Alix Deymier: How Soda is Rotting Your Bones

 On Tuesday, I went to Dr. Alix Deymier's talk. Dr. Deymier is an assistant professor at the Biomedical Engineering at UConn's School of Medicine studying bone formation and its relationship to acidosis. Dr. Deymier has had an interesting career path. She wanted to study the material composition of Native American Art and what makes up unique pottery, but instead she was forced to study bone bio-mechanics at Northwestern. Having little to no background in biology, she spent her graduate career learning about X-ray diffraction in bone, including the relationship between collagen and minerals and outside factors that affect their structure and function. Ultimately, she chose bones over art.

Her research on acidosis is incredibly fascinating and admittedly terrifying. Her lab wanted to analyze the effects of chronic soda intake on bone health. The main reason why she wanted to look at these effects is that bones are a large bicarbonate sink. Bicarbonate formation plays a role in chronic kidney disease and in the Keto diet; and bicarbonate reacts with acid to form a buffer solution. She took a group of mice and fed them homemade soda comprised of ammonium chloride in aqueous solution with a sprinkling of sugar (this was done because you cannot legally use soda in the lab since its pH is too low). In only 24 hours of drinking the homemade brew, the mice's blood and urine pH had dropped, their bone mineral and bone carbonate content had dropped, fraction resistance had increased, but there were no cellular changes within the bone. This meant that the soda's acidity alone had reacted with the bones to remove carbonate ions from the bone and made them weaker. What's even more shocking is that the pH of her homemade soda is less acidic than that compared to normal soda (Pepsi and Coke had pH values of around 2.5)! I thought this study was incredibly fascinating because it was interesting to see the interactions between chemistry, physics, and biology. Physics comes into play with her research because she wanted to look at the physical properties of bone to see how it changes with the soda solution. I learned something very important from her talk: drink less soda!