My “healthy diet” ideas are spread out among numerous ideologies and theories. I cherry pick things that I like and that work for me and drop the things that I don’t like. I like the WAPF ideas of a nourishing diet for the most part but I do not like their obsession with meat. Same thing for primal eaters but I do like the primal practice of minimizing grains. I prefer a vegetarian diet but not so much the fact that LOTS of vegetarians could actually be called grainarians. Living off pasta, bread, and rice is not healthy in my opinion.
I ended up deciding that for me the best diet is a nourished vegetarian diet with little in the way of grains and lots in the way of raw foods and greens (ala Crazy, Sexy, Diet). The chief way I choose to eat lots of greens is via green smoothies. I drink 2 quarts per day, minimum, loaded with things like spinach, collard greens, turnip or beet greens, parsley, mustard greens, wheatgrass, or wild greens like dandelion. Greens have a lot of the nutrients that WAPF enthusiasts claim they need meat for but when you drink 3-4 cups of greens in one sitting you are getting tons of those nutrients. You are also ingesting ALKALINE foods.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 I moved from Ohio to Arizona so I could go to one of the best doctors in the country. His treatment is a mix of conventional and non-conventional and he encourages diet and other alternatives as methods of cure as well. One of the first things he told me was to stop to eating meat and dairy. The reason? They encourage acidity in the body and cancer cells LOVE acid environments. Meat and dairy would in fact contribute to an environment that makes cancer very happy. Later on a I read several books that backed him up and one of those is The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health.
It is a very eye opening book and shows with perfect clarity why a diet based upon acid foods like meat and dairy are NOT a good idea. Of course this is not to say that you cannot ever eat these things but the typical person is not striking a balance between acidic and alkaline foods. The book goes into the exact things that happen when our body is too acidic… it is like giving your cells and acid bath and giving a place for things like Candida (yeast) a place to thrive.
In all honesty the diet at the back of the book is quite radical and there is NO way I could live on it long term. Cold cucumber, avocado soup in the morning doesn’t sound yummy. But thanks to pioneers in the raw foods movement I can drink my green smoothies in addition to other greens and veggies throughout the day and strike a good balance. Or so I hope. ;)
This book inspired me to get some pH testing strips to test my pH daily to see how I am doing. I also got some pH booster drops to add to my water. Eventually though that became cost prohibitive and I got an Alkamate, portable alkazing water bottle instead. LOVE it! One of the first reviews on that page was from someone who claimed they were to acidic and were getting hives. Ironically I get hives when I stop drinking my smoothies and let my diet get out of whack. I have never been able to explain way they come on but perhaps it too has to do with my pH. After filtering my tap I now add the pH drops and some lemon for the ultimate alkaline water. I have already seen a difference, especially in my skin. This month my period crept up on me and caught me by surprise. My skin usually gets oily and a just a bit blotchy a couple days before that time of month but this go round… nada. If the outside cells of my skin react this way to a more alkaline environment I can only assume the inside cells are swimming around in joy.
Do you know what your pH is?
