Acid – Alkaline Balance For Optimum Health with Dr. Susan Brown — Body Ecology Living

Welcome everybody to Body Ecology Living. I'm really excited about this podcast today because it's on a topic that not enough people know about. Unfortunately, medical practitioners don't really know about it. If they did, they'd be able to get more people well. And I am interviewing Dr. Susan Brown. And we've done a podcast already earlier on another important topic, osteoporosis. And you must listen to that because, you know, all these doctors are sending women over to get a DEXA scan. The DEXA scan may not be all that accurate. So you've got to listen to that one. And also this talk today on acid alkaline is very much related to osteoporosis. So my guest is Dr. Susan Brown, PhD. She has a center called Better Bones, Center for Better Bones, and she's written a couple of books. But we're gonna— I'm gonna show you her book, The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide, because this is a must. It's like a reference book. You gotta have this. And then I just want you to know that she's a medical anthropologist and a certified nutritionist, which I find is— when I read that and learned that about her, I thought, wow, what an interesting combination. So yeah, Dr. Susan, Welcome. And could you start off by telling us a little bit about your history? Like, how did you become interested in anthropology and then get into nutrition?

Well, Donna, you know, you yourself have always cast a pretty broad net trying to figure out the whole ecology of the body, which is related to the ecology of human cultures, which is related to the ecology of the cosmos. So you're the first person to cast a broad net. And I was always interested in that broad net, trying to think What is it? Why do certain cultures behave the way they do? Culture is something that we learn and share. And I was interested in studying how in different regions of the world, the same kind of human beings adapted to different environments, different histories, different inputs, and develop different cultural lifestyles that they passed and passed on and on. And if they were successful, they lasted a long, long time. And so I got very intrigued with the study of different cultures, understanding different cultures. And then when I realized that I had some health concerns, I got very interested in people who knew about how to regain that natural human potential for health. I saw people all over the world that have very good health. And I'm wondering, hmm, how do we maintain that natural health? And it occurred to me that we have within us a natural healing potential. If we look around every— the animals do perfectly fine without hospitals and without clinics to go to. And how is it that you would take supplements? They don't take supplements, they just eat. They just eat what Mother Nature gave them. And so I started studying about health. And particularly in my case, my grandmother, who I dearly loved, fractured a hip at 102 when she was living by herself in her house. She was very independent, People stop by there every day, but it was an amazing example of personal strength. She had both osteoporosis and rickets that we didn't really identify. This was a person born in the late 1800s who understood what slavery was like. And in fact, one day I asked her when she was about 100, I said, what was it like being a woman when you grew up? She said, come back tomorrow, I'll think about it. I went back tomorrow and she said, you know, Susan, when I was young growing up as a woman, it was just like being a slave. And I thought, isn't that an acute observation? She was born in 1880. I mean, she knew about the history of this. She knew what slaves were about. And she saw the position of women. It's so striking. But she was a kind person, a beautiful person. And I always thought how long she would've lived if someone knew decades ago, all she probably needed was a little vitamin D, you know? And So I was really struck with that and I began studying bone health for that reason.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, my father's aunts reached into the— well, well into their 90s, mid-90s, and they all three had breast cancer. They had it for probably a long time, like 10 years, but they didn't die from the breast cancer. They must have kind of just died from old age. But I've always thought that was interesting. And like you, I didn't— think about being— studying anthropology, but I've had that same question for many years. Like, I'm fascinated with their cultures and what do they eat and how— and what's the secret to the ones staying older? Yes, they get up there and still be active. Now, I will say that when you look at them, they look old, and I think we have a lot more understanding of why we age, so we're going to see people getting to that age and they'll also look better.

