Categories: Podcasts

Podcast 078: Your Body’s pH Balance

There’s a wonderful book by Theodore Barody called “Alkalize or Die“.

This is the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast Restoring Vitality to You and to the Planet. Let’s join our host Scott Paton and Martin Pytela now.

Scott: Welcome back everybody you’re listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast restoring vitality to you and to the planet. I’m your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela and we have been talking about your health and giving you some education on it and this is part three of our multi part series where we are going through all the basics of health education that you can find on the Life Enthusiast co-op website particularly if you click on the link that says health education. We thought that we would get into all these topics in a little more depth in fifty odd weeks and if you just go there and take a look you will see lots of more in-depth information that we couldn’t even get to in this podcast. This week we are going to be talking about pH balance and the impact that has on your body and your health. And Martin just before we went on the air you said that this was your favorite pieces of education that you love talking about this.

Martin: Yes Scott this is totally critical it is a crucial point. People who understand this manage their health, people who don’t understand it manage their illness. There is a wonderful book out, it’s by Theodore Baroody and the title is Alkalize or Die.

Scott: Do you think he could be a little less subtle?

Martin: I don’t know, I don’t think he could find a more appropriate title for it. I don’t mean to really diminish it down to just that where acid is death and alkaline is life, it’s not that simple. In the most common terms, there is an extra page in the pH Balancing which is Test for Metabolic Imbalances and I want to use this as a disclaimer that no we are not trying to boil it down to this single point that it is all about pH balance but it is critically important.

Scott: If you have the right pH balance everything works like the supplements and the enzymes and everything works a lot easier and a lot better.

Martin: Correct what this is about is the pH balance in your lymphatic system and the ideal balanced pH of the lymphatic system matches that of your blood and your blood has to be at about 7.35, slightly alkaline because 7.0 is the neutral and 7.35 is just a bit alkaline and when you are born the pH balance of the lymphatic system is matching that of your blood and as you are going on and your ability to detoxify is not keeping up with the inflow of acidifying influences you are slowly becoming more acidic and the really important thing here is this the oxygen carrying capacity of the lymph is directly related to its pH. By the time your pH had dropped down to 6.0 you have lost 94% of the oxygen carrying capacity of your lymph. Now why would this be important right?

Scott: That was going to be my exact question.

Martin: So why do I care?

Scott: Right, so what is the impact of oxygen on the inside our body its major important right?

Martin: Very important, first you need to understand that red blood cells carry the oxygen from your lungs through the system, they actually hand it over to the lymphatic system at the end because the lymph is that which is bathing all the cells at a tissue level. So for instance you are walking, it doesn’t matter how much oxygen you are getting into your lungs and into your blood if it’s not getting to the cells you still can’t move very fast. I saw that just the other day while I was on my walk, this older fellow, he must have been 80 something and he was just shuffling and barely capable to keep up with his dog and just shuffling up the hill and huffing and puffing and there just wasn’t have any ability to exercise. I speculate that this was caused by just that the pH balance of his lymphatic. Ability to deliver oxygen to the cells will influence strongly its ability to convert fuel into energy.

Scott: So one way of looking at that and you had a fire like our body was the fire and we are not getting any oxygen to the fire we all know the fire dies out and similarly when our blood can’t transport the oxygen because its too acid all the oxygen in the cells die out.

Martin: So what happens in the blood is maintained in a very narrow balance between 7.3 and 7.4 anything outside of that is sure death and the body will pull in minerals from its mineral stores to try to keep things in balance.

Scott: Like calcium out of the bones.

Martin: Exactly, calcium is the most alkalizing mineral that the body stores, calcium is like two pluses, two electrons in the valence layer so calcium can supply a balance of two electrons and yes you store calcium in your bones so that when you need it you can pull it and that is where the osteoporosis comes from where people are actually pulling the calcium out of their bones. They don’t end up weighing any less it’s just that the calcium is now in its liquid form in the lymphatic system buffering the acidity that exists there.

Scott: So what can we do about that?

Martin: Alkalize or die.

Scott: Get the book right?

Martin: Certainly or at least go read on the Life Enthusiast health education and pH balancing. There are multiple things that you can do. The most acidifying influence in your life is stress.

Scott: I thought for sure you were going to say something else so that is interesting.

