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March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

27:02

Alkaline Diet: Food secrets and common myths revealed

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	This is Alkaline Diet Food Secrets revealed with the Health Ranger.
	Thanks for joining me.
	My name is Mike Adams, The Health Ranger, the editor of NaturalNews.com.
	One of the biggest questions that I get from people is about the alkaline diet.
	Is it an anti-cancer diet?
	How do you achieve an alkaline diet?
	How does it work?
	And should you eat baking soda?
	Because it's very alkalizing to the body as a way to prevent cancer.
	That's one of the questions.
	I intend to answer all those questions in this segment.
	Thank you again for joining me.
	So first, let's cover the popular belief that an alkaline diet is an anti-cancer diet and that an acidic diet is a pro-cancer diet.
	Well, let's look at this from an interesting perspective.
	If you look at most of the foods that are considered to be acidic, They are in fact things like sugars.
	Soda contains phosphoric acid, and phosphoric acid is of course an acid, so it's highly acidic, right?
	You've got other kinds of processed foods like starches.
	Fried foods are a big part of this.
	You've got french fries, onion rings, you know, a lot of processed meats are considered to be very acidic to the diet.
	And when we say acidic or alkaline, what we're really referring to is acid forming versus alkaline forming in terms of the effects on the body.
	For example, a lot of people say that eating citrus fruit is alkalizing to the body.
	Which really never made sense to me because citrus fruit are acidic, but what they're actually referring to is the effect on the body.
	But because this information has a lot of contradictory myths out there, I'd like to try to clear up a few things.
	First of all, let's start with this understanding that you need acid in your stomach in order to digest foods.
	And just so that you understand digestion, if you don't already, the foods, once they go into your stomach, They are, of course, treated with gastric acid that your body creates.
	Now, gastric acid is not a very strong acid.
	For example, I run a laboratory, the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, and in that laboratory we use very strong aggressive acids such as nitric acid or hydrochloric acid to digest and liquefy foods before feeding them into the ICP-MS instrumentation to test for heavy metals.
	And I've also made a gastric acid digestion simulation system that uses a gastric acid.
	And I've noticed that it's not very strong.
	It doesn't really break foods apart very much compared to things like nitric acid.
	Nitric acid will oxidize a protein powder very, very effectively, whereas gastric acid doesn't work as effectively on a protein powder as a nitric acid.
	And in fact, many fruits and meats are not fully digested in gastric acid.
	This is why chewing is so important.
	It's why saliva is part of the digestion process.
	So one of the first things to understand in this is that if you want to be healthy, chew your food.
	I know it sounds simple and basic, but that's something that is very important when you're dealing with fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds.
	A plant-based diet is a diet that really requires a lot of chewing and We're good to go.
	The stronger your gastric acid, in other words, the more acidic it is, the better you're going to digest your foods.
	And digestion is, of course, the extraction and then the assimilation of important nutrients that are found in foods.
	And when it comes to a plant-based diet, those things are minerals, such as zinc, right, or selenium, or magnesium, calcium, macrominerals and trace minerals, both.
	But it's also things like plant-based compounds, such as the phytosterols that you might find in many different plants and fruits.
	You've got all kinds of healing phytochemicals, as they're called, such as resveratrol that you might find in grapes, or all the different...
	oils that are found in citrus fruits, just in culinary herbs, for example.
	All these amazing constituents that have powerful healing properties, you know, like ginger and garlic.
	Garlic has, I think, 12 or 13 different sulfur compounds.
	And these have to be digested through the breaking apart of the food and then the assimilation of the food elements into your blood supply.
	And if you don't have strong enough gastric acid, you're not going to be able to break the foods down and assimilate the nutrients.
	So, To get to the basics here, one of the big things you have to understand is that you need strong acid in your stomach in order to be healthy.
	So immediately, you should begin to question anyone that tells you that, oh, you need an antacid with your meal.
	Or that you should be drinking alkaline water with a meal.
	In my opinion, that's terrible advice.
	If you take a Tums with your meal, for example, an antacid, Tums contains buffering minerals, such as calcium carbonate.
	They buffer the acid, they weaken the acid, they reduce your stomach's ability to digest the foods that contain the constituents that prevent cancer in your body.
	So, don't think that just chugging antacids Or mineral buffers or alkalizing water at all times of the day is going to be good for you.
	That's a myth.
	It's not good for you to do it all the time.
	I'll tell you when it's...
	Possibly okay to do it.
	But a quick disclaimer here, if you have digestion problems, do more than listen to this.
	Go find yourself a licensed naturopathic physician or a complementary and alternative medicine physician who's licensed to practice.
	Meet with them.
	Find out what exactly is going on with you.
	Get a diagnosis and get, in essence, a recipe for how to heal yourself and bring yourself back to healing.
