Envision some of the foods you regularly crave. Pizza. Steak. Hamburgers. The All-American diet. Of course, these items are delicious, but the meat and carb-heavy foods you’ve grown accustomed to may be putting you at risk for chronic disease. And the reason for that may come down to your eating alkaline vs. acidic foods.
Like any good piece of machinery, your body can become less efficient if you don’t fill it with the right fuel. Fuel? Yes, fuel. Or in your body’s case, food. Alkaline foods and acidic foods have a big impact on the state of your body, including whether it has an acidic pH. A healthy diet leads to less pain and more energy as well as fewer chronic health problems, but many people don’t realize how alkaline-rich foods play into that diet.
So what are acidic foods? What are alkaline foods? And how can you use them to get the body you want – and deserve? Let’s start with the basics.
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The pH (potential of hydrogen) scale measures how acidic or how alkaline a solution is. It’s based on a scale of 0 to 14, where the lower the pH the more acidic, and the higher the pH the more alkaline. And when a solution is completely neutral, like water, it has a pH of 7.
In order to survive, your blood must maintain a delicate pH balance range of 7.35 to 7.45. Any time a pH imbalance occurs and results in acidic blood that is out of this range, the blood is unable to deliver adequate oxygen and protect the body from disease. Your organs also require proper pH balance to function properly. Any disruption to your pH balance can have severe consequences – yet many of us continue to fill our bodies with acidic foods.
What are acidic foods?
Acidic foods are anything you consume with a pH under 7. Some examples of acidic foods are coffee, most processed foods, certain dairy products, sugar, processed or cured meats and a variety of other items. The stomach itself is very acidic, with a pH of 3.5 or below, so it has more trouble breaking down these foods. That’s why they don’t fit into a and can cause a number of negative reactions in your body.
