Why a Diet At All? Why Not Just a Pill or a Superfood to Fix My Particular Ailment?
When I took a pharmaceutical drug, a vitamin pill, a natural remedy or a superfood I became aware that these remedies might give me some relief from my particular ailment temporarily…. but that any remedy, be it natural or chemical, couldn’t address the fundamental problem for why that ailment occurred in the first place.
I can’t say that the latest superfood will fix our bodies up just like that because it won’t. Our bodies are an amazing and intricately connected thing and when you treat it right it will perform beautifully.
Food is a Powerful Medicine
I have taken so many pills and potions – some worked temporarily, but after a short time I would find another problem would just pop up somewhere else in my body or the original one would just return. Does this ring a bell for you?
By finally addressing the food that I ate and the water I drank, my body was able to start really repairing itself I never really understood before how food could be such a powerful healer until I found the Alkaline Paleo diet.
Since using this diet health problems that I believed were the result of ageing or a genetic inheritance have disappeared
Why the Alkaline Diet?
The Alkaline diet and water have been amazing at maintaining my own and my family’s immunity. We just don’t get the usual colds and flu every year. Alkalizing our bodies has also really helped to reduce our bodies’ tendency towards inflammation. In our world there are many, many acidifiers, which causes inflammation. Stress, high carb food, shallow breathing, pollution, toxins. Adding an alkaline buffer – be it by water and/or food allows our bodies to mediate these acids created by our modern lifestyle. This lifestyle has never been seen before in the history of man.
With our world full of pesticides, chemicals and drugs, simply consuming a daily glass of Green organic vegetable juice is the ongoing strategy for detoxifying the body. When we drink green vegetable juices we give the liver a huge helping hand to get rid of some not so good chemicals and heavy metals that we might be storing .
The blood pH is a crucial component of our ability to survive and the body does absolutely everything to keep the blood pH at a certain level. This pH level can not go outside a very small range or we die. Doctors tell us that this is not something to concern ourselves with as the body is able to keep this balance all by itself. The body can and does rebalance almost continuously but when it can’t find the raw materials it needs to rebalance – alkaline minerals, it strip mines our bones for the alkaline components it needs to bring the pH back to the right balance.
An extreme example of this is end stage cancer . Cancer patients can have a strong alkaline ammonia smell as the body goes overboard trying to right a very acidic imbalance and actually starts to break down our organs to obtain alkaline minerals.
We are a constant rebalancing mechanism.. but you can’t rebalance from imbalance unless you bring more of what is missing to the process. If we are living the acidic life, I believe we support the body’s balance process by making sure we get enough alkaline minerals.
In his book, Alkalize or Die, Dr. Theodore Baroody explains the alkaline reserve, “The great alkaline reserve is the body’s bank account. The body can call upon it any time to release alkaline elements for the neutralization of acid.”
When the body uses minerals from its alkaline reserve, it’s important to replenish that supply through the food we eat and the water we drink. Why? Because if the alkaline reserve isn’t stocked with what it needs, your body will begin to find the alkaline minerals it needs elsewhere-in places like your your bones and teeth.
To help keep your alkaline reserve well stocked it’s essential that you eat and drink foods that are alkaline. Here’s a partial list of some alkaline vegetables you can include in your everyday diet. Eat them raw in a salad if possible. If you choose to cook your vegetables try steaming them instead of boiling.
Silverbeet, Spinach, Broccoli, Kale, Coriander(great for detoxing mercury from the brain), Parsley, Cucumber, Celery.
Eating what is in season is best and of course where possible eat organic.
Why Not Just Do the Alkaline Diet Then?
The Alkaline Diet is fantastic up to a certain point and that point came for me a few years ago and with my beloved this year. You see my beloved discovered some pretty scary things about his body which had not evidenced itself up until recently. In fact, my beloved thought he was incredibly healthy as everything seemed to be working fine, no outward signs at all, but then I noticed his memory was getting increasingly worse and when he broke his leg and found out he had osteoporosis, I realised he needed something more needed to be done. As for myself, I started getting some not-so-nice menopausal symptoms along with my usual IBS symptoms which was still giving me problems.
