Posts Tagged ‘alkaline’

Difference Between Raw and Alkaline Diet

May 12th, 2010

One of the difficulties with something as positive and helpful as a raw food diet is that there is going to be a lot of information out there for you to digest, if you will pardon the pun. Starting a raw food diet is enough of a challenge without having to decipher all of the details, words and jargon that can be tied to something that can be as complex as raw foods.

One of the areas that tends to throw off new raw food enthusiasts is the apparent overlap between a raw food diet and an alkaline diet. These two areas share a lot of common points, but it is like comparing apples to oranges in some ways – they’re very different, but they are both still fruits.

If you want to learn how to eat a raw diet, you should have some understanding of the differences, first and foremost. By definition, a raw diet is simply that – eating nothing but foods that have not been cooked, heated or processed by raising their temperatures. Raw food diets are largely about the natural living enzymes that exist within the foods we eat, and trying to preserve those enzymes so that they can be consumed by our bodies, not by the cooking process. A raw diet may include a great number of foods that help to reduce the body’s pH levels, but that is not the focus.

An alkaline diet focuses on the pH levels of foods, and how those foods affect your overall health and their impact on your body’s acidity or alkalinity. An alkaline diet tries to get you to consume foods that will reduce acidity in the body, bringing you closer to a more natural and health-preserving base or alkaline pH level. Many of the foods that help you to keep an alkaline body pH are raw fruits and vegetables that are staples of the raw food diet – but keeping raw is not the main focus of the alkaline diet.

People tend to seek out raw food help for a number of reasons, including finding an increase in energy and helping to strengthen their immune systems. But one of the key points of interest for many raw food practitioners is those living food enzymes. Consuming these enzymes aids the body in the healthy absorption and digestion of food, and the elimination of waste products.

The alkaline diet has a different goal, that of reducing the acidity of the body as a whole. Many people seek out the alkaline diet because of problems such as acid reflux, which causes them a great deal of discomfort. Creating a more alkaline system can help to eliminate acidic problems like gas and heart burn.

Both ways have their benefits, and can incorporate aspects of the other plan in order to create a full and functional eating program that will give you the benefits that you desire. Lowering your acidity and increasing your intake of living food enzymes can aid you in becoming a stronger, healthier person.

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What Foods Are Acidic?

April 30th, 2010

If you have decided to eat for energy, you may have begun to hear more and more about the pH levels of your food, and how they can affect your overall health. It has been said that a diet higher in acidic foods can result in an increase in stiffness of the joints and muscles, as well as an increase in headaches. If you are interested to know what your pH levels are, you can test your urine with pH papers, available at any pharmacy or drug store.

It is true that foods with a high acidity will be less beneficial to you than if you were to dine on a diet with a higher concentration of alkaline or non-acidic foods. And while you might think it would be relatively easy to determine which raw foods have a high acidity level and which do not, there are always a few trick foods that will make it very difficult to guess.

For instance, you might assume, based on the sour taste, that a lemon would certainly be highly acidic. The truth is, lemon juice is in the low end of the alkaline scale – it is not the most alkaline food to be sure, but it certainly is not acidic in your system.

A high energy diet, of course, cannot forgo all acidic foods when maintaining a raw diet, but it is a good idea to limit your intake of highly acidic foods as much as possible.

Raw foods can even have differing pH levels within the same food groupings. For example, high levels of acidity can be found in some nuts and legumes like walnuts, peanuts and lentils – which can certainly be a healthy part of a raw diet. Other nuts, like filberts and brazil nuts, are less acidic; and nuts like almonds are actually very high in alkalinity.

There are also some vegetables that are fairly high in acidity, including asparagus, green olives and artichokes. Again, these food items can be successfully incorporated into a healthy raw food diet for effective eating for energy, but care should be taken to include highly alkaline foods on the same plate, including most leafy greens, or other items like carrots, beets or cucumbers.

Surprisingly, most fruits are moderately to highly alkaline, with the notable exception of the very popular blueberry. This little fruit has an incredible number of benefits for the body when eaten raw, so it would be a mistake to remove it from your raw foods diet. But again, balance is what you are going for here, so for every heaping helping of blueberries you eat, make sure you include some alkaline fruits, like figs, raisins or prunes (highly alkaline), or peaches, bananas and avocado (moderately alkaline).

Avoiding acidic raw foods altogether is not practical or advisable for most people. These items often contain other benefits that you would be harder pressed to replace in a raw foods situation. But on the whole, you want your meals to be heavily favored towards an alkaline pH level, for optimal health and good eating.

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Posted in Food For Thought, General Nutrition, Raw Foods

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What is an Alkaline Diet?

December 22nd, 2009

We’re going back to basics on this one. Many of you have asked what makes an alkaline diet. So I thought I would give you some of the basics in this post.

The first thing you need to understand is what an alkaline food item is. These are foods that, once digested, leave behind an ash that has a basic pH rating of seven or higher. Rather than use this as cooking information, followers of the acid alkaline diet use this combustion as a comparison to how the body breaks down and uses food as a fuel source.

These foods leave behind minerals like calcium, copper, iron, magnesium and zinc when they are consumed by fire. Foods that leave this kind of residue include low-glycemic index fruits and vegetables, citrus fruits, tubers, roots and nuts. Switching your diet to solely these food items, it is believed, will help keep the body’s overall pH balance at a slightly alkaline level, which is thought to be a natural and healthy state. Foods to avoid on this plan include animal proteins, processed foods, unnatural sugars, and stimulants like caffeine.

One of the benefits of following a raw diet plan is that it is inherently alkaline in nature!

A diet rich in alkaline foods is also thought to reduce the body’s reliance on stored pH balancers such as the calcium in bones. Some studies have even shown that an alkaline-rich diet, or a regular use of supplements, can increase the amount of bone mass and muscle mass in older people, helping to offset conditions like osteoporosis in women and degenerative muscle wasting in the elderly. And while many say that more research is needed on the benefits of an alkaline diet, there have been studies done that show that the formation of kidney stones is largely prevented with an alkaline-rich diet.

Followers of an alkaline diet say that their food consumption is closer to what our ancestors would have originally eaten. They say that, before the onset of Western civilization, a typical human diet was unprocessed and uncooked plant matter. Grains were not edible until the discovery of tools like the mortar and pestle, and meats were an uncommon addition, depending on the hunting prowess of the tribe, rather than domestication of meat-bearing animals. Instead, people had to rely on the plants, fruits and vegetables that could be eaten without problematic preparations.

Proponents of an alkaline diet may do so to alleviate symptoms that they believe are due to larger amounts of acidic foods in the modern diet. Practitioners say that people suffering from frequent illnesses and headaches, or an overall lack of energy, and women who have ovarian and benign breast cysts might benefit from an alkaline diet, or at the very least, a reduction in the amounts of red meat and processed grains that a person consumes.

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Posted in Raw Foods

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