Alkaline vs Acid - Your Body's Fight for Survival!

Alkaline vs Acid - Your body’s fight for survival!

Building Your Body - If you were to build a house and had to choose between using new bricks and fresh lumber or old bricks and aging lumber, which would you choose? It’s quite an easy choice, isn’t it?

We make a similar choice every day by deciding what foods we are going to use to build and maintain our true home—our body. Our amazing bodies are in a state of constant change, continually being replaced throughout our life—building new bone, making fresh blood—replacing the old with new. This is why the raw materials from our diet impact our health so dramatically. The cells of our body have no choice but to work with the raw materials our diet provides. In this pamphlet, we would like to give you a glimpse of one of the most important aspects of our nutritional knowledge: the concept of acid and alkaline foods and the role they play in determining the health of our bodies.

Alkaline = HEALTH - Acid/alkaline balance is one of our clinic’s fundamental concepts because our bodies, by design, are alkaline. Most bodily fluids—the blood, the lymph, the fluid surrounding the joints, the fluid bathing the cells—must remain alkaline to maintain normal functioning. When our cells work, they produce acid, but our body constantly neutralizes those acids. The foods we eat can also be divided into alkaline and acid. They are placed in one category or the other based upon the by-products they leave in the digestive tract (which are called either alkaline ash or acid ash). Every acid food leaves acids behind that must be neutralized or the overall acid level of the body will increase. Alkaline foods, on the other hand, leave minerals behind that help neutralize acid and build alkaline reserves in the body. Because the American diet is predominately acid, and most Americans do not eat many alkaline foods, the average American’s alkaline mineral reserve is low or depleted. This leads to acid accumulation in the cells, which is a major contributing factor in the development of heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, and many other widespread chronic, degenerative diseases.

4 of the 6 Food Groups Are Acid! - Acid foods make up 2/3 of the food groups we are instructed to eat according to the USDA’s updated food pyramid. The meat group and the dairy group are entirely acid, and the grains and “Other” group (containing fats and sugars) are mostly acid. The only groups that are alkaline are the fruit group and the vegetable group. The more refining and processing that man does to food, the more likely that food is becoming more acid and less nutritious. For example, white flour is more acid than whole wheat flour and stimulatory foods like soda, coffee, and foods high in sugar and salt (most of which are found in that “Other” group) are all acid. High protein foods like beef, fish, chicken, milk, cheese, and pork contribute the most acid to most people. They are eaten on a daily basis by most people in the US, and their ash, in general, is more acidic than any other type of food.

Two Major Reasons for Widespread Degeneration – The widespread development of chronic, degenerative disease now starts becoming easier to understand. First, the diet of most Americans has been predominately acid foods for their whole lives. Beef, chicken, fish, cheese, dairy processed foods, and stimulants are consumed in large quantities by the great majority of Americans. Second, the average American diet contains few, if any, fresh fruits and vegetables, so the body has not been getting the alkaline minerals it needs to neutralize the acids produced.

The consequences of these two facts are mathematically very predictable. The overabundance of acids that must be neutralized are not countered with enough alkalizing minerals, which leads to an acid environment within our body’s cells. When enough cells in an area become acid, the organ they make up becomes susceptible to infection, malfunction, or chronic degeneration. People may deny that their diet has contributed to a problem they have because, they reason, they have been eating the same way all their life and claim they’ve never been sick. You will now hopefully understand that their diet has slowly depleted the alkaline reserve they were born with, and often, major symptoms only manifest once this reserve is very low, sometimes between ages as low as 35-45 in our society.

According to Dr. D.M. Hegsted, Professor of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health,

“The question to be asked, therefore, is not why should we change our diet, but why not? Ischemic heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension are the diseases that kill us. They are epidemic in our population. We cannot afford to temporize. We have an obligation to inform the public of the current state of knowledge and assist the public in making correct food choices. To do less is to avoid our responsibility.”

The raw materials you provide your cells on a daily basis, meal after meal, year after year, will determine if you are contributing to your body’s acid accumulation or increase of your alkaline reserve. It is the alkaline foods that provide the quality building materials your cells need. The cells will function more efficiently with an excess of these alkaline minerals that can quickly eliminate acids before they accumulate. You can choose now to be in control of your health and future. Health is truly a choice that brings with it added responsibility. No one but you can play the role of overseeing your return to health. Your health is truly in your hands.

Many thanks to:
Dr. Presten Witherspoon, D.C. of Health Touch Chiropractic in Tigard, Oregon who wrote this and Dr. Michael Einsohn, D.C., who provided the inspiration.