The Importance of
Your Body's pH Balance for Health

Health Topics on this page:

What is Acidosis?
How Can we Change our PH level?
The Alkaline Diet
What are the Symptoms of excess Acidity?

Everyday each of us is in a health war and we don't even know it! Every day our immune system wages a war against the assault on our body by bacteria, virus, fungus, yeasts, and moulds. We have a bacterial warfare onslaught being waged against us by stronger and stronger killer bugs and bad bacteria.

Our immune systems are becoming over-taxed in this war. Even the medical profession's first line of defense (the antibiotic) is becoming less and less effective against resistant new strains being created daily as the bacteria mutate.

Since Louis Pasteur discovered the germ theory of disease that states germs are the cause of disease, time has proven him correct. But note Dr. Pasteur's dying words: "The germ is nothing, the inner terrain is everything."

The inner terrain referred to in Dr. Pasteur's statement refers to our body's digestive tract, lymph system, blood, and urinary tract. Our bodies are alkaline by design and acid by function.

Maintaining proper alkaline balance is essential for life, health, and vitality. Simply put - an imbalance of alkalinity creates a condition favourable to the growth of bacteria, yeast and other unwanted organisms.

All leading biochemists and medical physiologists have recognized pH -or the acid-alkaline balance- as the most important aspect of a balanced and healthy body. They have long known that the maintenance of an alkaline pH in our body tissues and cells is critical to our health.

In contrast, our digestive system (except for our normally alkaline mouth) has varying degrees of acid by design, and our urinary tract should be slightly acidic for healthy function.

We live and die at the cellular level. All the billions of cells that make up the human body are slightly alkaline, and must maintain this state in order to function and remain healthy and alive.

However their cellular activity creates acid and this acid is what gives the cell energy and function. As each alkaline cell performs its task of respiration, it secretes metabolic wastes, and these end products of cellular metabolism are acid in nature.

The body will go to great lengths to neutralize and detoxify these acids before they act as poisons in and around the cell, ultimately changing the environment of the cell.

Most people and clinical practitioners believe the immune system is the body's first line of defense, but actually it is not. It is extremely important, but more like a very sophisticated clean-up service. We must instead look at the importance of pH balance as the first and major line of defense against sickness and disease and for health and vitality.

If we were to ask "What is killing us?", the answer might be "ACIDOSIS"! It has been demonstrated that an acidic body environment lacking in oxygen encourages the breeding of fungus, mold, bacteria, and viruses.

What is Acidosis?

Let's look at an example. If we were to seal the door to our freezer and then unplug it, come back and open the door in two weeks, what would we find? Mold, bacteria, microscopic bugs. Things will be growing and multiplying. Where did they all come from? They did not sneak in - remember the door was sealed. The answer is . . . "they were always there".

It is simply that the environment changed to a more inviting and healthy one for the "critters" to live in. This can be likened to a shift in our biological terrain from a healthy oxygenated, alkaline environment to an unhealthy acidic environment. You see, what is healthy for us is unhealthy for the body attackers and what is healthy for them is what is unhealthy for our body.

A state of acidosis is simply the lack of oxygen and available calcium which the body uses to maintain its alkaline balance. Calcium makes up 1.6% of our body weight. It is literally the human glue that holds the body together. Calcium is so active that it has been likened to an octopus.

A calcium ion can hold onto seven other molecules while it grabs onto one molecule of water. No other ion can do this. And it is the right size to easily get in and out of the human cell. As it does this, it takes a chain of nutrients into the cell and then leaves to get more nutrients.

The biggest problem scientists have found is that over time the human body becomes depleted of calcium. A compound called mono-ortho-calcium phosphate is the chemical buffer for the blood.

This buffer maintains the alkaline level (or the lack of acidity) in your blood. Without it you would die. If the acidity level of your blood changes - even slightly - you die immediately.

But in order to supply enough calcium for buffering we must have enough calcium being absorbed from our diet or our body will simply rob the needed calcium from our bones and teeth. The more acidic we become, the harder it is for oxygen to be present, so our biological terrain also has less oxygen.

Without adequate oxygen in our cells, unfriendly bacteria, viruses, moulds, and fungus can live and prosper. Then our cells cannot carry on their life-giving functions in a very efficient manner because our biological chemical reactions need oxygen.

Life and death are in the biological environment of our cells and we should ensure we create the best conditions for them to thrive. This is so important that some practitioners working with its implications to the health of our bodies are beginning to say "There are no specific diseases, only specific disease conditions, and there is only one disease. And that one disease is acidosis."

The human body is very intelligent. As we become more and more acidic the body starts to set up defense mechanisms to keep the damaging acid from entering our vital organs. It is known that acid gets stored in fat cells. After all, if the acid does come into contact with an organ the acid has a chance to eat holes in the tissue. This may cause the cells to mutate.

The oxygen level drops in this acidic environment and calcium begins to be depleted. So as a defense mechanism, your body may actually make fat to protect you from your overly-acidic self.