Yeah, the looking thing is interesting, isn't it? But, you know, more important than the look to me is how people feel and if people are happy. I mean, there's never been a culture that had so many conveniences as our culture, yet never— but dramatically high levels of unhappiness, anxiety, worry, fear, and even destructive self-behavior. And just that we've kind of lost contact with that native feeling of what is helpful to life and what is a good way to live a life and how do we feel happy and, and successful. And we get very— we're just— seems like we're overburdened with inputs, with technology, with new information, lost kind of our footing in that basic nature of the human potential for happiness and well-being. And pH actually relates to this, and we can talk later about it, that, that actually the ability to produce energy energy within this body is what allows us to survive. And we can produce a low amount of energy— like, did you know that in one day, you produce your own weight in ATP? Now, that's hard to imagine. I weigh 120 pounds. I produce 120 pounds of ATP every single day. And that can be an efficient production. It can take a little bit of my energy or it can take a lot of my energy. And part of that is dependent on the pH, the environment, the acid-base balance, influences how much energy we produce. The more energy we have, the very big likelihood we're going to feel better, we're going to be able to accomplish what we want, we're going to be happy.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into this talk, but I want to say a little bit, when I wrote The Body Code Diet 30 years ago, it had 7 principles, universal laws that people— I don't think I've ever done a really good job of explaining them well enough to people. It's too bad because they're really important and we have to live by them. We can't change them and they dominate us in our life. One of those, I've been macrobiotic for 8 years and they talk, you know, acid alkaline and the principle of balance or yin yang was the main thing, you know, macrobiotics is based on. So I, when I was learning about yeast infections and the diet and all, I, I brought the understanding of acid alkaline and it's really critical for so many reasons. But, you know, lately I've been working on another book and, um, oh fun, you know, helping long haulers. And I, um, I'm even more convinced with the infections that we have in our body, and we're always going to have them, um, you've got to have a slightly more alkaline environment or these, um, infections thrive. And actually they work very hard to make the body more acidic so they can survive. So I know what we need to do is start off with the real 'Cause I'm sure some people have never even heard the term acid alkaline. And so if we could just sort of start off with like what is acid alkaline? Yeah.

Well, probably everybody remembers their chemistry class where they would understand that there's a pH scale which measures a degree of acidity. In a minute, I'll tell you exactly technically what acidity is. It's just simply a free hydrogen ion, but it's the— so there was a scale scale from 0 to 14. You might remember that in school, colored scale. 7 is neutral. We know acid rain gets to be when it's like below 7, that 7 is neutral. We don't want— and so we realize because of acid rain that the environment is changing. And we see this scale from 1 to 14, 7 being neutral. We know that if you— now this, you might have had to take chemistry to remember this, but the blood, the blood has to be slightly alkaline. 7.35 to 7.45 in order for life to exist. So it's a kind of narrow window that the pH has to be. And if we're gardeners, you probably know, they will say when you plant these plants, test the pH of your soil. This particular plant likes acid soil. This particular crop likes alkaline soil. So there's lots of applications of pH balance in the general life that we do. In simple terms, you could think, well, very acid is like hydrochloric acid, very acid, like down towards the 1 end. And then very alkaline is like bleach or baking soda, which is towards the 14 end. And that acid-base has a balance, of course. And if you stray too far in one direction, the plants don't grow or your blood doesn't grow. You stray too far in the other direction, the same thing. It's not compatible with human life or it's not compatible with a particular function of the animal feed or the plant feed or the pH of the oceans is very interesting now. It's becoming so acidic because of the changing climate. When you change climate, different plants grow. And these plants are acid-producing, but also we have to— the acids, like when we take in, we have a chimney that's putting off uncombusted carbons. Those carbons go to the sky and then they fall back down to the Earth. And they fall back down to the Earth often in the oceans. The oceans are— and the oceans buffer those acids with things like carbonate, things like the shells of plants, things like the coral reefs. And so we have a great deal of destruction of the oceans, the changing of pH in ocean where a lot of the— if you might have been in Florida, at times you can't swim because the there's only jellyfish. And that's because jellyfish survive in that particular environment. Or up north here, the swimming areas are often closed because the water's too hot and too much algae. It's also acid-forming, certain toxins develop. So it's a chemical balance. It's a chemical issue of how much free acid— now, just not to bore people too much, but free acid is a hydrogen ion, just the simplest ion in the world, an H+. And Then an acid is something that has that free hydrogen, and an alkaline substance is something that can buffer or neutralize, so to speak, that acid to get it back more towards the middle range. It's a dance of chemicals and electrons.