	Just use this audio as Background information to learn more, but then go to a professional for diagnosis of what's happening with you in particular.
	I can't diagnose you through this audio program.
	So I do see a lot of people who have bought water alkalizing devices, which are useful in the right context, but they're drinking the alkalizing water with a meal, and as a result, they're weakening their stomach acid.
	They're not getting the good digestion that they need.
	Now once foods leave your stomach, they transition into the duodenum and on their way to the upper small intestine.
	And it's at this point that bile is injected into this slurry of food that has come out of your stomach.
	So you've got bile ducts and you've got bile producing organs like your gallbladder.
	At that point, digestion becomes more alkaline and less acidic because your body doesn't want high acids cruising through your small intestine and then your large intestine and out your colon.
	That would not be very comfortable.
	So after your stomach, the bile makes it a lot more alkaline.
	Now, this is important to understand because if the gastric acid in your stomach hasn't done the breaking down, the physical breaking down or oxidation of the food matter, then it's probably not going to happen in the more alkaline environment of your digestion.
	So, again, you've got to have strong acid.
	How do you get strong acid to work in your body?
	One of the answers is more juicing.
	In my experience, people who juice more vegetables, such as celery and cabbage in particular, tend to produce stronger, more robust stomach acid and tend to have much better digestion, fewer problems with so-called heartburn, which is actually often not enough acid in your stomach.
	And one common way that you can actually test this is if you're feeling heartburn symptoms after eating a meal, The common mythology is that you don't have or that you have too much acid and that you need to take Tums, but you might actually try the opposite.
	Try a tablespoon of vinegar, which is slightly acidic.
	For many people, adding vinegar to their diet or to their meal results in better digestion And a great reduction in digestion discomfort.
	So that's something to try.
	It's very safe.
	You know, vinegar is a common food.
	And you might even get it in some salad dressing, and then that can take care of your need for it for the entire meal.
	But if you want to build more stomach acid long term, Do more juicing of vegetables like celery, a little bit of cabbage.
	You can mix celery with apples.
	You can mix cabbage with things like, well, lemons and limes and pear juice and even carrots.
	Carrots with a little bit of kale.
	You could do orange and carrot and kale and cabbage.
	It would be a really nice drink.
	Just load up on the carrots if you want it to be a little sweeter.
	Very easy to make.
	Now, so getting back to where I started on this, and I know it's a little bit of a journey to get back to that, if you look at the kinds of foods that people say are acidic, they are precisely the kind of junk foods.
	That tend to cause cancer in the first place.
	So sugar feeds cancer tumors.
	We know that.
	We know that processed meats tend to contain cancer-causing additive substances like sodium nitrite, which causes leukemia and pancreatic cancer and colon cancer, brain tumors in children, all kinds of things like that.
	Processed starches.
	We're nutrient deficient but rich in unhealthy calories and that also feeds cancer tumors.
	So when people say that acidic foods cause cancer, what I actually see is a pattern of junk foods cause cancer and they also happen to be acidic.
	I'm not actually convinced that acidic foods alone, that the acidity is what causes the cancer.
	I'm not convinced of that.
	It might be.
	But I see it's just junk food, processed food, nutrient deficient food, fried foods.
	Oxidative food materials like fried starches.
	If you batter onion rings and then you fry the onion rings, you're eating huge amounts of acrylamides, which are cancer-causing substances made from the frying of starches.
	And that's what turns the onion ring batter brown.
	If you're eating something that's fried and brown, it's cancer-causing and it's acidic.
	So I'm not sure that it's the acid alone that's doing that.
	And at the same time, when people say, well, an alkalizing diet that's rich in fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds is anti-cancer, I'm like, yeah, of course it's anti-cancer.
	It's loaded with anti-cancer nutrients.
	If you eat blueberries and some kale and some ginger and some garlic and almonds, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, yeah, it's an anti-cancer diet.
	You know, broccoli prevents cancer.
	It contains DIM molecules and I3C, indole-3-carbinol, things like that.
	If you look at the entire cruciferous family of vegetables, they're all anti-cancer.
	If you look at resveratrol, which is in red wine as well as red grapes, if you look at all these amazing nutrients that are in the food supply, Because I'm not sure that it's the alkalizing alone that is responsible for preventing cancer.
	And here's the way to think about this.
	Some people are alkalizing by eating baking soda.
	Which I think is strange because baking soda is not a food.
	I would much rather eat a food that's alkalizing than take baking soda pills.
	Although I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it.
	Baking soda is very, very effective at alkalizing.
	And perhaps in acute situations where someone is highly acidic, maybe baking soda is exactly the right thing.
	I'm just saying that day to day, long term, as we live our lives, probably we could find a more wholesome way to get alkalizing foods into our diet rather than eating baking soda.
	And those foods happen to be the whole foods.
	The fruits, the vegetables, the pears, you know, celery, carrots, all these amazing things.
