By Alysa Bajenaru, RD

You may have heard celebrities touting the health benefits of an alkaline diet, but what is it and should you be following their lead?

An alkaline diet is typically defined as consuming 80% alkaline-forming foods and 20% acid-forming foods. But if we’re using the words alkaline and acid to define a diet, we first need to talk about pH.

What Is PH and Why Is it Important?

You probably remember from science class that pH measures how acidic or basic a solution is.

• 0-7 is acidic
• 7 is neutral
• 7-14 is basic (alkaline)

When it comes to the human body, there are strict controls in place to make sure the blood pH remains right around 7.4. Anything outside of this tight range is life-threatening. The good news is, no matter what you eat or drink, your body will maintain this delicate balance.

The foods you eat won’t change your pH levels, but they will affect how hard your body has to work to keep that 7.4 level steady. That’s where the alkaline diet comes in.

Are Acidic Foods Like Tomatoes and Citrus Bad for Me?

Just because a food is acidic in nature, doesn’t necessarily mean it forms acid in the body. To find out the acid- or base-forming potential of foods, we actually look at something called the potential renal acid load, or PRAL, a value that measures acid excretion in the urine.

Alkaline Forming Foods

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Nuts
• Some legumes

Acid Forming Foods

• Meat
• Dairy
• Caffeine
• Sugar
• Salt
• Alcohol

You can find more complete lists and charts online, but you can see that the first step in following a more alkaline diet is to increase your consumption of fruits and vegetables.

If your diet looks more like the second column, your body is working harder to maintain that pH balance by releasing alkalizing minerals such as calcium and magnesium into the blood to buffer the acid. An acid-forming diet is low in these minerals, which means the body must get them from where they are stored in your bones—this may be a risk factor for osteoporosis.

What Are Some Health Benefits of an Alkaline Diet?

Increased fruit and vegetable intake has been linked with lower rates of osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases. Combine this with a lower intake of acid-forming foods, and you find even more health benefits like improved muscle retention and cognitive function. One study even showed a decrease in lower back pain when supplementing with alkaline minerals.

The bottom line is that eating more fruits and vegetables is always a good idea, and reducing inflammation and acid-formation in the body has multiple benefits for long-term health.

What Supplements Support Alkalinity in the Body?

• Calcium
• Magnesium
• Greens Powder
• Chlorophyll
• Spirulina Powder

Here are three tips to get you started on the path to a more alkaline diet:

• Trade your morning cup of acidic coffee for alkaline green tea or homemade green juice.
• Drink plenty of water throughout the day (try for half your body weight in ounces).
• Fill half your plate with veggies at every meal.

Alkalizing Green Juice Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup coconut milk
• 1 cup spinach
• 1 small green apple
• 1/2 cup cucumber
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 cup romaine lettuce
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 1 lime, juiced
• 2 tsp. spirulina powder

Instructions:

Blend all ingredients together until smooth. Serve over ice or at room temperature (my favorite).

Why Juice?

Fruits and vegetables provide one more substance that is absolutely essential for good health – water. More than 65% of the cells in the human body are made of water, and in some tissues, for example the brain, the cells can be made up of as much as 80% water. Water is absolutely essential for good health, yet most people don’t consume enough water each day. Plus, many of the fluids we do drink, coffee, tea, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages and artificially flavored drinks each contain substances that require extra water for your body to eliminate. Fruit and vegetable juices are free of these unneeded substances and are full of pure, clean water.

Fruit and vegetable juices are good sources of traditional nutrients. Citrus fruits (grapefruit, oranges, etc.) provide healthy portions of vitamin C. Carrot juice contains large quantities of vitamin A, in the form of beta carotene. A number of green juices are a good source of vitamin E. Fruit juices are a good source of essential minerals like iron, copper, potassium, sodium, iodine, and magnesium, which are bound by the plant in a form that is most easily assimilated during digestion.

Since juicing removes the indigestible fiber, these nutrients are available to the body in much larger quantities than if the piece of fruit or vegetable was eaten whole. For example, because many of the nutrients are trapped in the fiber when you eat a raw carrot, you are only able to assimilate about 1% of the available beta carotene. When a carrot is juiced, removing the fiber, nearly 100% of the beta carotene can be assimilated.

