Baking soda, an important cooking ingredient can cause numerous side effects once consumed in large amounts.
Chemically, baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which is used as a leavening agent for making cookies, cake, muffins, and so on. It looks like white powder, alkaline in nature, and bitter in taste.Although acts as good cooking material, baking soda can be dangerous when consumed daily.Go through this article to know the harmful effects of baking soda if consumed daily.
Impact on digestive health:
Baking soda breaks down into sodium, bicarbonate in water. When baking soda is used in large quantities, sodium concentration increases disrupting the ion balance inside the body. The anion-cation imbalance leads to some unwanted conditions like hyperosmolarity, hypokalemia, and so on. Potassium and sodium are the major cations inside the human body. Blood pressure is often controlled by the balance between these two factors. Excess sodium concentration in the blood promotes a rise in blood pressure as well as impacts kidney function. Due to alkalinity, excess baking soda consumption causes metabolic alkalosis. In this condition, the pH of tissues increases above 7 or 8. Due to decreasing potassium and chlorine concentration than sodium, body homeostasis gets hampered.
Impact on cardiovascular health:
An abnormal concentration of ions in blood impacts your heart too. Cardiac contractility gets reduced due to excess sodium bicarbonate in blood and tissues. This term may sound confusing, but this means that the contraction ability of your heart muscles gets hampered. This may cause other heart-related problems too.
Impact on the nervous system:
Much research has been conducted on the impact of sodium bicarbonate on the neural system.An imbalance in ion concentration harms your neural system and mental health badly. Excess sodium is a precursor of stroke. It has been proved that excess sodium in the blood often causes damage to peripheral nerve endings. Furthermore, blood circulation in the brain gets hampered due to excess sodium concentration. Sodium is a must for nerve sensitizing effect, but an excess amount causes desensitization. The response to any stimuli also gets impacted. Most of the time, response times are delayed.
Impact on the renal function:
Kidney function is strongly dependent on sodium and bicarbonate concentration. Properly working kidneys maintain the healthy concentration of these two substances in the blood. However, excess sodium interferes with renal function, and less water and salt are removed from the body. This increases blood pressure. Recent research has concluded that sodium bicarbonate is one of the major elements behind chronic kidney disease.
Apart from these, excess baking soda use impact your mental health, promote ulcer formation, or even send a person into a coma.