Martin: Yeah lack of sleep especially lack of sleep before midnight you should be in bed by ten or at least by eleven and if you’re not sleeping by ten o’clock you are not allowing your body’s natural cleansing cycle to kick in.

Scott: We have talked about that on previous podcasts haven’t we?

Martin: So you are acidifying yourself by staying up late, you are acidifying yourself by having negative thoughts. The wrong kind of excitement so then we could go over into the food side of things. Really acidifying things are all chemicals that are non-living so at the top of the list is pharmaceutical drugs that are all prescription or over the counter or recreational all of that is acidifying. Sugar, aspartame, splenda all of those things are real bad news, wheat, pizza, spaghetti, all of that bad news anything that is starchy like alcohol, rye or whiskey or vodka or beer or wine or all of that it is all acidifying.

Scott: What about something like coffee because we all know everyone has their morning coffee.

Martin: Coffee is like a double whammy there are these alkaloids that are actually quite good for the body they are antioxidants but the net result of drinking coffee is quite acidifying so not good news at all. We actually have a table in the website in the diet guidelines for pH balancing. We have this beautifully colored table that shows you what is really acidifying and what is really alkalizing.

Scott: Oh No, I see that blueberries are among the most acidic of the berries.

Martin: They are an acidic berry, that’s right. What you need to understand is this; you need to have about 70 to 80 percent of your diet in the alkalizing and 20 to 30 percent in the acidifying. You cannot have everything in one corner that is an extreme that would kill you just as surely as having the balance the other way around.

Scott: The reason why we are talking about alkalizing the body and not acidifying the body is because everyone is having chocolate and coffee and processed food and pizza, wheat and everything else. If they were eating lemons and limes and asparagus and parsley and that sort of stuff and they were getting too alkaline then we would be telling them to have blueberries and cranberries.

Martin: That’s right because there is such a thing as alkalosis and it is described on our website but acidosis is much more common. Here is a classic example of acidosis, when the terrain is acidic viruses proliferate the most common virus is the flu the influenza. When does the influenza kick in? Right after Thanksgiving and when does the second wave come in?

Scott: Right after Christmas.

Martin: That’s right I’m glad you are on the ball and why is that? It’s because we all get together and we number one don’t exercise and number two we drink too much and number three we drink heavy acidifying foods like turkey dinner there is no alkalinity there. A week after that you have sufficiently lowered the pH to where the virus just kicks in and boom, you’re done. So what do we tell people about that? Food combining helps! Food combining is something that we have hinted at in previous podcast and that you eat only one concentrated food on a plate that is loaded with water rich food such as a salad or steamed vegetable or stir-fry or something like that. Never mind influenza there is much worse things associated with acidity, these are headaches and being tired.

Scott: I was going to say if someone was wondering if I’m a little too acidic or not or where am I? What sort of things can I look for? I’m glad you brought that up because I was just going to ask you about it and what sort of things can I look for and if people are like I am kind of like this then maybe I do have an issue here.

Martin: Well you know eczema and acne on the skin, anxiety.

Scott: Most of our teenagers are acidic?

Martin: Yes they have weaned themselves off of mother’s milk which is alkalizing and started replacing that with these beautiful drinks that the cola industry is providing and they are right up there at the top of the chart with acidity. Spaghetti, chips, deep fried foods all of that anyway as they’re hitting this in stride and just piling on these calories and their bodies are growing and they have this high calorie intake they are shoveling in food that’s low density of nutrients and high volume of calories and its mostly acidifying. Anyway acne, eczema, restless leg syndrome you have seen people unable to sit still you can see that knee popping up under the table, that’s a sure sign. Hyper activity goes along with that it’s just a stronger form of that, a huge appetite you know the more acidic you are the more you want to eat. It’s like a vicious circle that you are bloating; you are just piling on the pounds like it’s out of style. Then of course the chronic diseases like the gout and chronic indigestion, chronic diarrhea and diabetes and the immune like fibromyalgia and Lupus, the list associated with acid alkaline imbalance is pretty long and is associated with every chronic disease. Cancer is the worst of the lot, somewhere on our website you can find writing about the two theories, one is called mono morphic and the other is called pleomorphic. The monomorphic theory is what the mainstream medicine believes in, that there is no such thing as conversion from a virus into a bacterium into a fungus into a tumor where as the pleomorphic is much like the insect and if you didn’t watch it you would have a hard time believing it. Like an insect starts out as an egg and converts into a larva and then into a caterpillar and then it converts into a pupa and its dormant stage and it just sits there for a while and then finally it pops out of the pupae as a butterfly. You know what is the similarity between an egg and a colorful caterpillar and a hard shelled cocoon of sorts and then the butterfly, I mean they don’t even look similar.

