Body pH – a Guide to Health or Disease

The previous article http://dr-jo-md.com/bewise/soft-drinks-and-heart-disease reviewed a medical study that concluded that sugared soft drinks could cause heart disease in women. However, artificially sweetened soft drinks did not show that propensity.

But artificial sweeteners may pose other health threats. At your request we will take a look at artificial sweeteners in future articles.

For now, we’re launching into a series on body pH, a critically important issue for regaining and maintain vibrantly good health.

The nature of our modern lifestyle and eating habits tend to push the pH of our bodies into the acid range.

Your body pH tells how acid or alkaline your body fluids are. The nature of our modern lifestyle and eating habits tend to push the pH of our bodies into the acid range. Chronically acid body fluids create imbalances that lead to many of our chronic diseases.

The same is true with very alkaline conditions although with our Standard American Diet, alkaline conditions are rare. The goal is to provide our bodies with what they need to maintain proper pH. This greatly enhances the terrain in which our cells live and attempt to function.

What is pH?

The pH scale goes from 0 (very acidic) to 14 (very alkaline). A pH of 7.0 is exactly neutral (neither acidic nor basic). Every one-point change on the pH scale (say from pH of 7 to a pH of 6) is a 10-fold increase in acidity. From 6 to 5 is another 10 fold increase in acidity. Therefore a fluid with a pH of 7 is 100,000 times stronger than a fluid with a pH of 2.

Every solution is either acidic or alkaline. (Alkaline is often called “base.”) These solutions can be anything from body fluids, such as stomach acid and blood, to beverages, such as wine or coffee, to sea water. Acidity and alkalinity are measured in pH (potential of hydrogen).

The pH scale goes from 0 to 14, with 0 the most acidic, and 14 the most alkaline. The pH of stomach acid is 1, wine is 3.5, water is 7 (neutral), venous blood is 7.35, arterial blood is 7.4, sea water is 8.5, and baking soda is 12. Ideally, our pH should stay on the alkaline side: between 7.35 and 7.45.

Our bodies are designed to keep our blood between a pH of 7.35 and 7.45, which is just slightly alkaline so that it can carry oxygen from our lungs to our cells to give us energy. If our blood’s pH level drops below 7.35 or above 7.45 we would be close to death.

So our body will do everything it can to keep the blood at a pH of 7.4. The blood has a number of mechanisms to balance its pH, such as robbing other bodily fluids of crucial minerals (such as calcium) to neutralize the acid and to keep the blood at the proper alkaline level.

If the body robs these other fluids and organs of minerals they will become more acidic (a big problem), and also depleted of minerals that spark the enzymes to keep all of the chemical processes going fast enough to keep us alive and energetic. So, in the process of becoming acidic (unhealthy), we deplete the minerals in our bodies.

We live and die at the cellular level. In order to understand pH balance, it is necessary to realize that all the 75 trillion cells of the human body are slightly acidic and must exist in a slightly alkaline environment (the body fluid) if they are to remain healthy and produce energy. In other words cells function best at a slightly acidic pH, but the fluid surrounding them needs to be slightly alkaline.

Measuring the pH of your saliva is a useful tool to monitor the condition of your body tissues.

To be continued…

Blessings,

Dr. Jo