Maintaining Your Body's pH for Optimum Health

There are many articles and studies about food combining, diets and healthy eating but one that really makes a lot of sense is the correlation between managing acid vs alkaline food and drink intake. If you suffer from bloating or inflammation due to what you consume then balancing your pH (potential hydrogen) can really help!

Our bodies are remarkable, when we become overly acidic due to poor choices, they create alkaline minerals such as potassium, calcium and magnesium. This is great short term but causing your body to work this hard to balance the pH levels over long periods of time can lead to dis-eases such as osteoporosis.

We can easily test our pH levels with the 'at home' litmus paper strips - the range is from 0 to 14, below 7 is acidic, above 7 is alkaline and 7 is neutral. As one would expect, different parts of the body require different levels of pH to fight of bacteria, for example saliva is more alkaline where as areas such as our skin need to be more acidic to ward off unfriendly bacteria. Blood is the most important area to test and manage, we are looking for levels of between 7.365 and 7.4 and to create a balance of both acid and alkaline to maintain optimum health.

Here is a great chart of acid and alkaline foods and a lot more information too here: http://www.energiseforlife.com/acid-alkaline-food-chart-1.3.pdf. 

Key lesson: Our bodies are great healers but we need to help them along the way by monitoring our intake of certain food groups and maintaining a healthy diet as much of the time as is possible! A cup of lemon water when you first wake up can work wonders, starting the day of right! Then a quick green smoothie for breakfast or as a snack in the day is full of alkaline and can really help balance the acid intake from less healthy options. Do see the chart above on the energies for life website, mentioned above. Exercise, managing how we deal with 'stress' and sleeping well all aid fantastically to maintain the ph balance to the normal levels we require.

Personally I have hot water with lemon and then Apple Cider Vinegar with a dash of water, so great for regular bowel movement and fighting many viruses.

Take care of your insides and your energy, wellbeing and happiness levels will flourish!

Love & Light

Emma