The New Alkaline Diet
The concept of an alkaline diet has been around for many years.
Fundamentally it suggests that we increase consumption of alkalizing foods and
reduce our consumption of acidifying foods. There are many charts and sites on
the web saying basically the same.
So why hasn’t the theory become mainstream?
My theory is that any ‘diet’ is only as good as
(a) its promoter
and
(b) its ease of following.
And frankly, an alkaline diet isn’t easy to
follow.
Think ‘Popeye’ and you get the general idea.
I have been studying alkaline diet theory for over a decade. I’ve
read and followed every website, book, diet and strategy I could find. I can
say that just under age 65, I’m very healthy and that decade – one in which I
saw many of my old friends ageing rapidly – has seen less age-related change in
me than any friend I know. So in one sense it has worked.
But I need to be very honest here. I don’t follow the alkaline
diet conscientiously. In those ten years I did eat mountains of fruit, (acid in
the form of fructose) bread (acid in the form of carbohydrates) and yes, meats
(acid in the form of protein). So although I can point to my alkaline diet as a
contributing factor to my present wellbeing, a skilled debater could equally
argue that I am well because of the fruit, the bread and the meat... of yes, I
forgot the wine and coffee!
In that decade I have also closely observed hundreds of people
attempting the alkaline diet, and I have yet to see one who can honestly say he
or she adheres to it.
There is another important factor which I will expand on later. In
those ten years I have constantly consumed alkaline ionized antioxidant water.
It’s my firm belief that the antioxidant effect of this water may have been the
deciding factor in how I have resisted ageing when my friends have not.
My partner Cassie has seen her health improve over the ten years
on an ‘alkaline diet’ and alkaline ionized water, but she never reached good
health. She has been plagued with recurrent Irritable Bowel Syndrome since I
knew her, and candida rears its ugly head every time she loses ground with her
struggle with IBS. In her efforts towards health she has become an amazing
researcher and has tried almost everything to heal her stomach and lower bowel
permanently. She would have long periods of relative health, usually coinciding
with close control over her diet, then stress, or a breakout with my on a
special occasion would send her back again into pain, constipation and more.
So we can say that our alkaline diet helped us ‘clean up’ the
foods we chose, but can we say it gave us radiant health? No, we can’t.
In my profession as alkaline consultant I saw many cases like
ours, and with the maturity of experience, slowly gave up on the idea that one
health regimen works for everyone. I particularly remember Sandra, a qualified
nutritionist, who came to us when we conducted our own trial of the effect of
alkaline ionized water on people with arthritis, gout or rheumatism. Sandra was
plagued with pain in her arms and joints, and strictly followed the alkaline
diet to no avail. She enrolled in our trial out of utter desperation. 30 days
later, drinking alkaline ionized water daily, her pain was gone.
This was not an isolated case. I saw dozens of different reactions
to the alkaline diet, which finally made me accept that everyone is an
individual with complex and varied reasons for ill health, so to say that any
modality will fix them is well.. amateurish enthusiasm.
Before we give up on the alkaline diet, let’s do a quick recap,
because many people have real misconceptions about what it is.
Our body needs reserves of both acids and alkalis. Acids come in
the form of the vast majority of foods and are almost completely burned up
during metabolism to give us energy. Alkalis are in some foods in very minute
amounts, as inorganic minerals calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium (some
others to a lesser degree).
Here is where people get confused. We are not trying to eat more
alkaline foods than acid foods (foods containing, on balance, more of one than
the other). We are attempting to do two things:
- (Reduce
our intake of acid-containing foods – simply because most of us don’t need so
much and because what we don’t metabolise turns into metabolic acid and is
stored in the body.
- (Increase the intake of foods that, after
metabolism, leave us with more alkaline minerals to support the alkaline buffer
in our blood and to repair and regenerate our skeleton.
The classic example every alkaline diet advocate refers to is the lemon. Stick
a pH test probe into a lemon and you’ll see it is strongly acidic. But drink
lemon juice (also highly acidic) and your body will burn up the acids in energy
creation but leave the alkaline minerals in what some people call ‘alkaline
ash’. This alkaline residue forms the basis of your body’s body building,
anti-inflammation program, immunity and much, much more.
Here
is a link to my own alkaline food chart. I originally designed it as a wall
chart and it’s still available here in this form, but I realised that I
actually wanted to give this information to anyone seeking it, and so i made it
a free download. It’s a very popular download, but as I mentioned, i am yet to
see many people really strictly adhering to it. Like every diet, it’s great on
paper and reduces in possible effect the more we ‘cheat’.