Those fat cells and cellulite deposits may actually be packing up the acid and trying to keep it a safe distance from your organs. The fat may be saving your vital organs from damage. Many people have found that a return to a healthy inner biological terrain helps them to lose excess fat.

Osteoporosis is very confusing for many people. Most people think they can eliminate it by increasing their consumption of milk and dairy products. But in the countries where the consumption of dairy products is very low the instances of osteoporosis is very rare. Osteoporosis is essentially an acidosis problem.

As the body becomes more acidic, to protect against the event of heart attack, stroke, illness, or even cancer, the body attempts to remain healthy. So, it steals calcium from the bones, teeth, and tissue.

As bone mass becomes depleted, this is what we call osteoporosis. As we saturate the body with calcium this brings the alkaline pH up and drops the acid levels down.

One of the first warning signs of an acidic body is calcium deposits. A little known fact is that there has never been a scientifically proven association between calcium deposits in the body and nutritional calcium.

In fact quite the opposite is found in the results of testing calcium deposits of the body. Calcium deposits come not from dietary calcium but from the structural calcium of our bones and teeth!

So if calcium deposits are forming, we know our inner biological terrain is too acidic. Our dietary intake of calcium is not keeping up with the calcium needed and we are actively pulling calcium from our bones and teeth.

It all works like a little train, from the bones to the fluids and cells, to the blood. As our inner body becomes acidic, our pH level drops. When this happens we start losing calcium out of the blood, the bones, and the tissues.

This is a safety mechanism. Now your body's oxygen level drops leaving you tired and fatigued, allowing fungus, mould, parasites, bad bacteria, and viral infections to flourish and gain a hold throughout the body. It is interesting to note that you often won't have just some of these invaders. If you have Candida you will likely have bad bacteria, fungus, and parasites because they all flourish in the same terrain.

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What can we do to change our PH Level?

We must get in there and cleanse the body to get it under control. After it is under control, we have to support the body nutritionally to build new cells. We are in an era of malnutrition because the minerals aren't in the soil and they can't possibly get into our food chain.

What we have now is lots of food but very little nutrient value in it. We now need to take supplements, to stay healthy. The quality of the supplements you do decide to take will make all the difference in the world because not all supplements are created equal.

Calcium is the one mineral that can really alkalize your body. It produces the calcium buffering compound which raises your pH (makes your biological terrain more alkaline). There are many ways to keep your body at a healthy alkaline environment. These include:

Eating alkalizing foods including lots of green foods and healthy super foods

limiting our intake of phosphates which bind to calcium and prevent its absorption. Dietary phosphates are commonly found in all carbonated drinks, and in all animal protein.

Adding dietary calcium in the form of supplements is generally difficult because of our body's inability to absorb and most forms of commonly available calcium. The best supplement to take is in the chelated form with magnesium which helps to absorb it.

This all takes time. It is not easy to reverse acidity once we become too acidic. The extreme importance of our inner body environment has been mostly overlooked in the past, but has recently been recognized.

During this century, despite many technological advances in our society, we have seen many declines. One of the most obvious and dangerous is the nature of food production. Food in our most advanced countries has changed from nutritious raw foods to highly processed foods low in nutritional value.

Over 100,000 new chemicals have been introduced to our foods, air, and water. All of these changes have put even greater stresses on our body's innate ability to affect the chemistry of our body fluids, and therefore our biological terrain. As a result we see huge increases in the incidence of chronic and life-threatening diseases.

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The Alkaline Diet

The alkaline diet is opposite the high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diets that was in vogue with the Atkins diet plan. The therory of this diet is that because our body's PH level is slightly alkaline our diet should reflect this and also be slightly alkaline.

A diet high in animal protein, sugar, caffiene and processed foods tends to disrupt this balance. It can also deplete our supplies of calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium and make us prone to chronic diseases.

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What are the symptoms of excess Acidity?

Low energy, Chronic fatigue
Nasal congestion
Frequent colds, flus and infections
Always nervous, stressed, irritable, anxious
Weak nails, Dry hair and skin
Formation of cysts such as ovarian cysts, benign breast cysts
Headaches
Joint pain or athritis
Muscle Pain
Feeling better after a detox diet
Skin rashes
Leg cramps or spasms
Acid indigestion

Follow the guidelines in the alkaline diet if you have a combination of these symptoms. An alkaline diet is composed of approximately 75 percent of alkaline foods and 25 percent of acid forming foods. What are these? A good start would be to follow the diet guidelines in the anti-cancer diet and also the advice contained in the ebook featured below.

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Further Reading:

Acid/alkaline diet simplified - How To Use A Simple Diet To Create Astonishing Levels Of Health and Vitality

pH balancing diet.The letters pH is also known for Potency of Hydrogen ions so pH is an abbreviation for "power of hydrogen"

The Most Complete Book On Living On An Optimal Raw Food Diet .

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