You know, I don't want people to like glaze over because they don't want to know about chemistry, but— and I do want to get into the really practical stuff, why this is so important to know. But I want to tell you, because I know you're Michigan that I read an article about a lake in Michigan where they were getting all this acid rain. And so the fish started coating themselves in mucus to protect themselves from the acid rain, and then they smothered to death. So they're losing the fish population. Just another example of how that shows up in nature.

That's interesting.

Yeah, I thought that was one of those things that stuck in my mind for maybe 30 years now. Yeah. But, um, Anyway, so we just want— I want to point out that the blood itself, our blood, is very tightly regulated in its pH. And I think people get real confused because they— a lot of people dispute this theory because they say it can't be too alkaline or you'll die, or too acid when you die. But that's the blood. So throughout the whole body, there's all these organs that have different pH, like the stomach and the vagina and the mouth and the gut and all, can we just kind of walk through the digestive tract and talk about how the pH changes from the mouth to the stomach to the colon?

Well, yeah, I mean, we can talk a tad bit about that. I'm not really an expert on the digestion side, but certainly the oral cavity, if that gets acidic, like we eat sugars and then that is acid forming, the bacteria grow that produce acidity, that it can lead to damaging of the teeth. That's quite well known. The oral cavity, you'd like to have alkaline. We know that the stomach is very acidic. You want the stomach to be acidic. The strongest acid in the body is hydrochloric acid that can actually— those little hydrogen ions are looking for something to grab onto and so they actually have an electron transfer with like that, the food we digest, the food we eat so it helps to break down that food. Acid has a capacity to break down.

Proteins, especially the proteins, extract out, you know, things like B12 and minerals, particularly minerals. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then down in the small intestine you get alkaline again, but you get acidic down in the colon so that the microbes live there need to be— they're acid-loving. Yeah, yeah, basically. So yes, I just think that's fascinating, confusing actually, because there's blood which is tightly regulated and then there's places all over the body The vagina is more acidic. You know, if a woman makes love with a man and he has sperm in there, he's changing the pH of the vagina and yes, there's infections and so on too. So that's one simple thing to know. But so I wanted to— so I don't think people know. Oh, go ahead.

Well, I want to say you're absolutely right, Donna. And we talk about it in kind of general terms because we're focusing on the survival of the body and that the blood pH must be particular. But you're absolutely right. There's different compartments in the body. That have different pHs and that very acid chime from the stomach goes to the pancreas. The pancreas produces all this, these buffering, all this bicarbonate and the whole— and like you say, then into the intestine, it tends to change pH depending on the situation of the microbes. And so, yes, that's right. Every compartment can have its own particular pH. And I didn't mean to simplify that too much, but we're looking at the body as a whole.

Well, I just think we need to be more clear for people because I think this is just one area that there's a lot of confusion around and even practitioners. So the thing to know, I mean, so you can do a very simple test in the morning when you wake up and you explain this in the book. You have test strips that are my favorite ones to use because they're very durable. Instead of those, they have like, you know, testing where there's like a paper thing. Yeah, the paper. And you strip them out. I don't, I don't really like those as much, but I mean, they're fine if that's all you've got. But you want to talk about testing, like how would somebody know their body, if their, if their body is too acidic or too alkaline or balanced? How, how can we test for that? Right, right, right.

So what seems to be pretty— you'd love to be able to take the blood, you know, and study that blood, look at the pH, but you can't do it.