If
there is one thing I have learned about diets, it’s that unless faced with
imminent death, everyone cheats. Most will deny they are cheating to your face,
which, after some probing, I realised was caused by actual unconsciousness of
binge eating. Diet scientists are already aware of this and many a clinical
trial is flawed to the core by cheating participants who lie.
In
June 2010, Cassie was once again affected by serious candida. She had done the
diets, tried every darn probiotic yet invented.. she had even spent a very
large sum at the famous centre For
Digestive Diseases where she had healthy faecal matter with its own new internal micobia introduced
to her cleansed bowel. Radical, yes, but it does work for many people. However,
$5000 later it had no effect on her.
I
mention this only to let you see that she was very, very determined to get
well. One day she came across a site called beescandida.com. Bee was a 76-year
old lady who had suffered for many years just as Cassie had. Like Cassie she
had embarked on a search for answers . her site attracts over a million visits
per month and she advocated a very ‘non-alkaline’ diet that challenges the
whole diet industry.
Before I go further.. the essence of this article is that no-one has the total answer for everyone, and having restated that, I can say that Bee isn't right on everything. It seems to me that today we all have to take responsibility for discerning what is best for us and discarding that which we feel less clear about.
She
says that candida is a natural response to an unnatural diet, namely
carbohydrates. The body, says Bee, had to use what it had to try to maintain a
healthy balance against the massive excesses of carbohydrate in the modern
diet. In it infinite wisdom, it let candida loose on the carbs, gobbling and chomping
away, and of course, breeding up in the process.
Stop
consuming carbs, says Bee, and you will
eventually return candida to its correct balance in the body. And what does
carbohydrates include?
Bread. Fruit. Even some vegetables, especially root vegetables. Wine. Beer, all
grains and anything made with grains.
The 'food' no-one needs reminding about is sugar. Sugar, fructose, galactose, maltose,
glucose.. they are all sugar. Carbohydrates from the short list above also
break down in the body to sugar. Sugar is also acid. It’s the ‘daddy’ of all
acids. Powerful and potent, it invades us and changes some very basic and
important functions of the body.
So if
you are serious about an alkaline diet, let’s see how you do reducing
everything from that list above to as close to zero as possible. If you do,
you’ll be massively changing the balance of acids and alkalis in your body, not
by increasing the spinach or kale you eat, but by adjusting at the other end;
at the acid end of the seesaw.
Open
any textbook on diet and you’ll see the advice to balance your intake between
carbs, proteins and fats, with the advice to reduce fats as much as possible.
Carbs, we are told, are an ideal source of long term energy release with no ill
effects. Yet let’s take a quick look at the biggest carb eaters on the planet:
USA. America’s diet is killing them. They have epidemic diabetes, epidemic
obesity, cancer, underwritten by an almost manic hunger that is never
satisfied. Low fat is the biggest failure in dietary history – as again, seen
in America.
Fats,
of course, are lipids, and lipids are acids. Fats are the bad kids on the
block, and everyone ‘knows’ that they are bad. So what could fats tell us if
allowed to speak for themselves? Perhaps they would say:
- I am
the most efficient energy source you consume.
- I am
your heart’s primary food.
- I am
what every cell wall in your body consists of.
- I
regulate your hormonal system.
- I can
make you feel full without eating massive amounts of carbohydrates.
- I
raise your good cholesterol level.
Of
course, in the family of bad kids on the block, there really are some bad ones.
All polyunsaturated oils taken away from their natural source, certain
mono-unsaturated oils as sold in your supermarket, like Canola, and yes, there
are more.
The
good kids include all animal fat, butter, uncooked olive oil and coconut oil.
“What!?” I hear you cry. Animal fat? Yes, animal fat.
Here’s
the simple truth. We can get everything we need for energy from the good fats.
They convert to energy more cleanly, (less processing and stress on the liver,
less strain on the gall bladder) they
convert more fully, they only convert to sugars when needed, and.. wonder of
wonders, they satisfy your hunger in a way carbs will never do, which makes
them better weight reduction participants than all carbs and sugars.
So..
why do we all believe that fats are bad? There’s a huge backstory here and
no-one explains it better than Gary Taube, scientist and writer of Good
Calories, Bad Calories. Gary has singlehandedly dismembered the research on
fats and carbs. He has challenged flawed papers that have been presented to us
as truth with the help of corporate America (Big Food) and if you check his
blog you’ll see what happens to people with the courage to challenge the dominant
paradigm. There are others in increasing number s, all with the same message.
