Why Your Body’s pH Matters

Previous Lesson Review:
You learned a LOT about plant-based protein, complex carbohydrates, essential fatty acids and how to incorporate them into your life as you strive to thrive.

Thank yourself for your commitment to thriving in 30! You’re a third of the way through your journey to whole-body health.

Last lesson you learned how you can build a balanced nutritional profile that includes the best proteins, complex-carbohydrates and fats this planet has to offer. This lesson you’ll learn why it’s important to create an alkaline body for yourself so you can:

• Improve sleep
• Avoid diseases (like cancer and osteoporosis)
• Increase energy
• Lose weight

Alkalinity

It’s a concept that’s fairly new to most people: the food you eat contributes to the acidity or alkalinity of your body. Why should you care about your body’s pH? Because when your body’s pH drops (meaning it has become more acidic), the likelihood of ailments increases sharply. If your objective is to thrive and live in optimum health, your pH matters!

A healthy or neutral pH for your body is about 7.5—but what can you do to keep it in this healthy zone? The simple answer is to choose more foods that are alkaline-forming. The food you eat has a direct effect on your pH—you can increase the pH level in your body (making it more alkaline) by incorporating a greater portion of alkaline forming food into your diet.

The Costs of Acidity

If you’ve never heard about pH balance and its very important role in your health, you’re probably wondering how your body has coped with any imbalance you’ve had to this point in your life. Luckily, your body comes equipped with a natural buffering system that keeps your overall pH within a small range so it can function. The bad news? This buffering system comes at a long-term cost when it’s constantly working to buffer an overly acidic pH (called acidosis).

When your body is in a state of acidosis, this buffering system compensates by drawing on stores alkaline-forming minerals found in your body. Its number one source for alkaline-forming minerals? Your bones! Calcium (which neutralizes acid) gets leached from your bones to bring your pH back into balance. Over time, this leaching process—and not simply a lack of dietary calcium alone—contributes to the development of osteoporosis.

Acidosis is often a silent factor if you’re prone to fatigue: since acidity is a stressor in your system, cortisol levels rise, impairing sleep. Contributing to overall stress, acidosis is also believed to be a leading cause of other concerns, including kidney stones, reduced levels of growth hormone, loss of lean muscle mass and increased body fat.

Constant, low-grade acidosis affects your body at the cellular level; it’s responsible for an increase in free-radicals (those damaging molecules you’re trying to stop by eating antioxidant-rich foods) and a decrease in cellular energy. On top of that, bacteria and viruses crave acidic environments to grow in, contributing to still more health challenges.

Research shows that cancers can’t develop in an alkaline environment—that alone is a pretty compelling reason to take control of your pH (nevermind avoiding all the other possible costs)!

What Causes Acidity?

Acid-forming foods are the number-one cause of an overly-acidic system. In fact, the overconsumption of acid-forming foods plays a significant role in one of North America’s largest health problems—excessive weight.

Promoting Alkalinity

By now you’ve discovered that you can take control of your health by making smart choices about how you fuel your body. Preventing your body from going into a state of acidosis begins with choosing more alkaline-forming foods.

As a rule, any food high in chlorophyll is a first-class ticket to creating an alkaline body (hint: if it’s dark green, it’s good for you!).

Alkaline-forming food choices that will help you achieve your optimal pH are listed below; you will notice that some of these foods are naturally acidic—citrus fruits, for example. “Alkalizing” here refers to the effect foods have once digested (not their pH level outside the body), so foods like apple cider vinegar (highly acidic outside your body) can actually be highly alkaline-forming inside the body.

Alkaline-forming Foods

Vegetables Asparagus Beets Bell peppers Broccoli Carrots Cauliflower Celery Chicory Cucumbers Leafy greens Sprouts (all types) Zucchini Chlorella

Pseudograins Buckwheat Millet Quinoa Amaranth Wild and brown rice

Fruit Lemons Limes Cantaloupe Mangos Apples Melons (all types) Avocados Papayas Pomegranates Bananas

Seeds Flax Hemp White Chia Nuts Almonds Coconut

In contrast to the alkaline-forming foods above, the foods listed below are acid-forming:

Acid-forming Foods

Meat Cold-water fish Beef Venison Pork Wild game Poultry Shellfish

Dairy Milk, raw, unprocessed Butter Cheese (all types) Cream Milk, pasteurized

Miscellaneous Synthetic multivitamin Candy Coffee Margarine Peanuts (roasted) Prescription drugs Soft drinks Soy protein isolate Whey protein isolate

These are by no means comprehensive lists—you can find more complete lists in The Thrive Diet (the book on which this Thrive in 30 course is based). Simply, these lists are an introduction to foods in each category, to start you on your way to making conscious, healthy choices.

Finding Balance

Does everything you eat need to be alkaline-forming? Not at all!—what you’re after in your quest for optimum health is balance. As long as you choose alkalizing foods more often than acid-forming ones, you’re on the right track.

Food is not the only way to change your pH level for the better! Other activities are alkalizing, too, including:

• Deep-breathing exercises
• Yoga
• Light stretching
• Meditation
• Any other activities you enjoy!

Incorporating positive, alkalizing activities into your routine has a big impact on your life and combats the effects of non-nutritional stresses (which are acid-forming all on their own).

Take Action:

• Rate your current diet compared to the charts above and make notes for yourself. Are your current food choices more frequently acidic than alkaline? If you’re consuming mostly acidic food, add at least one alkaline-forming food to each of your meals this week and slowly start removing acidic foods.

• Get active! If you’ve been neglecting your favorite activity—whether it’s yoga, running or another activity that gives you time to reconnect your body and mind—get back at it, starting today. Here are some tips to help you stay committed:

1. Do something you really love so creating an alkaline body isn’t a chore but a joy you look forward to every day
2. Don’t know what that something is yet? Try at least one new activity this week and stick with it long enough to either choose it or know to move to your next alternative
3. Don’t stop looking for your right activity until you find one—or several—that inspire you to stay active

If you’re already regularly active—or you’re training to improve your competitive athletic performance—congratulations! You’ll look forward to Lesson 7, where I’ll teach you how to harness the power of nutrition strategically to fuel your workouts, give you a performance edge and reduce recovery time.

As emphasized in previous lessons: aim for a smooth transition to eating clean instead of making any abrupt changes—put the focus on including, not excluding.
Too many sudden changes to your diet can shock your body and cause additional stress. For example: if your diet includes a lot of dairy products, remove one dairy item from your daily diet every week, instead of ditching dairy overnight, cold-turkey style. It is most important to make changes that work for you.

Next Lesson Preview:
You’ll learn the impact a healthy digestive system has on stress, immunity and overall health.

To thriving!

Brendan