
Researchers from this study also tried it with 10 human patients who had relapsed after bone marrow transplants. The researchers found that the sodium bicarbonate improved the health of the patients’ T cells without causing additional side effects.
This suggests baking soda might help immune therapy in leukemia, though larger studies are needed.
In a 2020 in vitro study, researchers used a special treatment called TILA‑TACE, which added a 5% baking soda solution to cancer-fighting drugs and delivered it directly into liver tumors.
This resulted in better control of the tumor as the baking soda neutralized the acid around the tumor, allowing the chemotherapy to work better at slowing the cancer’s growth.
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The treatment also released a lot of sodium (Na⁺) into the cancer cells, which caused them to swell and burst in a way that alerted the immune system.
This process is called pyroptosis. It helps the body recognize and attack the cancer by releasing warning signals and inflammation that boost the immune response.
Baking soda can’t prevent cancer. And eating baking soda or other alkaline foods will not prevent you from developing cancer.
The connection between baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and cancer has to do with the acidic microenvironment that occurs when cancer cells proliferate.
Several studies have suggested that sodium bicarbonate, when used in a clinical setting, may make anticancer therapies more effective by reducing this acidic microenvironment.
More research on this topic is needed, however.