I just saw a post by Dr Robert O. Young, for whom I have great respect on many issues of acid-alkaline theory… but this one made my eyes water. He titled his article ”

For All The Protein The Body Needs – Eat Organic Electron Rich Green Kale”

He made the very valid point that kale is a wonderful alkalizing vegetable, but to suggest it take the place of other protein such as meat.. well, sorry, I have enough trouble actually eating kale. On my blog I’ve linked to some worthy attempts at making this deep green alkaline vegetable palatable, but let’s be honest. You’d have to be a super-Popeye to be able to live on kale! He rounds off  his rave with the statistic that a serving of kale gives 2gm of protein. What he doesn’t say is that we need far, far more as a basic protein requirement per day.

Here you’ll find a protein calculator for your height and sex, and mine is between 38.9 and 69,2 grams, which means I’d need to eat between 16 and 34 of Dr Young’s kale serves per day! Surely that would even kill Popeye! Wikipedia also has an excellent section on protein requirements with a massive bibliography, and frankly, to me  it stacks up far better than Dr Young’s Kale argument.

As many of my readers know, I’m following my wife Cassies’ Acid and Alkaline Diet which includes plenty of meat for available protein and the easiest way to avail yourself of the wide range of amino acids we all need. I’m also eating fat because fat (good fat) is the best source of energy for the body. I’m cutting out as many carbs as I can, and that’s why I was so surprised that Dr Young still goes on about eating lots of vegetables and fruit. Fruit, dear readers, is loaded with ..guess what? SUGAR. Even blueberries, which I still use to aid getting down my coco oil, said to be the most alkaline of all fruit, are still sugar laden, and ALL sugar, as the good doctor repeatedly tells us, converts to acid.

I really think the acid/alkaline theory of the last ten years needs a running jump at itself. I know, I know, I have been a major contributor to it in its present form, but I have moved on and recognise that many acids have not just a role in our diet, but an essential role. That’s why Cassie and I strive to identify the good acidic food and the good alkaline food and make the best of each. This all-out attempt to remove all acidic foods from the diet and live on something like kale is.. well, it needs to move on.

I wrote recently about people only hearing what they want to hear, and I do believe from personal observation of myself that this is the basic problem of the human. We have this amazing ability to mould reality around what we would like it to look like, and facts don’t have a chance!

In his profound book, Life Without Bread, Dr Wolfgang Lutz says that distressing heartburn is often the first symptom to disappear following withdrawal of carbs from the diet.

He has observed it in hundreds of his patients. patients have come back to him complaining of heartburn, but inevitably he found that they had sneaked crabs back into their diet. He suggests that carbs actually interfere with acid regulation. The normal state of affairs, says Dr Lutz, is that acid is produced by the stomach when it has something to eat. Only a ‘sick’ stomach produces stomach acid when empty. This so-called ‘fasting secretion’ is the reason for autodigestion seen in gastric ulcers. Excess gastric acid is responsible for, or provides the right conditions for, development of a gastric ulcer, which, he says, is deducible from the fact that a typical gastric ulcer is found only in sites where contact with gastric juice is possible.

Dr Lutz treated and took notes on low carb diet patients his whole life. His fastidious recording of his cases gave him the absolute certainty he needed to challenge the dominant and still existing paradigms that say carbs are good, fat is bad. And we must include fruits because fruits are a major sugar contributor! I know you don’t like to hear it, but that doesn’t alter its veracity.

A glass of pure orange juice contains 20-30 grams of sugar.

It’s certainly better to eat the fruit than the juice because at least the fibre will tell the stomach it’s had enough. If we look at history, we never had continual access to fruit. Wherever we lived, we accessed the fruit that grew in our area when it was in season. That means most of the time we had no fruit. Our bodies are the last thing to change in our history and we are still inhabiting the body we had thousands of years ago – which implies that we are best suited to a diet we had in that time. A modern diet with huge supply or proportion of carbs just isn’t natural.

Further, research into the anthropology of diet has established that our ancestors were used to a diet of around 25% fat. Physician Boyd Eaton, working with John Speth and Lauren Cordain published his latest work on our Paleolithic diet in 2000, stating that hunter-gatherers would actually consume a whole animal, not just the muscle meat, and preferred the fattiest bits, including organs, tongue and marrow – and the fattest animals. His latest research suggests that our diets were extremely high in protein, (22 -40% of energy source) low in carbohydrates by normal western standards, and comparable or higher in fat (28-58 percent of energy source)

So if we compare Dr Young’s recommendations of piles of fruit and vegetables, it’s not hard to see which is the ‘natural’ diet.

Pass me the coconut oil please.