Scott: If you didn’t know you would never think they were the same thing like a tadpole and a frog.

Martin: Yeah a tadpole to a frog there is a similarity after a while because you see the legs pop out but at first all you see is this little head with the tail at the end you wouldn’t know you would think it’s some kind of round snake. Possibly strange looking fish and anyway so what happens is the modern medicine as we have it has only studied dead blood through microscopes and samples that they have prepared with formaldehyde or blood thinners to the blood so that it would not coagulate on them. They don’t see how this thing changes from one stage to another. There is a branch called live blood analysis that uses typically dark field microscopes which they take the blood on the spot and stick it on the slide and examine it right there. They have about a 15 to 20 minute window to see what’s going on in the blood before it dies and in most doctors’ office’s that’s not how it’s done. They send you to a lab and take your blood in a vial and they send it off three or four or six days later to get analyzed.

Scott: So it is pretty much all dead?

Martin: Yeah the research that they do on that is frozen. There is no living transformation visible, you can’t for instance take a blood sample and do a live blood analysis and then get you to ingest something and wait for 20 or 30 minutes to see how it changes your body and take another snap shot of it, which is important. We have some pages on that about the Himalayan crystal salt that the folks that we buy the blood from, they did a live blood analysis on ingesting the salt brine therapy and it shows that sticky blood has improved 30 minutes after you have had a glass of water with a teaspoon of brine and it becomes not sticky. All of a sudden the blood that is sick, heading towards cancer and you take one glass of the salt water and you are heading towards health. So you asked how could we see the evidence, we could see it in live blood analysis and the biggest one is as the pH of the blood changes we can see the transformation of these little critters, from viruses to bacteria to fungi to tumors and it’s a one continuous process and it can be reversed through the change of the pH in the body. So people who end up with cancer if they alkalize themselves, they will reverse the cancer it will completely disappear from the body.

Scott: So how do you become more alkaline and less acidic?

Martin: We have mentioned the biggest acidifiers, stress and food intake and of course pesticides and herbicides and all that sort of stuff is not helpful so you need to detox. We talked about detox in the cleansing section. The foot spa for detox rapidly or the miracle 2 bath with the neutralizer and all that. That’s going to pull the toxins out, eating in a food combining manner where you have only one concentrated food on a plate and a water-rich food diet you know salads and steamed vegetables and raw foods.

Scott: Filtered water that doesn’t have lots of fluoride and chlorine in it.

Martin: Here is an interesting thing; distilled water’s pH is 5.5 which is quite acidic it’s useful only if you are trying to detoxify a lot of toxins in a short run. If you were to use distilled water or reverse osmosis water which is also acidic for extended periods of time you are not doing yourself any favors. You should have a water ionizer and the simplest water ionizer we have is the precious Prills to ionize the water quite successfully. We have something more advanced called the E water machine which is only a 300 dollar investment or we have been referring people to the water ionizers the Kangen filter which has a higher price on it at 4400 dollars seems like a high price but anybody who has a chronic disease that is caused by acidity in the system will get it reversed by using a water ionizer. So what would you rather have a hundred thousand dollar medical bill from cancer treatment or a 4400 dollar bill for your water ionizer.

Scott: There we go and that’s always the big question isn’t it.

Martin: Yeah so what’s the perspective there? It’s difficult for people to get their head wrapped around prevention so how do you find out how your pH is doing? for ten dollars we sell a pH paper roll with a chart attached to the back of the dispenser. You take a piece of the pH paper about one inch long in the morning and put it under your tongue and wet it with your saliva and take a look are refer to the chart. If it is somewhere seven like 6.7 to 7.2 then you are doing just great anything below that you have a reason to be concerned. Anything below six is cancer territory; anything below 5 is death territory like irreversible final terminal stages.

Scott: If you are not dying you can be pretty safe to say you are over five.

Martin: Yeah pretty close. Anything below 5.5 is just ringing all alarm bells all at once. At 6.0 and above you have time to take it easy and do it just lifestyle changes, at below five it’s time for absolutely radical and drastic lifestyle changes.