Fresh juices are a tremendous source of enzymes. In fact, the “freshness” of juice is one of their key features because enzymes are destroyed by heat. When you eat cooked foods, whether its meat, grains, fruits or vegetables, if the food is cooked at temperatures above 114 degrees, enzymes are destroyed by the heat. Since fruits and vegetables are juiced raw, the enzymes are still viable when you drink the juice.

Restore Your Vitality & Revitalize Your Body

Juicing vegetables is one of the most powerful tools one can use to obtain high level vitality and the fastest way to restore your health. Vegetable juicing will establish an environment where nutrients can be used by the body. The nutrients are rich in supply and taken directly to the cells. Iron levels will normalize very quickly just on green juices alone. The benefits are enormous. The green juices in particular will build your blood, carry oxygen to the tissues and irrigate the system, removing stagnation.

Live Enzymes & Living Juice

The simplest way to eat living food is by drinking fresh juice. Fruits and vegetables build and regenerate our body; they provide minerals, enzymes, vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, amino acids and much more when eaten fresh or raw, without cooking or preservatives. Fresh juice is referred to as “live food” because it contains enzymes. Enzymes are protein molecules that have been found to have enormous health benefits. They have the ability to stimulate biochemical reaction. Enzymes are the body’s life force and are constantly breaking down substances and rejoining substances to rebuild and repair. Without enzymes all life would simply be a collection of lifeless chemicals. In other words, the element that enables the body to be nourished and live, the element that is hidden within seeds and plants in the sprouting and growth of plants, is a life principle known as an enzyme. Heating enzymes and vitamins causes their destruction and minimizes the vitality of your juice. Enzymes are the catalyst for hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that occur throughout the body; they are essential for the digestion and absorption of foods as well as for the production of cellular energy. Enzymes are essential for most of the building and rebuilding that goes on constantly in our bodies.

Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Juice for Your Daily Diet

The addition of fresh juices will immediately make our eating habits healthier by adding larger amounts of beneficial raw food in a delicious and more easily digestible form. Raw, uncooked fruits and vegetables contain vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Dietary experts now emphasize the importance of vitamins and minerals for normal growth and tissue maintenance and efficient absorption (enzymes). The Super Angel is perfect for a diet that depends on living and raw foods, especially hard-to-extract juices like wheatgrass and spinach as well as fibrous vegetables like beets.

The Benefits of Juice

• Improves life expectancy and health
• Contributes to the prevention of heart diseases
• Helps with depression
• Helps relieve high blood pressure
• Helps detoxify the body, thereby helping to alleviate allergies
• Helps with degenerative and deficiency diseases
• Aids digestion
• It is believed that fresh juice may assist in reducing the body’s stress by helping to correct acid/alkaline imbalances that are so common in our modern world.
• The nutrients and enzymes found in fresh juices can immediately go to work in the body to strengthen the body’s natural immune system to help prevent disease.

Live Enzymes from the Super Angel Living Juice Extractor

Freshly prepared juices are a rich source of live enzymes. These enzymes are not only essential to the digestive process, but they are absorbed and recycled to the digestive tract. On their journey they are able to scavenge debris and effectively vacuum clean the blood of fungus, bacteria and undigested food particles which may have escaped digestion. These enzymes are crucial to the healing system. One doctor, Dr. Max Gerson found that patients using centrifugal-type vegetable juicers did not respond to therapy, while those who used a grinder and press did. There are two factors to bear in mind here: centrifugal juicers tend to kill enzymes and the juices are generally nutrient-poor, a good proportion being left in the moist pulp. The test for “live” juice is to see how long it retains its color before it goes “brown.” If you are going to seriously juice, we would recommend a more expensive juicer that triturates (grind into very fine particles) and presses with a slow RPM (keeping enzymes intact and generating no heat) that guarantees you’ll be able to juice even the more fibrous green vegetables and grasses. You will find that it will more than repay itself both in the quantity of juice extracted (a third more in many cases) and in its mineral quality, which can nearly double that from the more traditional juicers. Bottled juices are dead. They have to kill the enzymes in order to preserve juice whether through pasteurization (heat treatment) or common pickling devices such as using whey, which denatures the enzymes.

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What is coconut kefir?

