Hello and welcome to Science Shorts, the series where I offer up two mutually occurring but contrasting factors, explore them and determine which one is better for our health and wellbeing.
Sometimes I will explore esoteric and less pervasive ideas and practices, but today we will be looking into a commonly understood concept in science: that of the balance between Alkaline Vs. Acid in the body.
We will look at how it can affect your health and answer some important questions like: is it better to have an alkaline environment or acidic one? Which foods create such conditions? So please join me as we delve into this interesting topic.
The Balance
Our bodies balance between an Alkaline and Acidic state is known as pH and is a major factor in determining your overall wellbeing.
The main thing that effects your pH is foods, but also liquids you drink and other things like smoking or being in polluted air environments can effect it too.
The body is always trying to create a more balanced state between too much alkaline and too much acid within the tissues and fluids, like your muscles and blood.
However, it has been demonstrated that imbalance and disease take hold when the body is regularly exposed to many acid-forming factors, like food, drink and air that contain this potential for us. Also mental stress that results from these negative influences can also add to the effect.
While it is obvious that smoking in all forms is bad and should be avoided, including the inhalation of toxic fumes indirectly from the air pollution around us, what many neglect to see is that what we eat each and every day has a far bigger impact on our health. It is for this reason that we shall be looking into diet alone in this article.
For example, the following study into cancer suggest that acidosis, or an increase in acidity within the body, is a contributing factor to carcinogenesis, the formation of cancers, and is linked to one’s dietary intake:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3571898/
That was a looking from a negative angle. Here is a study looking for the positive:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195546/
Our blood has a pH of 7.35 to 7.45, just above the neutral mark of 7. Anything above this neutral value of 7 is considered alkaline and anything bellow as acid. So our blood is naturally alkaline. While it has narrow margin for functioning effectively it appears that regularly going over, or higher, into a more alkaline state is less harmful than regularly going lower into a more acidic state.
Your body fights hard to neutralize acids and maintain the proper pH in organs, tissues and body fluids. But it can only do that for so long before a condition known as acidosis occurs. You have to give the body what it needs, in the form of alkalizing fruits and vegetables, so that it can properly maintain the delicate acid base balance.
Here is a brief, and so not exhaustive, printable PDF chart document depicting alkaline Vs. acid forming food items, provided by greenopedia.com:
http://greenopedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Alkaline-Acid-Food-Chart-Printable.pdf
Perfect Panacea
Nearly 100 years ago the great Dr Otto Heinrich Warburg of Germany discovered this now established scientific perception. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for showing that disease cannot thrive in an oxygen rich environment.
The Modern Medicine Man
Fast forward to today and the leading proponent of this message was the recently assassinated Dr Sebi a true leader and visionary in the maintenance of human health and the natural treatment of disease.
There have been over 50 holistic medicine practitioners that have died under suspicious circumstances in 2016 alone. The big pharmaceutical industry does not want the word getting out that all you need to do is augment your diet properly to not only fight disease and cure it, but to prevent it altogether. It would render all their synthetic, expensive drugs obsolete along with many of the other treatments that doctors provide, like disease related surgeries.
The medical and pharmaceutical industry is truly massive and there is no profit in making people healthy preventively via nature’s natural pharmacy: ones healthy, whole foods, plant based diet.
Just to clarify my point. The American Dietetic Association position on vegan diets is as follows:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
…vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes - American Dietetic Association
But back to Dr Sebi. He sates that all diseases are caused by mucus generated from eating acid forming foods. He has even been quoted as saying: “There is only one disease: mucus.”
Now when you listen to his lectures Dr Sebi goes into more detail and says that all disease are created from an acidic condition. In other words, your body has an acidic environment instead of an alkaline one.
An acidic environment, in conjunction with oxygen deprivation and mucus build up gives the person a disease. Depending on where in the body the mucus is determines the name given to the disease.
Dr Sebi concludes that by cleansing the body of mucus and creating an alkaline environment all diseases can be cured.
In 1987 Dr Sebi advertised in the Village Voice, the Amsterdam News and the New York Post that he had cured: Impotence, Herpes, Diabetes, Sickle Cell, Blindness, Cancer, Lupus and AIDS.
On February 10th 1987 Dr Sebi was arrested and charged for practicing medicine without a license and Dr Sebi claimed the state was unprepared to defend itself. The past 2781 cases lost and he eventually won. He had diagnostic sheets that came from their institutions that proved that his patients no longer had their disease. The judge said he had to bring 1 of every patient he had cured.
He was supposed to take 9 but instead he brought 77 of his patients who were cured. After being found not guilty Dr Sebi went on to expand his brand ‘Dr Sebi’s Cell food’, do lectures and has treated several high profile individuals, including the late Michel Jackson and the late Lisa Left Eye Lopez of TLC.
Dr Sebi claims that certain food compounds can eliminate acidosis, phosphates, carbonates, iodides and bromides, in addition to these compounds he changes a person’s diet by removing meat, lactose, starches, carbonic acid and uric acid, this removes mucus build up and creates an alkaline environment which no disease can survive in. According to Dr Sebi someone with AIDS is just someone with mucus in the lymphatic system, skin and blood. By removing the mucus the person is cured of AIDS.
In summary
So even though there is lot of complicated science to prove and disprove this or that, it is usually the natural and simple things that are best, as a wise man once said.
So eat a more whole food, plant based diet and be happier and healthier!
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