Cut out carbs as much as humanly possible. Substitute fats. Stay on the diet
and see the effect.
I’m
sure you’ve noticed by now that a fat loaded diet actually substitutes one form
of acids (lipids) for the other (sugars). But because carbs are the antagonist,
the cause of so much illness including but far beyond diabetes and candida, and
because there is no denying that we need acids to convert to energy, our choice
between the two forms of acids is a critical one. By switching to fats, we
‘clean up’ our acids and burn them far more efficiently. And now we can support
our acid/alkaline balance as we had planned to, with dark leafy greens, green
drinks and alkaline ionised water.
The
problem I had in accepting that fats were the good kids on the block was
centred on my acceptance of the dominant paradigm. I’ve written in some detail
about the campaign by Monsanto in the US to stop the consumption of dairy and
coconut oils. It’s stunning to learn that such a huge change from saturated
fats to polyunsaturated fats was a cleverly managed PR exercise with millions
and millions of dollars as the reward for the participating companies. But it’s
even harder to actually give up the fear that their campaign has instilled into
us through repetition over the years.
On
her website, Bee counsels that the only way back to health from candida
overgrowth is total abstinence from carbs. It’s fascinating to watch
correspondents on her bulletin board attempt to bargain with her, using every
possible reason to keep hold of their ‘little treats’. I have observed for many
years that sugar is seriously addictive, and so it’s common to hear dieters on
her site talk about detox, or the
serious mental blockages they see in themselves as they begin to ‘clean up’.
Bee says that you need to be on her diet for a month for every year you have
been sick. She stresses over and over that although she calls it Bee’s Candida
Diet, it is actually a diet for everyone.
Bee’s
site carries many, many stories of radical health improvements. What she
doesn’t offer is scientific proof, but as mentioned before, Gary taubes’ book
fulfils this area more than adequately. I will offer one recent scientific
study of mice that gives you an idea of what we are talking about here.
At the British Columbia Cancer Research
Centre, scientists implanted various strains of mice
with human tumour cells or with mouse tumour cells and assigned them to one of
two diets.
The first diet, a typical
Western diet, contained about 55 percent carbohydrate, 23 percent protein and
22 percent fat. The second contained 15 percent carbohydrate, 58 percent
protein and 26 percent fat. They found that the tumor cells grew consistently
slower on the second diet.
There’s more. Mice genetically predisposed to breast cancer
were fed the same diets and almost half of them on the Western diet developed
breast cancer within their first year of life while none on the
low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet did. See it here.
Only one on the Western diet reached a normal life span
(approximately 2 years), with 70 percent of them dying from cancer.
Only 30 percent of those on the low-carbohydrate diet
developed cancer and more than half these mice reached or exceeded their normal
life span.
For those of you interested, Dr Jay Wortman has also worked
with indigenous populations using similar principles and has even made a video
of it. He also has a blog
that documents his own progress but also some of the resistance he finds to his
newfound knowledge.
I was
lucky. Living with Cassie, who worked very hard to remain strictly carb free, I
supported her and did the same. She had more negative symptoms to begin with, I
didn’t, but I was very surprised to see the one health challenge I have –
Benign Hyperplasia of the Prostate – improve dramatically over six months of
diet. Cassie too experienced better and better ‘gut’ health. We continued to
drink our alkaline water and continued to eat our dark leafy greens. We saved
pots of money by giving up the local carb-crazy restaurants, choosing to cook
wonderful home meals. We both experienced an almost magical increase in the
enjoyment of the food we ate, combined with satiety – being ‘full’ on less
food.
Prostate
cancer is, as we all know, far too common in men of my age, so one wonders why,
when a study of mice bred for
prostate cancer showed a slowing in tumour growth, a followup human study was
not begun. Perhaps it was because getting a
man of my age to drop his ‘little pleasures’ just seemed to hard.
In
line with my earlier observations, our close friends who had had longterm
health problems saw how well we were doing and asked what had happened. We
passed on the diet, they began it, began to get well, and when we moved
overseas, gave in to carb temptation. One is now suffering from CFS, another is
undergoing another soul-searching rationalisation for her ill health, and the
other, as always, lies about her ‘treats’ and at the same time complains that
the diet didn’t work.
