How Not Enough Alkaline Food can Affect your Heath Health

Your mother always told you to eat your vegetables. And we have all heard the age-old adage, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” not to mention conventional wisdom about eating a “balanced” diet. Proven Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)  theories  such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurveda all talk about keeping the body’s “vital energies” in  the right  balance to support good health.

Recent scientific research indicates that “balance” in eating the proper alkaline foods may indeed have a lot to do with preventing heart disease and maintaining overall wellness – and may actually be at the root of much of this folk wisdom about nutrition and the effectiveness of some CAM practices.  So what does it actually mean to increase alkalinity in your body?

In this case, we’re not talking about the balance of some  ethereal energies, but the internal effects of proper pH balance. Anyone who has ever owned a fish tank knows a little bit about pH balance. pH stands for Potential Hydrogen, which is a calculation of the hydrogen ions in a given solution or substance. That means it is a measure of how acidic or basic that particular thing is. In a fish tank, if the water is too acidic, or too basic, the delicate balance of your aquarium’s environment is off, and your fish can get sick, or even die. The same is true of the human body, to a certain extent.

pH range is measured on a scale from 0 –14. The pH of water is 7.0, or “neutral.” The  average  pH of the human body is between 7.35 and 7.45 – just  slightly basic  . Just as there is an ideal pH for your aquarium, this slightly basic normal range is the ideal environment for the human body’s metabolic processes.

According to  studies , heart health, better digestion, even the prevention of major diseases like  cancer, can be supported by proper pH balance. That being the case it stands to reason that the foods we eat should be mostly alkaline, to help maintain the body’s proper pH levels. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true. The diet of most Americans is highly acidic. The foods generally recognized to contribute to heart disease – processed sugars, animal fats and proteins, high fat dairy products, and salt – are all highly acidic. Not coincidentally a heart healthy diet as recommended by the American Heart Association includes fruits, vegetables, fish, whole grains, nuts and legumes; all foods that when digested, release alkaline, rather than acids.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a diet that was much more in line with the human body’s ideal pH level and the design of its digestive system. Heart disease, cancer, and the many other plagues of modern society were virtually non-existent centuries ago. With the advent of agriculture, animal husbandry, and later on, commercial industrialized food production – the Western diet changed dramatically, but our bodily systems have not.

Western medicine has yet to accept the theory that the so-called “alkaline diet” can actually prevent heart disease and improve overall health. As research into the benefits of the Alkaline Diet continues at Johns Hopkins University and other well-known facilities, even allopathic physicians admit the practical health benefits of increasing the intake of fruits and vegetables, and reducing one’s consumption of meats, salt, and refined grains. No matter how you look at it, such a diet is “basic” to good nutrition!