It's—

you have to— even if your doctor pulls your blood, you have to measure it right quickly because it will soon, it will soon change the pH. So the thing, the clinically relevant technique is to look at the urine. And there's quite a bit of data saying that the urine is— if we're looking at the kind of acidity, what we call metabolic acidity, if we look at the impact of different foods on the pH, then we look at the first morning urine. And the first morning urine is a very good indicator of mineral— of pH balance and acid load. And acid load is really an indicator of mineral adequacy because the compounds that alkalize are attached to minerals most frequently like potassium citrate, which becomes potassium bicarb in the body, or magnesium alkalocitrate. So, yeah, you want to measure the first morning urine. We have, in the book, The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide, I discuss that technology and we actually have a pH test kit kit at betterbones.com and alkalineforlife.com. We have a pH test kit that gives you the book and suggestions on how to develop a diet that'll get the proper pH, a high mineral diet, and then these strips to measure your first morning urine. And what you want the first morning urine to be is like 6.5, just either slightly acidic to 7.5, right around neutral, remember, which is 7.

7.

So that's a simple thing to do.

If it's acidic, it's gonna be more when you put the strip underneath your urine and you shake it up and bring it out. If it's yellowish, it's more acidic. That's right. There's a little guide on there.

There's a little guide. Yes.

If you hold it up to it, it's amazing how accurate it is.

It's a color guide. Yeah. It's a color guide. So you're looking for slightly green, which is about 6.5. Donna, have you tried that with some of the people on the Body Ecology Diet? Have you seen what their pH is, I wonder?

Well, you know, I went through a spell there where people were real into it and got so many questions because they were testing all throughout the day and they were—

Yeah, that's that thing.

So I sort of got away from that. But I think of cultures, speaking of cultures like Japan, for example, well, in a day's time they are taking in a lot of minerals in their diet. Like they put kombu, which is a sea vegetable, into water and boil it and make like a kombu stock. Then into that, they stir that into miso paste, which is protein and more minerals. And then they just eat that literally for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And their whole diet is just extremely mineral-rich, so much so that when we, you know, we went to that war, we went over there, started helping them, we brought in meat and we brought, which they didn't have, they had fish, and we brought in milk, which made them bigger, bigger bones, for example. Anyway, before, actually, with extremely rich mineral, mineral-rich diet because they ate so much out of the ocean, that they were some very small people, you know, they weren't tall and they were very muscular. So strong, very, very strong. They didn't develop the same way. So what we, you know, I always thought that was fascinating because I lived in Japan a few times.

But yes, yes.

So, yeah, so could we— so I'm hoping people understand to go get test strips and tests because I've said for years that most everybody wakes up too acidic. And so the first thing you have to do is start changing, you know, that acidity. Like, I always put a lot of minerals in water, right? And if I were going to drink coffee, which I try not to, It's acidic, so I'll put in— we have Ancient Earth Minerals, these are humic minerals in a liquid form. I'll put a couple of dropperfuls in there. You can't taste it, but I'm trying to create a balance, which also I'm going to talk about. But so, and then try to stay very mineral rich during the day. So that's why I think we really have to get in, get very practical here and start talking to people about foods.

Bright-gilding. Okay.

The acid alkaline, the foods that are acidic and the foods that make the body more alkaline.

Yeah.

Actually, the foods that, you know, naturally balanced.

You know, just, just before we talk about the foods, let me— foods are real simple, and I'll show you 5 categories of food that those are the main categories that alkalize. But the— if you, if you, if you decide to measure your pH and get an idea of your acid load, you need to measure the first morning urine. Either you'd like to have urine measured after 6 hours of sleep, but some people say they can't. They go to bed at 10, they wake up at 3, they have to urinate then. So that's okay. Urinate, but then when you get up to stay, do the first morning urine. Measuring it throughout the day has no accuracy because the pH changes all throughout the day as you buffer from different foods you eat.

And in the morning, you should be not— you have to do this before you eat, right?