What’s wrong with the Alkaline Diet?
The Alkaline diet exponents as you see on the net have claimed for years that all you need do is eat 80% Alkaline and 20% Acidic foods. One of the major food groups that have been and still are allowable in the Alkaline 80% side of the diet is fruit. I have now found out that fruit is not the alkalizer that we thought it was. The high sugar content of fruit actually acidifies the body. Sure it has some alkaline minerals but they are far outweighed by the sugar content. It appears that the alkaline diet exponents were looking for alkaline minerals and ignoring the acidifying ones!
Fruit was a favourite of mine and I would eat it throughout the day believing it to be a healthy snack. I often added fruit to my juices to make them taste nice, but using fruit especially as a juice meant that I was getting concentrated acidity in the form of sugar. Our livers can’t even see it coming!
Not only that… the acidic foods I was eating included foods that just could not pack the nutrient punch that my body needed. I ate grains, nuts, pulses and lentils… I always ate whole foods but the truth you may not like to hear is that these foods are missing many of the essential Amino Acids that are needed for ultimate health. These foods are not nutrient-dense.
Now here’s the big secret; Good Fats – lipids – acids – are the most natural thing you can eat!
The brain is 70% fat, the heart gets its sole energy from fats.
Another thing these ‘whole’ foods are missing are good fats. We need good fats to create cholesterol, the body’s natural food source for all of our hormone cascade. Yes, we do need cholesterol.
Cholesterol creates hormones in the body, so if we are deprived of cholesterol we are unable to make the hormones necessary for hormonal balance.
If I am only going to have only 20% acidic foods then they need to be the best nutrient-dense foods I can get.
So if we reduce or remove fruit, what do we eat? Greens! Lots of greens!
Remember: Vegetables are great detoxifiers but they are not nutrient-dense.
The Paleo Diet- A Nutrient-Dense Diet. A diet where you’ll naturally eat less!
The Paleo Diet is based on what mankind has evolved to eat over the course of our evolution. Our Palaeolithic ancestors ate some fruits and vegetables – only in season – and when they could, some honey but the bulk of their food was meat, with fish and eggs in certain areas. This is a very nutrient-dense diet. I’m not making this up. You’ll find an excellent link to Dr Loren Cordain’s research on this page.
Our ancestors had clean food, clean air and clean water so they had very little need for detoxifying. They had little need for vegetables and would eat them in small amounts when game was scarce.
It’s now clear to many Paleo Anthropologists that we could not possibly be sufficiently evolved enough to live healthily on the high carbohydrate food that we are giving to ourselves today. An evolution of that degree will take thousands of years. In fact, our bodies are still ‘paleo’ – they still have a blueprint that survives best on what they evolved to eat; meat and fat. You may disagree but the research is clear. Never before in our history have we consumed the amount of sugar we have consumed today. Grains – especially wheat – have been around for a relatively miniscule part of mankind’s history. Our paleo gut just isn’t able to deal with these high levels of carbohydrates, so opportunistic bacteria abounds in the bowel consuming what our normal digestion can’t deal with- carbohydrates.
Why the Alkaline Paleo Diet?
The Alkaline Paleo diet is a diet using the best of the Paleo concepts and the best of the Alkaline concepts. We live in a very different world than our Paleo ancestors. Never before have we had such a sedentary life, so much more chronic stress, so many toxins and so much more acid-creating food and drink. Our ancestors could just run away from danger. We can’t – and danger comes in different forms, and manifests as long-term chronic suppressed stress and it is highly acidifying to the body.
But we still need the highly nutrient-rich foods that our ancestors naturally ate. They didn’t have a pill to take, they just ate good food and remained healthy and went on to dominate a whole world as a species!
Hence the Alkaline Paleo Diet- 80% green and coloured vegetables, alkaline water and 20% meat, eggs, fish and good fats. Good fats are incredibly important for creating hormones.