Acid or Alkaline?

There are certain health ideas that get widespread despite their “truthiness”.

I don’t claim to have all the answers…just most of them 😉

Seriously though, I am constantly learning more and updating what I think is best. In fact, I use to fall for the one below regarding acid and alkaline balance, but I’ll tell you why I changed my mind.

Will asks:

“I thought acid was bad for you in your book Upgrade Your Water you said you can supplement your water with things like lemon and the acid will lower the surface tension of the water. But in Eating for Energy by Yuri Elkaim he says that acid is bad for you and alkaline is best for you. Is this a contradiction or is one of you wrong or are you both right somehow?”

Acid and alkaline has to do with pH balance, which is the power of hydrogen. The scale ranges from 1 to 14 with 7 being neutral. Lower that 7 being acidic and higher than 7 being basic or alkaline.

First of all to say that acid is bad is a GROSS generalization.

Different areas of the human body work best at different pH ranges. The stomach for instance is very acidic. The saliva, slightly acidic. The blood ideally is very slightly alkaline.

Many proponents teach that for health, and to prevent/reverse cancer we are to eat more alkaline foods and less acid foods.

This pH balance of foods is measured by burning the foods to ash and then detecting the presence of which minerals are there, some being alkaline and some being acidic.

This idea then got extended to water. Now the marketplace is full of water machines that make your water alkaline.

But is this good? When you drink water it goes into the stomach first. Alkaline water in stomach acid. Considering many people already have issues with too little stomach acid this can just further exacerbate the problem.

Meanwhile adding lemon to water makes it more acidic and hydrating. Simply try drinking plain water versus lemon water when you are thirsty and notice the difference.

I do agree that the pH range of your body is important. But I don’t agree that this factor of what we eat and drink should be analyzed for it.

Why?

Because in Weston Price’s work, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, he compared the various diets of native peoples who had ideal health, as compared to “Westernized” cultures. He said:

“An important source of misapprehension is the literature and teachings of faddists. Such, for example, is the misapprehension of many people that they must use only alkaline producing foods and that a great danger is associated with the use of acid producing foods. In the primitive races I have found practically no difference between the acid balance meat diet of the isolated Eskimos of the far north and the less acid vegetable and milk diet of other groups as efficient factors in the control of caries. . . our bodies have a mechanism for maintaining proper acid and alkali balance in the blood and this varies through only a very narrow limit whether the balance of the total food eaten is acid or alkaline.”

In fact, in looking at many diets from Eskimos, Native Americans, Swiss, and many others, they were predominately acidic.

Instead if you’re getting all the nutrients you need, your body and its various pH ranges, will take care of themselves.

Thus the whole Acid-Alkaline diet thing, to me, is a red herring.

The fact is the easiest way to change the pH of your blood and likely other areas of your body is not with food or water but through breathing! See Upgrade Your Breathing for more details.