Scott: So as I am listening to you talk about all this Martin I want to alkalize my body and I remember “pop pop fizz fizz” came into my head and these drinks that people will take after they drank too much the night before or an upset stomach what would happen if you took baking soda and just drank it or tums.

Martin: Well it does make sense with people who have a cancer problem there is a wonderful treatment that has been recently promoted which is a mix of baking soda and maple syrup. Cancer loves sugar so you mix three parts maple syrup with one part baking soda, mix it in a pan and serve it table spoon at a time and as the cancer cells suck in all the sugar they get a side kick which is the baking soda which instantly alkalizes the terrain which makes it impossible for the cancer to exist. It’s just phenomenal and the success that people have been having with that is quite remarkable so in an emergency or a time to time basis this is great. What happens if you alkalize yourself too much you will alkalize your stomach to give you heart burn. If you are neutralizing that’s a good idea but you need to do that on a consistent basis like after they have eaten stupid foods. They create a problem in their digestive system everything is about correct, your saliva is alkalized, your stomach juices are acid, your small intestine juices are alkaline, your lower bowel juices are acid, it just changes from one to the other in order to digest meat your stomach has to be quite acidic and the stomach stuff comes out as 2.5. The medical approach to having heart burn to disable their acid pumps with Prilosec or something of that sort is a bad idea. The right thing would be to eat in a proper manner like food combining or that sort of thing. Most people don’t have heart burn because of too much acidity they usually have heart burn from not enough acidity.

Scott: Actually that’s very interesting because most of us would say that it feels very acidic not very alkaline.

Martin: Right but if you are burping after a meal, there is a wonderful high school experiment that you take a table spoon of vinegar and pour it on top of the table spoon of baking soda and what you get is a whole bunch a fizzing and bubbling and it is also warm, there is heat coming off of that. You have a release of alkalizing and acidifying chemicals all at the same time so making bubbles, fizz and heat and it feels terrible. So what you need is more power to digestion so you can down foods clearly and more effectively and then send it on down the small intestine where your pancreas will inject baking soda or sodium bicarbonate and that neutralizes the chyme from your stomach and so if you neutralize it in your stomach, you are asking for trouble. You just push the underdigested food into your small intestine that will not be able to deal with it so soon enough you will start to over load your liver with these undigested proteins and you will start to get these dark circles under your eyes and the swollen puffy eyelids.

Scott: There you go so there are lots of different physical symptoms and really how hard would it be to have some filtered water, some spring water and some lemon.

Martin: With some mineral drops added to it. The Adya Minerals that we talked about 20 episodes ago where we have these wonderful trace minerals sulfur extracted from the black Mica just the most wonderful trace mineral supplement if you add that to your water you have bought the right stuff. Have we convinced people enough that pH balance is an important link?

Scott: I hope so what I would do is just briefly read off some of the items from the pH balance page from Life-Enthusiast.com that are alkaline and people can think about them and people can say would it be hard to put some of these into their diet. For example lemons and watermelon and lime and grapefruit, mangos and papaya are the most alkaline. Blueberries, cranberries and prunes are the most acidic and vegetables you have asparagus, onions, parsley, raw spinach, broccoli, olive oil is very alkaline. In the nuts you have almonds which is very alkalizing and peanuts and walnuts are very acidic.

Martin: This is not to say that; walnut oil is excellent as an Omega 3 source but it would be intelligent to have only a handful of it. Having an Oh Henry bar everyday with chocolate sugar and peanuts and caramel and whatever they add to it that’s bad.

Scott: What’s interesting too is that raw spinach is alkalizing but cooked spinach is moderately acidic. We keep getting back to live food.

Martin: Yes cooked fruit bad news, any fruit that you have cooked has gone onto the dark side.

Scott: The dark side of the force. Martin if someone wanted to talk to you about their diet and how they can become more alkaline how can they do that?

Martin: Well Life Enthusiast co-op at 1-866-543-3388 or there is phone that rings on my desk at 775-299-4661 or just listen to a whole bunch of these podcasts we keep going over the same topics and each time in more depth. Or just head to the health education pages at www.Life-Enthssiast.com

Scott: You have been listening to Life Enthusiast pod cast restoring vitality to you and to the planet.

Martin: Thanks for listening.

Author: Martin Pytela