Can we be done with “biohacking”? It feels like every day there’s a new thing that people are doing in order to lengthen their lifespan or improve their vitality — and it’s never something fun! I don’t want to drink bone broth; I want you to tell me that staying up until 4 AM playing Runescape Classic is actually good for me!

The latest addition to this bizarre field of “research” is, uh, baking soda. For some reason, health “biohackers” have decided that adding a bunch of baking soda to a glass of water — or, heck, just straight up eating the stuff — will maximize your performance. How? Uh… pass?

The power of Baking Soda. pic.twitter.com/xWqA59DRfQ

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But really, they claim that eating just a little baking soda will normalize your pH, which gives you some sort of endurance benefit. Does it really work? The answer seems to depend on who you ask. Some studies (and some more deranged internet users) claimed they saw a marked difference in endurance, while others claimed that basically nothing happened at all and that any benefit seen from the stuff is likely imagined. Plus, too much of it can be bad for you, so it’s best not to play around with this stuff all willy-nilly.

I think if you want to improve your performance, there are probably better ways to do it than eating baking soda!