Yeah, that's right. Because you've had all night for your body to equilibrate. The acids with whatever alkalizing reserve they have. So you buffer as much as you can and then you see that result in the morning. So the foods are really simple. And I was just reading an article by Linda Fossetto, a new article on potassium. She's a major pH researcher at the University of California. And they calculate that in prehistory, these humans like us ate 10,000 10,000 grams of potassium a day. Potassium is one of the major— right? We recommend, we used to recommend 4,500. Now, they've reduced it to 2,500 because they said no one's dying from if it's at 2,500. It's really, it's a whole nother issue of what we set our standards at. But the point is early diets were very, very high in potassium. And potassium from the fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds is generally in the form of potassium citrate. The body takes that potassium citrate and produces bicarbonate. And the pH is really a dance between free hydrogen and bicarbonate. And so we want lots of sources of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, and some— and lentils are a very good alkalizing form, some of those small pulses that can actually buffer acids that have the alkali reserves that end up turning into bicarbonate that we can buffer acid with.

So, well, you know, if you, you can go buy potassium citrate as a supplement, but it's a very, very low dose, like 20 milligrams or 200 milligrams. I mean, go ahead.

With potassium, you're saying?

Yeah, but you know, I have potassium citrate as a supplement, and every time I go over to take if I get a cramp in my leg, I think, oh, I'm really low in potassium. But anyway, so I go to the cabinet where I keep it and I always look at the bottle, which I can't remember now, but it's an incredibly low dose, like nothing really. I see there's, you know, 20 milligrams and maybe 200 milligrams, but I always want to take like 5 of them at least. So yeah, how do you get more potassium in a supplement?

So you could get it, you just make yourself a nice green drink with a lot of green vegetables or even lemon and lime water, which has citrate, which the body converts into bicarbonate. But that's an interesting story. What happened with potassium is that— and the reason that until recently, you couldn't buy higher dose potassium is because people in kidney failure do not excrete excess potassium. Potassium. And so, if a person with kidney failure inadvertently takes or consciously takes 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 milligrams of potassium— milligrams, I should be talking of, yeah— that they can have very serious problems with their heart, with the heartbeat, and this and that. So, you want to make sure that you are not in kidney distress. And that's why they kind of they kind of restricted the sale of high-dose potassium, except under situations where the people are monitored to make sure they are not in kidney failure.

How can they get enough? Let's say they don't have a kidney problem, but they want to take in more in a day besides the green drink. Can they take— is there such a thing as a supplement with a higher dose?

Well, certainly you can supplement with potassium citrate, but here's the thing. One of the really big values of alkalizing is taking the fruits and vegetables that have so many phyto compounds, so many antioxidants. Basically, one of the major foundations is oxidative damage, foundations of all diseases. So we want to keep that a very high antioxidant level. And of course, our ancestors did because they just ate whatever— nuts, seeds, fruit, whatever they could find, the bark of a tree. Those things were chock-full of nutrients and including high levels of antioxidants. So we can say, I'm just gonna use a potassium supplements. But it's better to get the foods. And you can look at the potassium foods and go and say, on betterbones.com, you'll find a chart of high potassium foods and you pick the ones that maybe are low calories. You say you make a broth, you make a soup of it. Even things like lemon and lime juice will provide some. But certainly other foods like avocados will have many, many, many Lots of vegetables have high potassium.

So, okay, so I wanted to— I know they're in the olden days when I first began, some of the old-timers, they were already old at that time, they had recommended like a potato skin broth. I think that was rich in potassium.

Potato skin has a lot of potassium, right? And then Jensen would do that. They'd say cut off The edge of the potato? Yeah, that's true. And I just saw a study that like 10% of the potassium that Americans get is from potatoes and processed potatoes. We don't eat the fruits and vegetables. We eat, in fact, the average American of 3 people, 1 person out of 3 doesn't even have 1 fruit or 1 vegetable a day. We eat things like all this processed food. So if you eat a potato, even a French fry, you're getting a certain amount of potassium. But We'd like to give the body a full deck to play with, with good, fresh, whole foods, colorful foods, foods that are very high in antioxidants, high in phyto compounds, resveratrol, quercetin, all these amazing compounds that you're not gonna get in a supplement. Now, if you—

go ahead.

So if you ask me about supplementing in minerals, here's a really interesting thing. The first morning urine gives us a rough idea of mineral status because the minerals don't stand alone in nature. They're attached to something. They're attached to an anion. There's a negative charge, there's a positive charge. So this negative charge can be alkalizing itself like a citrate or a glycinate or an ascorbate. So if you get a mineral attached to an alkaline, an alkalizing factor, it's much more powerful to balance the chemistry. Like potassium chloride, It's potassium still, but the chloride is acid-forming. So it's not as powerful a source of potassium where potassium citrate, this is alkalizing. You get that with potassium, you get a double benefit of alkalizing. And the most important— and that's how potassium occurs in food as potassium citrate. The most important mineral I think that we've overlooked though is magnesium. And the first morning urine test, if you have somebody, if you're all listening sitting here say, "Hmm, this is interesting. I can count up my potassium." And you know how? You need about 8 cups of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds a day, and some small beans to alkalize. You need about 8 cups. So you think, "Well, I'm not quite getting that. I better expand this." But the other issue outside of potassium and perhaps more important is magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is a hidden driver of many, many degenerative diseases today, including bone health, including cardiovascular disease. And the first morning urine is a very good indicator of magnesium status. So that's a particularly strong indicator of magnesium in particular. And everyone would do well to measure that first morning urine and see how's my magnesium doing. Then you can look at the food list. But here with magnesium, we do find you often need to supplement because you know what happens? Since we don't have this activity level that we eat, we can't eat as much food as our ancestors did because we're sitting all day at this computer and we're not out there working in the fields or running around collecting food. So we don't have the same appetites or the same ability to— we don't eat as much food to get the nutrients that our bodies used The chemistry of our body needs high magnesium, high potassium, but we don't eat enough of those foods. We have a sandwich, say, "I'm hungry, that's good for lunch," instead of thinking, "We're full, but is it giving us the nutrients?" Most people don't think before they eat.

But a big issue today that I think about all the time, I don't have a solution for, is that so many people are now on very restrictive diets. They're trying to save or stay away from the fun that food. So they, because they have small intestine issues. And another big one, and I'm very much in this camp because I learned about oxalates maybe 20 years ago when we started working with children with autism. They're super sensitive to foods high in oxalates. And, you know, anyway, I won't go into that, but I've done some podcasts and on summits and things like that. I always bring up oxalates and finally more and more people are knowing about them, talking about them, and Susan K. Norton wrote an excellent book on them. But they really are a problem, and they really are high in vegetables, dark green leafy vegetables like beet greens and spinach, of course, but sweet potato. I'm sure some of those foods, when you look at, you know, what nutrients are in them, they are a great source of potassium. Right, right. So Swiss chard is another one. There's just a lot unfortunately quite a lot of them now. I developed candidiasis early in life because it was just what got me started on this path and why I wrote the book, Body Culture Diet book, but trying to get well and help other people. But I started off by taking antibiotics, you know, the doctor thought it was fine for me to have nice skin and I took them for a long time and I remember this last doctor said, you can stay on this antibiotic the rest of your life. I started wondering, you know, should I be on this thing for so long? It was like 15 years. So naturally I worried about my gut, if I ever had a microbiome that was good because, you know, baby boomers weren't breastfed. Our moms were put to sleep and we woke up, they woke up, we were drugged and they said, hey, Mrs. Whatever, you have a little girl, you have a little boy, but very different birthing, very far from nature and little babies seemed to be not very intelligent for a month or so because they were actually drugged. Well, fast forward today, we know more about that, but we, you know, basic baby boomers got a bad start to life. Well, then as time went on and my understanding of oxalates grew, what, what makes them besides these foods we're eating, and we're eating a lot of them now, nuts and seeds are very high in oxalates, you know, anyway, something important to know about. And so we're avoiding them because we have to, But now, as we understand more about yeast and mold, they're actually making oxalates too. So we're getting them from a popular diet, you know, the N-diet, and we're getting them from yeast and mold making them. And so we're just off the charts creating oxalates in our body. And so I actually think that's one of the things that screws up our bones, for example, you know, they make the bones weak and porous. But I wanted to, you know, actually talk about the things that do make us unhealthily acidic.

