Day 369
There is a new fashionable diet going around in Hollywood, one that promises, as others do, to make you lose weight and keep you healthy; the alkaline diet. Jennifer Aniston and Gweneth Paltrow both follow this new diet.
The theory behind is that all the food we eat, after being digested, absorbed, and metabolized, is either alkalinizing or acidifying. Grains, fish, meat, poultry, cheese, milk, and salt all produce acid while most vegetables and some fruit have an alkinizing effect.
Our blood is slightly alkaline, with a normal pH level of between 7.35 and 7.45. Alkaline proponents believe that our diet should reflect this pH level and be slightly alkaline. Having a diet high in acid-producing food is believed to disrupt the pH balance and promote the loss of essential minerals such as potassium, magnesium, calcium, and sodium, as the body tries to restore equilibrium. Eating too many acidifying foods would also deplete the body of energy.
As a matter of fact, a research conducted by the University College of London suggests tha people who ate plenty of alkaline vegetables, fruit and fatty fish actually had a lower risk of depression. Furthermore. according to Dr. Robert O. Young, Director of Research at the pH Miracle Living Center, "depression is not something you get, it is something you do with your lifestyle and dietary choices. When you choose a raw alkaline diet with daily exercise you remove the dietary and metabolic wastes from your body that can make you sick, tired and depressed."
I'm an advocate of balance in life and I usually don't buy into fads without researching appropriately. I have to say, however, that this approach seems to make sense. Anyway, it recommends to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and no oone can deny the importance of such dietary choices. It might not be easy to respect the 70% alkaline, 30% acidic proportion recommended by the diet, but it's certainly worth trying to make a point of including more alkaline foods in our diet, whether it be for physical health or mental wellbeing.
Here is a list of alkaline versus acidic food:
