Is an acidic pH impacting your health?

If you rely on a diet high in acidic foods, it is like you have received an engraved invitation to the Chronic Disease Ball.

by Brenda Haas-Krieger — 

The pH of your food matters. If you rely on a diet high in acidic foods, it is like you have received an engraved invitation to the Chronic Disease Ball.

Excess acidity weakens all of the body’s systems because it forces it to borrow minerals — including calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium — from vital organs and bones in order to neutralize and purge toxins from the body.

Over time, the body suffers prolonged “corrosion” due to high acidity. An acidic diet will disintegrate the tissues and speed heart action. Acid coagulates and eventually thickens the blood, thereby plugging up the capillaries. The skin, deprived of life-giving healthy blood, loses elasticity and begins to wrinkle. Candida and parasites thrive in an acidic body.

According to Dr. Lynda Frassetto, researcher at the University of California, we have turned an evolutionary corner. We do not handle acid waste the way we used to. She studied almost 1,000 aging subjects and found that we now stockpile acid in fatty deposits, rather than eliminating it via the kidney and liver. The body’s innate wisdom has chosen to save the kidneys and liver from degradation by excess acid. The trade-offs, however, are obesity, lowered immunity, lack of energy and a whole host of chronic diseases, ranging from diabetes and osteoarthritis to cancer.

The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14. A pH of 7 is neutral, which is roughly the pH of water. The 0 to 6 range is acid; the 8 to 14 range is alkaline. The pH scale works like the Richter seismic scale — a pH of 5 has 10 times more acid than a pH of 6. This is why soft drinks, with a pH of 2.5 are almost 50,000 times more acidic than neutral water, and why we would need 32 glasses of neutral (pH 7) water to counteract the phosphoric acid in one glass of soda, without forcing the body to borrow minerals.

The population as a whole eats too many acidic foods — processed and junk foods are almost always acidic. Generally speaking, the plant world gives us alkaline food while animal flesh produces acidic food.

Animal proteins are essential for human health, so it pays to eat the cleanest meats available (organic and grass-fed). The meat, eggs and milk from animals raised in confined industrial feedlots are considerably more acidic because of the animals’ unnatural diet and stressful living conditions. Vegetarians who think they are eating only alkaline foods are often mistaken. Organic fruits are alkaline, but nonorganic fruits treated with sulfur are acidic. Grains are acid-forming — whole grains less so than processed.

More and more people are asking how to accurately measure their pH. Bear in mind that the blood pH test is the most accurate, as the reading will stay in a narrow range, while the pH readings of saliva and urine can vary widely.

Your health and longevity are in your hands — read everything you can and work with a practitioner who will guide you. You can heal yourself by changing the environment inside your body, and the most effective way to do this is by modifying your diet, one step at a time.

Brenda Haas-Krieger, M.S., D.D., has a master’s in environmental health from the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati. She works with BeamRay frequencies based on Dr. Rife’s work and SCIO (formerly QXCI). 480-314-0065, brenda@innerfocus.net or www.innerfocus.net.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 28, Number 5, Oct/Nov 2009.