Gas·tron·o·my

The alkaline diet has been around for at least five decades within circles at health food stores. Since the 1970’s or so, Ph test strips became readily available and affordable, allowing people who were curious about such things to test the Ph of their saliva. So it goes, many people compared tests after meals and found that many foods and beverages (as well as states of being, i.e. stressed out or angry) cause a shift towards an acidic or alkaline Ph. This is where many raw food diets and juicing protocols originated from – the observation that a slightly alkaline state in the lymphatic, digestive and renal systems tended to be associated with good health.  

Body alkalinity, as I’ve described above, is complex and counter-intuitive in some ways. For example, lemon juice and raw apple cider vinegar tend to cause shifts towards alkalinity.  As I understand, that is because both are weak acids that aid the stomach in digestion, and reduce the excretion of stomach acid (a strong acid). Weak acids require less of an alkaline salt to neutralize, which is what happens in the upper intestines with bile flowing from the liver to neutralize chyme moving out of the stomach. Bile is composed in large part of alkaline mineral salts, which are found in abundance in bitter greens. So, consuming fermented foods and citrus allows one to retain more of their alkaline minerals, including magnesium, which are essential for proper functioning of the nerves, heart, brain and smooth muscle tissue. Fermented foods help digestion by providing enzymes (which work best within certain Ph ranges) produced by colonies of mutualistic microorganisms.

Interestingly, breathing exercises and consuming juices rich in chlorophyll also tend the body towards an alkaline state. That is likely because of chlorophyll’s chemically similar structure to hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood. Carbon dioxide gas is acidic when it is dissolved in solutions of water.  

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