The New Biology of Health - Part 4

Forget cholesterol and carbohydrate counts. Forget calories and fat grams. Forget blood pressure, blood sugar, hormone levels, or any of the other markers of health you're used to at the doctor's office. It turns out that the single measurement most important to your health is the pH of your blood and tissues - how acidic or alkaline it is. Different areas of the body have different ideal pH levels, but blood-and-tissue pH is the most telling of all. Just as your body temperature is rigidly regulated, the blood and tissues must be kept in a very narrow pH range - mildly basic or alkaline. The body will go to great lengths to preserve that, including wreaking havoc on other tissues or systems.

The pH level of our internal fluids affect every cell in our bodies. The entire metabolic process depends on an alkaline environment. Chronic overacidity corrodes body tissue, and if left unchecked will interrupt all cellular activities and functions, from the beating of your heart to the neutral firing of the brain. In other words, overacidity interferes with life itself. It is (as we'll see in more detail in the next chapter) at the root of all sickness, dis-ease, and disease.

If that's not enough to get you interested in balancing your boy pH naturally, nondestructively, keep this in mind: Overacidity is also what's keeping you fat. (More about that later.)

The goal, then - and what this program allows you to do - is to create the proper alkaline balance within your body. The way to do that is by eating the proper balance of alkaline and acid foods. That means 80 percent of your diet must be alkalizing foods such as green vegetables. (This percentage will go down somewhat once you've successfully rebalanced yourself. And if you're very sick, the percentage should go up for some period of time.) That leaves much smaller portions of acid foods (such as meat and grains) on our plates. In addition, carefully chosen, high-quality alkalizing supplements will help you achieve and maintain pH balance. You'll learn more about all this in detail in later chapters. You'll also need to exercise properly (see chapter 13) and adopt other alkaline lifestyle practices, like learning to manage stress (see chapter 14).

That's it. That's all there is to it. Get at least three-quarters of your plate covered with alkalizing food, use the alkalizing supplements as explained in this book, and you'll be good to go.