In our last blog post, The Alkaline Environment & Your Digestive Health, we talked about how having a balanced pH in the body is essential to prevent diseases and have good health. In this blog, we’ll explore some ways to help your body maintain a healthy pH.
Your body’s pH determines if your body’s fluids are more alkaline or acidic. When your body is in an alkaline state, your chances of getting sick with chronic diseases decrease.
If your body is more often in an acidic state than a neutral one, your risk of contracting chronic illnesses, weight gain, teeth and gum problems, pain and inflammation increases. A condition of high acidity may go undetected for years, which may lead to prolonged damage.
Most people don’t stop to consider the acid/alkaline balance in their blood, but an optimal pH is actually crucial to one’s health. Human blood is a solution, meaning that it is made up of a uniform distribution inside a liquid.
Having a balanced pH protects our bodies from the inside out.
Some even say that diseases and disorders cannot grow in a body whose pH is in balance. An imbalanced pH allows unhealthy organisms to grow, damages tissues and organs, and hurts the immune system.
Eating an alkaline diet can produce tremendous results —and I would like to add that it’s not just the latest Hollywood fad like many ways of eating!
Eating alkaline as a long-term approach is simple and something everyone can do. Here are 10 simple tips to get started:
10 Quick Tips on How to Add More Alkaline Foods to Your Diet:
1. Eat more veggies and fruits. Even if you don’t go any further down this list, taking this one step can instantly make a huge difference.
2. Reduce soda intake, or eliminate it altogether.
3. Replace refined carbs with roots and gourds.
4. Add fresh lemon and lime to your water. Though we typically think of citrus fruits as acidic, they’re highly alkalizing in the body (limes especially).
5. Consider cooking with sea vegetables. For some of you, I know this is “out of the question!” But if you’re willing to try new ingredients, why not experiment with packaged sea veggies available in the health-food or Asian section of your supermarket?
6. Drink 64 ounces of high-mineral spring water daily.
7. Limit animal protein. Try to limit your animal protein sources (beef, chicken, pork, eggs, and dairy products) to 1 serving or less per day and increase plant-based protein sources.
8. Add cinnamon, ginger, and other herbs and spices.
9. Monitor your urinary pH. Track your first morning urine pH (after at least 6 hours of sleep) to know how your nutritional changes are affecting your body.
Put simply, pH is a measurement of how acidic or alkaline something is.
The pH value ranges from 0–14:
● Acidic: 0.0–6.9
● Neutral: 7.0
● Alkaline (or basic): 7.1–14.0
10. Supplement your diet with a high-quality multivitamin–mineral complex. No matter how attentive we are to what we eat, where it’s from, and how we dish it up, we can’t always have a perfectly balanced diet. Gain peace of mind with a top-notch bone-healthy supplement.
Except for changes in the pH of our saliva and urine, the foods we eat can’t alter our body’s pH, which is tightly regulated.
Under the premise of the Alkaline Diet, working toward a healthy, balanced pH involves making smarter eating choices to emphasize consuming alkaline-forming foods.
Many of these are plant-based foods. In addition to the eating regimen, the Alkaline Diet plan may call for you to alter your behavior to eliminate habits that theoretically increase acidity.
These include habits such as smoking and tobacco use; drinking alcohol; ingesting coffee, soda and other stimulants; and drug abuse. According to the Alkaline Diet, being constantly dehydrated, overdoing workouts and having a sedentary lifestyle can impact your pH, too.
Foods that tend to cause more acidity in the body and that you may need to limit or avoid include:
● certain dairy products
● processed foods
● fresh meats and processed meats, such as corned beef and turkey
● sodas and other sweetened beverages
● high-protein foods and supplements
Research supporting the connection between foods like animal protein and dairy and chronic disease due to a change in the body’s pH is limited. New research may shed more light on this connection, or expose other reasons why reducing animal products is beneficial for health.
The alkaline diet is a healthy alternative that may work due more to the emphasis on consuming plants and limiting processed foods than to changing the body’s pH.
Eating more fruits and vegetables, along with curbing your refined carbohydrate, sugar, and dairy intake, may or may not help balance pH levels within your body.
Either way, a plant-heavy diet with reduced refined sugar intake has many health benefits and may reduce daily issues and lower the possibility of certain long-term health risks.