Does drinking alkaline water have practical benefits? If so, please explain what criteria must be met to produce improved water, and what proportion of water ingested daily must meet the requirements.

The creation of alkaline water for ingestion is an interesting notion and has some plausible defense, but this is not a practical strategy. Water inherently has no buffering capacity, so it takes only a minute amount of an alkaline substance to shift the pH into the alkaline range, and that greatly overstates and overpredicts the level of influence that can be delivered into the body to make some change take place. In actuality, with oral intake, with the production of hydrochloric acid within the stomach, this instantaneously overrides the alkalinity of the water that is prepared and renders moot the entire enterprise because no alkalinity of any significance ends up in the body, so there is no benefit to alkaline water per se. The body itself, as a whole, has significant buffering capacity and so there are natural physiologic mechanisms for regulating the hydrogen ion concentrations in the cells and tissues, and this cannot be manipulated readily through any dietary manipulation that is of practical feasibility. To overcome the workings of the body in that fashion would be very harsh indeed, because it could not be delivered uniformly and would be in great excess in some tissues before being distributed and spread more evenly throughout the body. So this is a notion that is naïve and is not truly a desired outcome, in most cases, for changing a person’s health. There are far more important things going on in the body, except when there are extreme abnormal levels of acidity, that is a different matter, but even in those circumstances, the situation is more dire than can be regulated through substances ingested for the purpose to play a practical role.