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The Nuance
Your Body Can Regulate Its Own pH
There’s not much evidence that playing chemist with your body’s pH levels will do you any good
In the 1999 film Fight Club, Brad Pitt’s character dumps a skin-searing powder onto the hand of the character played by Edward Norton. “This is a chemical burn,” Pitt’s character explains. “You can run water over your hand and make it worse… or you can use vinegar to neutralize the burn.”
While the scene is dramatized, to put it mildly, experts say that the chemical science it depicts is more or less accurate. “The basic material he puts on his hand is lye, and he neutralizes it with vinegar, which is acidic,” says Adam Friedman, MD, a professor and interim chair of dermatology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “And it’s true that when you get extreme shifts in the skin’s pH, that can disrupt every function of its biology.”
Chemists use the pH scale, which generally ranges from zero to 14, to measure acidity. Something that has a pH below seven is termed acidic, while something with a pH above seven is basic or alkaline. A pH of exactly seven is neutral. (The “H” in pH refers to hydrogen ions, which the scale measures. But the origins of the “p” are murky.)