Coconut kefir is quite simply fermented coconut water. Typically, fermented drinks are recognized as dairy (milk kefir) and tea (kombucha) beverages, and not as much recognition has been given to coconut kefir. This may prove to be a mistake, due to the fact that coconut kefir eliminates the often problematic ingredients of dairy and certain teas for some people’s digestive systems while still allowing you to take in a highly beneficial probiotic beverage.

What are the benefits of coconut kefir?

The benefits of coconut kefir are comprehensive, but, from a high level view, this probiotic beverage is very healing to the digestive system and the liver and creates a strong immune system that is ultimately responsible for your good health.

In your digestive system, coconut kefir will enhance hydration and recolonize your gut and mucous membranes with healthy strains of beneficial microflora. Coconut kefir is superior, as it promotes a wide variety of microflora and has been said to have a much more potent effect on the digestive system than any yogurt.

Kefir also contains beneficial yeasts that are known to hunt out and destroy pathogenic yeasts in the body. These beneficial yeasts are considered the best defense against dangerous yeast organisms like Candida. They clean, purify and strengthen the intestinal walls and help the body become more efficient in resisting dangerous pathogens such as E. Coli, salmonella and intestinal parasites.

Since we have ten times more bacteria in our body than cells, creating an optimal environment for bacterial balance is paramount. Poor bacterial balance can cause blood sugar imbalances, sugar cravings, weight gain, poor

immunity, low energy and digestive disturbances. Kefir helps heal all of these problems by restoring balance to the microflora of the body. It also helps assimilate nutrients in the gut and enhance the usage of certain trace minerals and B vitamins.

Kefir’s excellent nutritional content offers healing and health benefits to people regardless of condition. The regular use of it can help relieve intestinal disorders, promote bowel movement, cleanse the endocrine system, reduce flatulence and create a healthier digestive system.

How do you work it into your daily routine?

The simplest ways to consume coconut kefir is through a shot or added to your smoothie first thing in the morning. You can also add it to other beverages, like unsweetened cranberry juice, and add a touch of stevia to sweeten if you wish. This creates a nice 1-2 combo for your liver and kidneys.

If you are new to coconut kefir, 2 to 4 ounces a day is a good start.

Some people take it first thing in the morning to wake themselves and their digestive systems up and before bed when the friendly bacteria often do their best work. Others drink it before each meal for optimal digestion. There is really no bad time to take it, but the benefits will be enhanced for you if taken during one of these times — or all of them!

The 9 Tray Excalibur Dehydrator With 26Hr Timer and Clear Door features the Parallaxx design which uses a temperature controlled, fan forced, horizontal drying system mounted in the rear. Cool air is drawn in the back, heated and distributed evenly across each tray eliminating the need for tray rotation. During the dehydration process, warm air removes moisture from foods and is pushed out of the front of the machine.

Key Features

• 14 square feet drying area over 9 trays
• 26 hour countdown timer
• Clear door for viewing ingredients as they dry
• BPA free mesh drying screens included
• Thermostatic control from 41ºC to 74ºC (105ºF – 165ºF) for safe drying
• 600 Watt rear heat unit with 7″ fan
• Made in the USA
• FREE copy of ‘Preserve It Naturally’ dehydrating guide and recipe book

review Juicers Says

Horizontal airflow provides even drying, eliminating the tray rotation that is needed in all stacking type dehydrators. This means that drying is quicker and heat is not lost as the dehydrator doesn’t need to be taken apart to change the tray sequence. One or all trays may be removed making space for larger items such as whole fruit.

The Excalibur is easy to clean with spills falling on seamless tray bottoms. BPA free flexible mesh tray inserts hold food above the tray frames. The adjustable thermostat allows perfect drying every time and square tray design increases drying area over dehydrators with round trays. The wide temperature range provides for delicate low temperature drying and preservation of enzymes in raw food and higher temperature food drying to ensure safety for meat jerky, fish etc. Nine polycarbonate drying trays come as standard giving fourteen square feet of drying area and these are dishwasher safe. Excalibur’s own dehydration guide is included FREE with every Excalibur dehydrator. This model includes a 26 hour ‘set it and forget it’ timer so you can leave the dehydrator to switch off automatically when the preferred drying time is finished. The clear door means you can keep an eye on things throughout the drying process without removing the door and allowing heat to escape.

View the full range of Excalibur Dehydrators

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