The All-American diet. The meat and carb-heavy foods you’ve grown accustomed to may be putting you at risk for chronic disease. And the reason for that may come down to these two words: pH imbalance.
Are you too acidic?
How your body’s pH imbalance is affecting your health
To understand the importance of your body’s pH balance, let’s start with the basics.
The pH (potential of hydrogen) scale measures just how acidic or how alkaline a solution is. It’s based on a scale of 0 to 14, where lower the pH the more acidic, and the higher the pH the more alkaline. And when a solution is completely neutral, like water, it has a pH of 7.
In order to survive, your blood must maintain a very delicate pH balance range of 7.35 to 7.45. Any time the blood shifts out of this range, it becomes unable to deliver adequate oxygen and protect the body from disease. It’s sort of a systemic danger zone.
Luckily, your body is equipped with several control mechanisms that help regulate your pH and protect you from falling into this danger zone.
But like any good piece of machinery, your body can become less efficient if you keep filling it with the wrong type of fuel. Wait, fuel? Yes, fuel, or in your body’s case, food.
Every single type of food has its own pH. Some foods, such as avocado and quinoa, are alkalizing. While other foods, like most meats and dairy, are acidifying.
The stomach is very acidic, with a pH of 3.5 or below, so it has no trouble breaking down alkaline foods. The American diet, however, is largely comprised of acid-forming foods, which means that the majority of Americans are placing a heavy acidic burden on their bodies and straining their blood’s regulation system. Eventually, the body just can’t keep up so it turns to other ways of protecting itself. Unfortunately, these alternate methods can trigger an entirely new set of problems that can lead to weight gain and the onset of chronic disease like kidney failure and diabetes.
As if your body didn’t have enough challenges neutralizing a heavily acidic diet, you should also know that lifestyle can play a role in pH imbalance. Stress, alcohol, caffeine and medication have also shown to create greater acidity levels with our bodies. And in today’s society, each of these factors seems to have taken up permanent residence.
Fortunately, by filling up on alkaline foods, you can actually help detoxify your body and counter the acidic impact of both diet and lifestyle. Of course, the ultimate goal is balance. It’s unrealistic to get rid of acid-forming foods altogether. Ideally, you should aim for 75% of your diet to be composed of alkaline foods and 25% of your diet to be acidic.
One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to build your meals around vegetables and fruits — most are alkaline in nature. There are some fruits, like lemons, that have an acidic pH outside the body, but when eaten are metabolized into an alkaline solution. You should also do your best to avoid refined carbohydrates (pasta, crackers, breads), dairy products (milk, cheese) and animal proteins (meat, chicken).
A properly alkalized body may not only restore your health, it may restore your entire sense of well-being. Taking the time to take care of your body is one of the most compassionate things you can do for yourself. In today’s world, we often forsake our health for convenience, and in turn, we suffer. But the wonderful thing is that all of that can change in an instant. It is just up to you to give that change the green light.
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