	Squash.
	The root vegetables especially, rutabagas, right?
	Beets, turnips, all these things.
	They're very alkalizing and they also are loaded with anti-cancer nutrients.
	So if you are pursuing an alkalizing diet, you are in effect pursuing an anti-cancer diet without even knowing it.
	This is kind of a bonus.
	Now there are some people who will take baking soda but then eat a processed junk food diet.
	Now imagine that.
	Visualize that for a minute.
	Imagine someone living on hot dogs and processed meats and nacho cheese in the microwave, like Velveeta or what have you, eating donuts, eating a lot of fried foods, eating all kinds of junk foods, and then They say to themselves, well, gee, I better alkalize my diet so I'll take some baking soda and kind of even that out.
	Well, my question to you is, do you really think that's going to work?
	Do you think that you can just counteract all that junk, all that nutrient-deficient garbage containing cancer-causing chemicals?
	Do you think you can counteract that with baking soda?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so because it's more than just the pH that we're talking about here.
	It's all the other nutrients that are in the food or that are missing from the food in the case of junk food or processed food.
	Perhaps baking soda can be useful, again, in some acute cases or someone that's in transition, but long-term, if you want to halt cancer and you want to be healthy, you've got to turn to a primarily plant-based diet.
	It doesn't have to be vegetarian.
	It doesn't have to be vegan to be healthy.
	You can still have some free-range meats in your diet If that's your choice, and you can still be very, very healthy with that if your diet is predominantly plant-based and predominantly whole food-based.
	Now let's talk about your bones for a minute here.
	Your bones are of course made of alkaline minerals such as calcium, such as magnesium.
	You're going to have a little bit of strontium in your bones.
	Don't confuse that with the radioisotope known as strontium-90.
	This is the non-radioactive isotope of strontium I'm referring to here, which has high affinity for naturally occurring calcium.
	So almost everywhere that you're going to have calcium in a dietary supplement or in a bone of an animal or a human being, you're also going to find significant levels of strontium in those.
	And I know because I run these kinds of tests on foods and I see strontium all the time, right next to calcium, typically in supplements.
	Now, your body has to maintain a very narrow pH range for your blood.
	Your blood can't vary from that range very far at all without you dying.
	Now, the normal healthy pH of your blood should be about 7.4, roughly, in that neighborhood.
	And it doesn't vary from that very much at all.
	I mean, it's not even going to go down to 7.3, typically, or 7.5 on the high side.
	It's not going to go there.
	It's going to maintain this very narrow pH range.
	And why?
	Because it's at that narrow pH range that all the cellular processes upon which your body depends can actually take place.
	You know how plants can't really take up nutrients into their roots unless the soil is at a certain pH?
	And if you change that pH, it completely changes the ability of the plant to take up nutrients.
	Well, the same thing is true in your body.
	If you change the pH of your blood, your cells won't be able to eliminate toxins in the waste products, and they won't be able to assimilate the life-saving nutrients that they need in order to function at a cellular level.
	So this pH level in your blood has to be maintained in a very, very narrow range.
	Now what that means is that when you eat something that is more acidic or more alkaline, your body has to compensate for that in order to keep your blood in this narrow range.
	Your body can't let your blood fall down to a pH of 6.
	You would die.
	You would absolutely die.
	And in fact, when the pH level of your blood starts to go haywire, your body goes into emergency mode to try to compensate and try to balance it out.
	Your body can even do things like increase respiration to exhale more carbon dioxide.
	Try to get that out of your blood because carbon dioxide is slightly acidic.
	You'll also typically see increased urination, increased burden on the liver.
	Sometimes increased heart rate, lots of other symptoms that can go along with acute blood acidification.
	When you drink a soda, you are consuming very high amounts of an acidic substance known as phosphoric acid.
	It's the same acid that is used to, well, stonemasons use it, for example, to etch patterns into stone.
	It has traditionally been used by the U.S. Navy to clean rust off of battleships and other ocean-faring vessels that the Navy uses.
	It's a very powerful acid.
	You can buy phosphoric acid typically at a hardware store and you can use it to clean surfaces like stone and metal.
	When you drink phosphoric acid, your body has to compensate for that with alkalinity.
	In order to keep your blood at this very precise pH that we already discussed.
	So your body has to buffer the acidity with something that's alkaline.
	Well, what does your body have at its disposal that is alkaline?
	The answer is your bones, your skeletal system.
	So what happens is when you drink acid in the form of a soda, Your body will effectively start to release alkaline minerals from your bones in order to buffer the acidity of what you've just consumed.
	In essence, the acid is leaching away the minerals from your bone mass little by little, but your body's doing it on purpose as a buffering strategy to make sure that your pH doesn't fall so low that you go into crisis mode.
	Now, if you do this over time, day after day, year after year, you're going to have very weak and fragile bones, most likely.
