Remember your chemistry classes at school? You know, when you learned about the pH scale? Well, our bodies also exist in the delicate balance between acidity and alkalinity. When your body’s acidity levels rise, this will inevitably lead to varying degrees of fatigue, depression, poor digestion, weight retention, and cellular degeneration. That’s for starters!
Many raw food diet enthusiasts will tell you, and I agree, that it’s at the heart of most chronic health conditions. And it’s a major factor behind sluggish athletic performance, never mind bone degeneration and other problems.
So which foods are going to make the acidity problem worse? The main ogres to avoid, or at the very least to limit the intake of considerably, are meat, bovine dairy, and refined sugars, including (I’m afraid to say) chocolate (not easy for me to deal with as an addict!), as well as nicotine and caffeine.
Highly acidic foods place great stress on the body. By design, our lungs, renal areas, and other organs work hard to keep the body’s acidity low. So when blood becomes overly acidic, the body tries to “neutralise” it by a process called buffering. This effectively means the body seeks out some other mineral to balance the acidic excess. The principal elements that we are looking for to balance out acidity include sodium, potassium, and calcium.
There’s now plenty of evidence, to illustrate that high protein foods, which clearly include meat and dairy products, are major contributors to calcium loss and over-working of our kidneys. This is because our body is trying to neutralise blood acid by leaching calcium from bones and into the bloodstream.
It’s worth noting that for athletes who might be worried about bone density, this is extremely important to remember! It’s not just about how much calcium you take in, but also how little you destroy. I'm pleased to know that Paula Radcliffe shouldn't have that problem, having been a long time enthusiast for wheatgrass juice. Whilst she was residing mostly in this country, forever year she was consuming power wheatgrass juice in large quantities!
Which foods are alkalizing? You guessed it: vegetables, sprouts, low-sugar fruits, legumes, and certain grains (spelt, quinoa, and millet in particular). Greens are just about the most alkalizing foods around.
So, eat as many greens as possible, and drink wheatgrass juice, broccoli sprout juice, or other vegetable juices, regularly. Your blood pH, and with it your athletic capability and general health will be happy. Indeed, wheatgrass juice is one of the most alkalysing foods you can consume. You can also eat as much celery as you like, which coincidentally (or did nature have a better designer than we give her credit for), both looks like a bone in structural terms, and also remarkably has the same high level of sodium, and plenty of natural calcium. It's the most salty food you can eat, but you cannot eat too much of it!
Some people are obsessed about the amount of salt that they have in their diet, but it is widely accepted that you can eat as much celery as you like, despite it coming with very high levels of salt, because it is highly unlikely to cause you any health problems. This is a synthetic and unnatural things that we should be excluded from our diets. Time to get down there and get some wheatgrass or broccoli sprout juices! Equally, you may just wish to read some of the articles on the website.
