Admit it, some of the best beauty and health secrets come from celebrities sharing their lifestyle tips. Their income is based on them looking their best. They seek out the best science, treatments, and products to maintain their fitness peak. Read a celebrity gossip blog or magazine interview, and you’ll hear an odd secret or two being dropped. Like Elle Macpherson sharing the oddest thing in her purse is a pH balance urine tester kit.
A tidbit I filed away, and like magic, I started seeing alkaline water everywhere. You know it’s a trend when Trader Joe’s has it own label version. “What is alkalinizing?” I wondered. Macpherson isn’t the the only fan of this philosophy. Kelly Ripa, Victoria Beckham, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jennifer Aniston have all admitted they are fans as well. Ripa shared it helped her with physical pain she was experiencing.
The term pH refers to the acidity or alkalinity of a substance. Easy to understand examples are spas, swimming pools, and fish tanks. pH is measured on a scale of 0.0 to 14.0. Values less than pH 7.0 are acidic, and values over pH 7.0 are base or alkaline. Pure water has pH value of 7.0 - perfect balance of acids and alkaloids.
Having a well balanced diet is known to promote good health, so I can understand the concept having a balanced pH diet. We want our systems to be in a good balance, in order to have everything working properly. It’s how we prevent disease, repair our muscles during exercise, and avoid feeling fatigued. Homeostatic mechanism (a survival system) is how your body balances itself, and seeks to maintain a constant pH 7.365 in the blood.
The body maintains and protects this pH balance by depositing and withdrawing alkaline or acidic minerals from one location of the body to others, such as our bones, vital organs, soft tissues, and body fluids. Here’s where the testing happens. The body’s clear fluids, salvia or urine, should remain at the healing pH range of 7.1 to 7.5.
There are fervent fans of the alkaline diet. Elle says she’s been following strict alkaline diet for years, meaning 80 percent of the food she consumes is alkaline-forming and the other 20 per cent is acidic.
"The thought is that some foods—like meat, wheat, refined sugar, and some processed foods—cause your body to over-produce acid, which can supposedly lead to health implications such as osteoporosis or other chronic conditions," says Joy Dubost, Ph.D., R.D., a food scientist and nutrition expert.
If the alkaline diet is so wonderful, why aren’t more experts talking about it? Well, this philosophy isn’t without it’s detractors.
"Your diet does not affect your blood pH at all," Allison Childress, R.D., a nutrition sciences instructor at Texas Tech University shares. Both Dubost and national health authorities agree with her. "Altering the cell environment of the human body to create a less-acidic, less-cancer-friendly environment is virtually impossible," according to resources from the American Institute for Cancer Research.
So what gives? Why do we have these people who look like they have discovered the fountain of youth in their 50s, extolling the virtues of the alkaline diet? I think it’s because the alkaline diet folds neatly into what we consider healthy eating.
The alkaline diet looks a foods’ PRAL or Potential Renal Acid Load score. A negative PRAL score indicates the food is basic/alkaline. A positive PRAL score indicates the food is acidic.
A score of 0 indicates the food is neutral. Alkalizing foods are most vegetables, most fruits, sweet potatoes, almonds, chestnuts, tofu, most herbal teas, bee pollen, sunflower seeds and apple cider vinegar. Acid-forming foods include all meat and fish, rice, pastas, breads and most grain products, cheese, sodas, alcoholic drinks, coffee and other caffeinated beverages, sugar and artificial sweeteners, and wheat germ.
Looking at this list you can see why achieving a balanced pH is not something which occurs by accident. Experts who believe in the alkaline diet say it’ll take 18-24 months for a highly acidic individual to balance their lymphatic pH through diet. Now I can understand why Macpherson carries around her pH urine test. If I worked so long and hard to achieve this desired pH state, you bet your bottom dollar I wouldn’t let anything mess it up. I do say this as I’m on my third cup of coffee, so I might be out of the running any time soon.
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