The things that make us unhealthily acidic, you say?

Well, yeah, it's probably not a good way to say it. In other words, what are the things we're doing? Like, for example, stress is huge. And, and And stress is making us acidic.

Right, right, right.

Talk about that, the cortisol and all that. But also even just exercising, we're temporarily acidic. And what are some of the things that come to your mind? I'm huge on infections, so they make us acidic. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's, it's a constant issue of balance. Certainly if we, if we over-exercise, we produce acids like lactic acid, and especially if we push ourselves maybe a little bit too much. And there's always this thing between rest and recovery. But if you take the issue of— let's see. Yeah, I mean, exercise is a really good example. We can definitely get acidic with exercise, but probably of more interest is the stress response. That when we are under stress, as you all, everyone knows, the body really responds in many ways to kick up the survival mechanisms by producing things like cortisol, which tell your body, look, stop digesting food, shut off hydrochloric acid, start getting ready to fight or flight.

Fight or flight.

Send the energy to the muscles, send the glucose to the muscles, don't send it to digestion. Shut everything down that's not to do with the fight or flight mechanism. And so, yes, stress has such a big impact on every part of the body. In fact, we did some— I had a client who was always measuring her pH and she was very good. She'd always measure the first morning urine. She took the minerals, like one of the things we do at Alkaline for Life is produce mineral compounds that And so she took our supplements and she was great. But then she got a really big situation of stress. It was kind of a family distress and she recognizes that she got really invested in it. She got really upset. She got thrown off-kilter by this and her pH went down. And it stayed down for about 4 or 5 days till she finally said, "You know, I realize I'm internalizing this. I've got to do my breathing exercises. I've got to let go of this a little." feel, trust that it's going to work out. And when she shifted her mental attitude and changed her stress response, her pH went right back to normal.

And I had a spiritual teacher tell me once that the best way to handle stress is to be absolutely grateful for everything, even that probably. But I try to practice that, and of course breathe too. But I'm just by nature somebody that's easily stressed. So, you know, that's common today. And then we live in a world where you turn on the TV, you turn on the news, you— awful things are happening in other places in the world, you know, here, and we don't have any say-so on fixing it. It's, um, I don't know what it would have been, you know, like different kind of stress if you were an ancient person living, uh, thousands of years ago. Just your life, you know, getting enough food was stressful. You know, not being killed, different stress. But I don't know if we're under way more stress, especially people in war zones right now. So, you know, it's almost like you almost have to assume stress is there, it's not going to go away. And so you need to do things to constantly, daily, right, focus on minerals and alkalizing. And I have our— I take our minerals and I literally pop them into anything I'm drinking, even if it's soup or something, because You might think, wow, she sure is taking a lot of those. But I feel like I have to do that because it's making balance for me.

