The summer is a great time to think about your eating habits. You can go for lovely green salads, raw green vegetables and the beautiful fruits such as the berries and currents that are around. In fact, that’s what this popular Naturopathic Clinic homepage encourages. If possible try to eat organic foods because it puts less strain on the liver.
Why do I suggest green vegetables? …. they are alkaline foods and it is important to keep your body in an alkaline state. The average western diet is acid-producing and when acidic wastes accumulate, they can cause organs to malfunction and break down.
No germs, fungi or viruses can live in an alkaline medium, and your body is constantly working hard to neutralise the acid and bring you back into balance. To do that your body needs certain key minerals but unfortunately you do not get these minerals from your food. If you do not provide the where withal to keep your body alkaline it will use your own buffers, your important minerals, from organs such as your heart, your brain, your lungs and your liver, and from tissues, such as your bones, your joints, your muscles and your skin, to reduce the acidity. As they begin to lose the minerals they need to function properly, they begin to weaken, function less effectively and eventually fail.
It is said that acid waste builds up in the body in the form of cholesterol, gallstones, kidney stones, arterial plaque, urates, phosphates, and sulfates. Even mild acidosis can create weight gain, obesity, blood sugar problems and cardiovascular problems, as well as cold hands and feet, headaches, allergies, fatigue and digestive problems such as irritable bowel syndrome.
So, many health problems today are not necessarily due to growing older but to an imbalance of your acid/alkaline levels, and can be easily fixed by making small changes to the way you eat and the supplements you take.
The foods that you eat, the pollutants that you breathe in and many of the cosmetic products you use, all create a very acid body. If you bring your system back into proper pH balance, you’ll notice you look and feel better.
Your body is 70% water and every one of your 100 trillion cells is filled with water. Every other chemical in your body, from the acid you need to digest food, to the hormones that course through you, the immune cells that attack infections, and the blood that carries oxygen and nutrients to your cells, either contain water or are suspended in water.
This water needs to be maintained at a proper pH balance, not too acid and not too alkaline. A healthy person with perfectly balanced pH has a reading of about 7.4 in their blood and about 7.25 in their tissues. That means every cell in your body should be slightly alkaline to survive.
It is so important to drink at least 1-2 litres of water to keep your body hydrated but our water from our taps and a lot of the bottled water has an acid ph! The water we drink should help us to remove the acid build-up, not add to it.
There are many filtration systems but they do not necessarily change the pH of the water. The best way to do that is to add a mineral solution to the water you drink.
When you digest meat, eggs, milk, cheese, white flour and sugar, acid is released into the body. Not surprisingly, beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, soft drinks and artificial sweeteners also leave an acid ‘ash’, dumping more acid into your body.
Sugar is not just an anti-nutrient but a non-nutrient, there is nothing good in sugar. All your energy should be coming from your low glycaemic carbohydrates such as all your green vegetables and whole grains.
So a great way to start your day is with a ‘green smoothie’. Put an avocado, an apple, a whole lime, some cucumber and a couple of handfuls of spinach into a liquidiser. Add some coconut water, liquidise it and make a delicious smoothie. You can add a ‘greens’ supplement to make it even more alkaline.
Regular salads are important and you can include in them raw broccoli, avocado, tomato and spinach. Add a little fresh ginger to help with digestion and almonds and pinenuts for the protein. Fruits can be more alkaline and all berries are super foods as they contain ‘flavenoids’ that are strong antioxidants and help to remove toxins from the cells.
Find out about your food sensitivities. So often I have found that by removing certain foods from someone’s diet, can make them feel a whole lot better. Food sensitivities are very common, infact it is possible that we all have food sensitivities but it is only once they are triggered that they start to cause a problem. If everything in life is great, there are no stresses, no illnesses and good health, the body will cope. However if the immune system ‘drops’ for whatever reason, an illness, an accident, a stress, then it is quite likely that the food sensitivity will be triggered. Once triggered the food will build up in the system and as if the body cannot cope any more the symptoms will appear. It is most likely that the food you are sensitive to will be some of the foods that you eat on a regular basis such as milk and dairy products, wheat, yeast, sugar, citrus, tomatoes and peppers, tea, coffee and chocolate.
To find out what sensitivities you have you can try an elimination diet at home, starting with a very limited number of foods and then slowly re introducing foods to see what reaction you get. Or you can be tested with a bio-energetic machine such as a Vega machine, or there are blood tests that you can do.
Eating healthily is a long term process, start adding the right vegetables, cutting down on your meat, to less than 15% of your diet, cutting out the processed carbohydrates and drinking lots of alkaline water. You don’t know what you are missing until you have tried it!