	And this is why people who drink a lot of sodas have several problems, but one of them being fragile bones that break more easily than other people's bones.
	And secondly, they tend to have kidney stones.
	Why is that?
	Because they are essentially peeing out the minerals that used to be their skeletal system.
	They're urinating them out through their kidneys and bladder.
	They're getting kidney stones as this calcified liquid is passed out of their body.
	Some of it builds up in the kidneys.
	And they end up with very, very painful kidney stones that have to be passed, which, according to people who have experienced that, is the single most painful thing ever in life, worse than childbirth.
	Now, I've never experienced that, so I can't say if that's true, but the idea of peeing out pebbles of calcium doesn't sound like my definition of a great day.
	Not to mention all the blood that comes with it as you're ripping your insides out with these stones passing through.
	So, if you want to avoid kidney stones, don't drink soda!
	And don't take in these acids that your body has to buffer with minerals out of your skeletal system.
	It's a very simple thing.
	And if you do drink soda, you might think, well, I have a water alkalizer here that I bought that alkalizes the water to buffer the soda.
	Well, that's true, but you'd have to drink gallons of alkalized water to counteract just one can of soda because of the very high level of phosphoric acid that sodas contain.
	Now the last point here is, let me answer this question of, are alkalizers any good?
	Water alkalizers sell for $500, $1,000, sometimes a couple thousand dollars.
	And they produce more alkaline water from tap water.
	And they typically do this by kind of splitting the water into one stream that's more alkaline and another stream that's more acidic.
	And many people drink the water, the alkalized water, and some people report really outstanding results.
	That may very well be the case, but I would just say drink it between meals, not during a meal for all the reasons we've already discussed.
	So if you do have a water alkalizer, use it strategically.
	And indeed, between meals, this water going into your stomach, it's not producing a stomach acid response that food would produce.
	It's really just hydration.
	So it probably is working and going right into your bloodstream, effectively.
	Again, I'm oversimplifying it, but effectively the water is going into your blood, right?
	And it's taking that alkalizing property with it, I do see merit in water alkalizers.
	But they have to be used strategically at the right time and not to drink that water during a digestion of a meal because it can interfere with that and actually reduce the effectiveness of your digestion.
	And one last point on this, people ask me, is it worth it?
	Should I spend $1,000 on a water alkalizer?
	Well, I think the best way to look at that is to really ask yourself, of all these things that you can spend money on, you know, you can buy a water alkalizer, you can buy organic vegetables, you can buy fresh produce, they're all investments in your health.
	And they all have value as investments.
	The real question is, what is the cost of being sick?
	What's the cost of having cancer?
	What's the cost of being in a hospital?
	What's the cost of having chemotherapy, which can destroy your kidneys, your heart, your brain?
	It causes brain damage, chemotherapy does.
	That's why they call it chemo-brain.
	It's a well-known side effect of chemotherapy.
	But what's the cost of being diagnosed with cancer?
	Well, that's huge!
	You could buy a hundred water alkalizers for the cost of one course of chemotherapy in some cases.
	You could buy years of organic, fresh fruits and vegetables for the cost of being in the hospital needing acute cancer treatments for just one week.
	So when you think about what is the cost of these things, really ask yourself, compared to what?
	Someone might say, well, gee, this water alkalizer is expensive.
	But compared to what?
	It's not expensive compared to being in a hospital.
	Not at all.
	In fact, it's a cheap investment.
	It's a smart investment in your long term health.
	So almost anything that you can do to increase your nutritional intake With healthy foods, to buy organic foods so that you limit your exposure to pesticides, almost anything you can do to filter your water, just having a good water filter is a great investment.
	Anything you can do to clean up the foods that you're eating and clean up the beverages that you're drinking, make your diet more pristine, that's a great investment in your health that's going to pay off for you year after year.
	In so many ways, not just money in your pocket or money that you save from not having to spend it on hospitals, but also just feeling better, being more vibrant, being more awake and aware, having more energy to spend with the people that you love.
	Whether it's your children or siblings or spouse or whoever it happens to be.
	Living longer, enjoying life and having a healthy mind.
	Not lapsing into dementia and Alzheimer's as so many people do these days.
	You can't put a price tag on being healthy.
	It's the most important aspect of your physical life here is to be healthy.
	Only from that place can you do anything else that really matters.
	So it's priceless.
	So thank you for listening.
	I hope I'm encouraging you to think critically about alkalizing.
	Think it through.
	Make sure that you're using technologies or supplements or foods in the right way to be more alkaline.
	But also realize that it may not be the pH that matters with these foods as much as it is just the fact that they're healthful, wholesome foods loaded with nutrients rather than the junk food, processed food, fried food diets that are giving people cancer.
	Alkalizing alone is not enough.
	You also need to make healthy food choices.
	So thanks for listening.

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