Standard Pages (they don't change often)  Wednesday, March 21,
2012   Walking around my local supermarket, I noticed an
expansion of bottled water brands touting "Alkaline". What is
it, and where did this come from? What the heck does it mean?
Aside from the predatory pricing of bottled water, it is so
unregulated that producers can make so many health claims
without any scientific backing.  The emphasis on alkalinity
stems from health claims of the alkaline diet. Not delving into
the difference between alkalinity and basicity, at least for the
moment, what it is is the opposite of acidity. It comes down to
the structure of water - H2O. It really looks like this:   Where
one oxygen atom is bounded on each side by hydrogen atoms. But
in reality, it breaks up into charged chunks or ions:  H-O-H
 <--> H+  + OH-  When a substance dissolved in water makes more
of the H+ ions, that makes it acidic. And when it's the
opposite, where there are more OH-, that makes it alkaline. You
may hear the term pH - that's a nume