You Body Is Naturally Meant to Be Alkaline!

A huge component of the Healthy & Active Program is all about keeping your body’s pH in balance.  The term pH stands for the word “potent” and the H is the chemical symbol for hydrogen and how hydrogen behaves in your body is absolutely essential to hyour health.

Your Body is More Alkaline Than Acid

In order for the body to remain healthy and alive, your body keeps a delicate and precise balance of blood pH at 7.365, which is slightly alkaline. The body does whatever it has to in order to maintain this balance, including making us seriously ill in order to help us dispel the acid.

The problem is that most people have what can only be described as incredibly acid lifestyles. Acid is produced in your body whenever you have stress, upset emotions and when the food you eat is acid forming. The acid is only neutralized by alkaline substances.  The exces acid is stored in your fat cells and in order to try and control this your body will leach calcium, an alkaline substance,  from your bones in an attempt to stabilize your overall pH level..

The typical North American lifestyle diet is very acidic which puts a strain on all of your systems and organs and causes a lot of disease.

The Goldfish In Dirty Water Analogy

The author, Dr. Robert O. Young who wrote The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet. Reclaim Your Health and who is at the forefront of research on the effects of the acid/alkaline balance in the human body, uses a “goldfish in the aquarium” anaology to describe how Imbalanced blood pH ruins our health. 

“Pretend you had a goldfish in a bowl, and one day you saw the goldfish was beginning to look very unhealthy. You also notice that the water is a little dirty.

Chances are it's the water that's making the fish unhealthy, not the fish itself. When you change the water, the fish will get healthier. The fact that the goldfish is unhealthy is actually a symptom of the unhealthy environment. Not the problem. “[1]

Our bodies are more than seventy percent Water! And most of the time because of our diets, emotions and lifestyles, the "water" in our body is over-acidic, and to put it simply: toxic. Yet, even knowing this, modern day establishment medicine puts much more attention on fighting the symptoms, and not recognizing the root of the problem.

Acidity Is An Epidemic

It is a real challenge in these hectic times to keep our bodies in the proper pH balance and the result is that we often blow our metabolisms out so they do not function properly any more. This does not happen over night but rather, over a period of years.

Our bodies produce acid all of the time. During the digestion process (though to a lesser degree on an alkaline diet), respiration, normal metabolism, and cellular break-down.

Before you even account for what happens while you breathe, digestion and metabolism add enough acid to your body to significantly affect its pH, potentially decreasing it by as much as 2 points. That means that unless we help our bodies cope productively with these acid by-products, and/or if we overwhelm the body's ability to do so by piling on acidic food, drink, and behaviour, we are fated to be fat, sick and tired.

This is where a change in diet and lifestyle can be enormously helpful. It is possible to reverse your pH from acidic to alkaline. For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website atwww.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Michael Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.

---

[1]  Sourced fom Robert O. Young, Shelly Redford Young. The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health. Grand Central Life and Style. 2010

Alkaline Diet Theory – A Brief History

Before it was called the alkaline diet, the alkaline-based diet that is now current part of the Happy & Active lifestyle program was known as the Ash Diet or the alkaline/acid diet. The reason it was called the Ash Diet is because alkaline foods contain minerals: mainly calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc and copper. In biochemistry these elements are incombustible, which means they catabolize differently when they processed by the body.  When digested, they create ash in water, which in turn creates an alkaline state in the body.

Robert 0. Young’s Theory About Alkaline Foods

One of the most well-known contemporary proponents of the Alkaline was Dr. O. Robert Young, who created many of the Western alkaline/acid food charts still in use today. Since the early seventies, Dr. Young written a series of groundbreaking books on the subject with the most famous being The pH Miracle (2002).

Robert O. Young

His claim was that health depends primarily on proper balance between an alkaline and acid environment in the human body. According to this theory, when the blood becomes too acidic, the body does whatever it has to do to regulate the acid-alkaline balance. This can result in all kinds of symptoms including food cravings, digestive symptoms, weight gain, yeast overgrowth, fatigue, raised cholesterol, raised insulin resistance and more.

Young claims that this one sickness and one disease is acidosis, the over-acidification of the blood and then tissues due to an inverted way of living, eating, and thinking. The "one treatment" is to maintain the healthy design of the body through an alkaline lifestyle and diet.

The Alkaline Diet

The original Robert Young diet recommends eating fish, vegetable and some grains. This groundbreaking theorist also recommended abstaining from "acidic" foods — such as red meat, shellfish, eggs, dairy sugar, refined foods, artificial sweeteners, coffee, alcohol, chocolate, and sodas, However, long before Young and his series of miracle pH books came into the picture there was a wide spread recognition that alkaline foods and liquids restored health to the body in the spa communities throughout the world.

For example, many of the mineral springs and mineral waters in Europe were recognized to be alkaline in character and therefore healthy for the body.

Of course, Robert O. Young originally got his information from a much earlier work.  Young’s work was based on one of the first books on the subject. It was penned by an alternative health advocate named George S. Weger who wrote a book called The Genesis and Control of Disease which identified acidosis as the cause of a many conditions including fatigue, infections and “mental disharmony and sleeplessness.”  It was penned in 1840 and talked about acidic states in the blood. Revised editions of this book also were printed in the 1930s.

Alkalinizing Using Fasting

One of the most famous books about achieving body alkalinity through fasting was written a century later. The Master Cleanse included instructions for Three Day Cleanses, 21 Day Detoxification Cleanses and ones that last as long as three months. This book was written in 1940, by Stanley Burroughs and is considered to be a foundation text about how to use fasting to detoxify and alkalinize the body. The book made a comeback and was massively reprinted in the seventies.

Burroughs purported that consuming no food at all and drinking a concoction made from lemons, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and purified water for a period of days (as long as you can stand) is the key to getting rid of acid wastes in the body and restoring them to a healthier alkaline state that does not support disease.  

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Micheal Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.