How Does An Acid Body Lead to Disease?

Review previous body pH article here:

1. Body pH – a Guide to Health or Disease

Oxygen is key to cellular health. We must keep the oxygen levels around our cells and in the blood at a good level. Acidic fluids cannot hold dissolved oxygen very well. We need alkaline fluids in our bodies to hold the oxygen. Since alkaline fluids hold dissolved oxygen, the blood has to be slightly alkaline to carry oxygen to our cells.

Since alkaline fluid carries oxygen to muscles, exercise becomes easier when the body fluids remain or return to that slightly alkaline, healthy state. You have experienced the fatigue of exercising past your ability to deliver oxygen to your tissues. That’s called anaerobic (without oxygen) exercise.

Your muscles and other organs accumulate lactic acid without enough oxygen. That leads to more acidity in those organs and pain or fatigue. Then you have to stop for awhile to replenish the oxygen and allow the alkalinizing mechanisms to return the tissues to a healthy pH.

If you begin exercise with a chronically acidic body, then you fatigue more quickly. As you make healthy life-style changes that restore the proper alkalinity to the body fluids, exercise will become easier and more fun.

Athletes take note. Athletic performance improves when your body tissues are in the proper pH balance.

Also, disease cannot survive in an alkaline fluid. Oxygen rich alkaline body fluids discourage the growth of unfriendly organisms.

Oh, now I am beginning to understand. An acid terrain or soil of the body provides a medium favorable to the growth of unfriendly organisms. An alkaline pH balanced terrain provides the medium that favors growth of normal friendly organisms.

The vast array of degenerative diseases including cancer, osteoporosis, hypertension, heart disease, allergies, memory loss, diabetes, etc. share the common link of acid body fluids or acidosis. For example, in regard to osteoporosis and acidity Michael Colgan, in The New Nutrition, says, “Acidosis destroys bones, because the body has to steal alkalizing minerals from them, to keep the blood pH from dropping into the acid range”.

Common symptoms of an unbalanced pH include heartburn (a burning sensation in the stomach and acid-tasting burps), bloating, belching, and feeling full after eating small amounts of food. Other symptoms could include insomnia, water retention, migraines, constipation and diarrhea, fatigue, a burning sensation on the tongue and in the mouth, and halitosis. Of course, all of these symptoms can be caused by other disease processes as well.

Overly alkaline body tissues can also lead to disease, but when consuming our Standard American Diet alkalinity is rare since the SAD foods, high amounts of sugar, white flour and meat are so acid-producing.

And more about body pH in the next article:

What causes pH imbalance in the body?

How to measure body pH

Blessings,

Dr. Jo