I
can’t judge them. The diet seems difficult when we look at it from our toxic
carb-addicted mind, but once we began, supported by our alkaline staples, a
whole new way of looking at food emerged. We loved our food because we really,
really tasted it! I would burst out in rapture at a simple mouthful. Cassie would
moan in ecstasy over a simple dish. Because I have now experienced how good it
can be, I am looking from a new mind/body vantage point, and absolutely
understand why my dear friends can’t seem to stay on the diet. We are all
addicted to carbohydrates! Sugar hair-triggers the insulin response in our
blood because we never stop snacking on a ‘little something sweet’. Our
adrenals wear out shrieking with panic as yet another massive dose of acidic
sugar dumps on our system like a dumptruck in our driveway. And yet, like the
drug addict, we rationalise it away as our ‘right to choose’, or ‘what keeps me
stress-free’ or ‘that’s just how it is, what can I do?’.
Some
attempts have been made to study humans on low carb. Here’s
a link to a crazy German study of totally desperate cancer patients. The
only people allowed to be enrolled were those people who had completely run out
of options; virtually at deaths’ door. They also used some suspect ‘bad kid on
the block’ oils including hempseed and linseed as fat sources, plus soy protein
as well as animal protein. In short, the study is so mixed up one wonders what
they would achieve or how they would interpret those results. The good
news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of
carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their
physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumours slowed or stopped
growing, or shrunk.
The
new alkaline diet isn’t really new. We
still advocate all of the good greens, but we do NOT advocate fruit. But
the big change is from carbs to fats. Our greens and our alkaline water support
our good fats as they re-energise the body and heal our sugar-drug habit. We
drink alkaline ionised water because we have learned that many of our alkaline
foods actually bind essential calcium, thus making it eaten but unavailable.
Alkaline ionized water gives us those essential alkaline minerals plus an
abundance of antioxidants in the form of free hydrogen, supporting our body’s
regeneration, immunity and self-healing.
There
is ample documented scientific evidence in the form of peer reviewed studies
that show the beneficial effect of drinking alkaline water. So we cover all
bases with the new ‘Acid and Alkaline Diet’-
good acids in the form of good fats, good alkalinity in the form of dark
greens and alkaline water.
But
what about protein? Doesn’t protein up the levels of uric acid, and isn’t uric
acid the cause – or one of the causes – of gout? Gary Taubes had to drop a
chapter from his book ‘Good Protein Bad Protein’ because of the size of his
work, and he recently released this missing chapter here.
To quote in part:
“Because uric acid itself is a breakdown product of protein
compounds known as purines – the building blocks of amino acids – and because
purines are at their highest concentration in meat, it has been assumed for the
past 130-odd years that the primary dietary means of elevating uric acid levels
in the blood, and so causing first hyperuricemia and then gout, is an excess of
meat consumption.
The actual evidence, however, has always been less-than-compelling:
Just as low cholesterol diets have only a trivial effect on serum cholesterol
levels, for instance, and low-salt diets have a clinically insignificant effect
on blood pressure, low-purine diets have a negligible effect on uric acid
levels. A nearly
vegetarian diet, for instance, is likely to drop serum uric acid levels by 10
to 15% percent compared to a typical American diet, but that’s rarely
sufficient to return high uric acid levels to normality, and there is little
evidence that such diets reliably reduce the incidence of gouty attacks in
those afflicted.(4) Thus, purine-free diets are no longer prescribed for the
treatment of gout, as the gout specialist Irving Fox noted in 1984, “because of
their ineffectiveness” and their “minor influence” on uric acid levels.(5)
Moreover, the incident of gout in vegetarians, or mostly vegetarians, has
always been significant and “much higher than is generally assumed.” (One
mid-century estimate, for instance, put the incidence of gout in India among
“largely vegetarians and teetotalers” at 7%.)(6) Finally, there’s the repeated
observation that eating more protein increases the excretion of uric acid from
the kidney and, by doing so, decreases the level of uric acid in the blood.(7)
This implies that the meat-gout hypothesis is at best debatable; the high
protein content of meats should be beneficial, even if the purines are not.”
So it appears
that protein in the form of meat may not be the problem we as alkaline diet
advocates thought it was. A former 12-year vegetarian, I now eat more meat than
ever before, along with a large supplement of coconut oil which reversed my
early onset Alzheimers’ symptoms. (
see
video) having said that. I eat less meat per meal than I may have done
earlier in my life because, simply, I’m not as hungry as I was on a
carb-dominant diet.
Judging
on past experience, I expect a strong resistance to the idea that we can be
healthier eating meat, fat and dark greens than a balanced carb diet. I’m not
interested in arguing it out because I have done the work and with Cassie’s
help, satisfied myself that this new paradigm is a radical new method of
dietary acid/alkaline balance, rather than the original concept of swinging to
alkaline away from acids.
Ian
Blair Hamilton
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