You know, and if we could also— we need the full deck of nutrients and alkalizing compounds. But also, if we could have a goal of gaining some control over our mental processes and our emotions and not be so subject to this. We see something horrible, we get to feel horrible, but, you know, to be more a witness of what's happening and try to— they always talk about the ducks, you know, they'll be in a pond, the ducks, one duck will fight with the other duck, they have a big fight. And then after it's over, they shake and they go off and they forget it. You know, we have to kind of— the impression can leave a deep mark if we see something horrible on the TV, or it can leave a mark where we say, bless those people. And not leave a deep mark that consistently brings up negativity. Just to tell you, I did recently an interview with Acharya Sunya, who's one of these teachers of Ayurveda and the Vedas. And this is called From Fear to Flourishing that you can find it on YouTube if you're interested. We were talking about bone health and how fear affects bone health. And she said, you know, in the ancient texts, they said that bone was very strong tissue. Nothing could damage bone except one thing. And that was negativity. So we have this whole energy. Is the energy of negativity similar to the energy of acidity? You know, a breakdown, debilitating energy? I don't know. But certainly, we should work to become masters of our thoughts and our feelings. At least we can't control the world, but we can control this body and how we respond to things.

What advice would you have for somebody that just grew up in a really difficult situation and it's just ingrained in them to be fearful or to think themselves inside, like what?

It's so interesting, Donna, because the researchers now know that if you have a very fearful situation, they like, you were out there in the savanna, you fell into a deep hole, the tiger's after you, there's a fire, you gotta do something. Bone is the first organ to sacrifice. And what bone does is give up a protein, osteocalcin, to go into the blood and shut down the parasympathetic so we can stay in high gear fight or flight. And that is a very interesting thing that happens. But today, we don't have tigers on our table. We may say, look, I'm just overloaded with all of this stuff, all this news around the world, or worse yet, a good friend of mine is very sick, or my mother died. Then we have to— it's very good to figure a way, like you said, In the long run, we know that this life is a learning school, that this is going to be a lesson too. But immediately, we'd say, okay, I encourage people to sit down and to feel the feeling. The first time I said, I'm terribly sad, I'm crying, I'm sad, I'm— to feel that feeling, because suppressing feelings won't really help at all. And then to try to create a little distance. And breathing is the most— breathing sort of connects us to cosmic intelligence and also to the intelligence within us. So we sit down and do some very gentle, deep breaths and maybe even soothe ourselves, maybe even say, I'm really stressed, but it's going to be okay. I trust that the Great Goddess is going to provide whatever we do that can quiet down the response. And breathing is— breathing techniques are very good for that.

And I'm thinking quiet down the response in a positive way, because somebody might say, I'm very stressed, I'm going to the refrigerator and get a big chocolate bar. Or, you know, there's a lot of ways people are handling stress in an unhealthy way too. So your advice is very wise. So thanks for saying that. Do you, um, so let's, let me, uh, just go into a couple of diets. Yeah, there's a carnivore diet, and, uh, so they're just let people know, basically the person's eating animal protein, mostly beef, from nose to tail, meaning they're eating a bunch of organs. I don't think they eat the tail, but anyway, that's carnivore. And Paul Saladino was really promoted and made it big, but after a year or so, he realized that wasn't a good thing to do, so he added in some fruits. But when you look at the fruits, one is avocado, which people don't think of it as a fruit, and the other one is coconut. So people think those are kind of more vegetables, I guess. But, and then some honey because he realized you had to have some carbs. And I guess that's working for him well. But I wondered from the very beginning when I was hearing about it, I thought, wow, what an extremely acidic thing to be eating. That's going to— eventually there's going to be a problem here and people are going to, you know, move away from carnivore. But That's a very acidic diet. And you know, the other thing too, we didn't talk about the principle of balance, another one of the 12 principles I talk about in the book. But so carbs are very, very often given a bad rap. And what I know is they're acidic, but some people need them. The thyroid seems to need them according to all the data. And also they're calming. They help you sleep better at night because they help you make more serotonin. I'm one of those people, being a blood type A, that definitely needs some complex carbs.

Yes, yes.

But what I do, knowing the principle of balance, that they're acidic and I need to alkalize to create balance, I do things like I might add those minerals but also put in a lot of alkalizing vegetables. So I wouldn't just eat rice, I would put it in a gruel or a soup or something. So I'm getting the carbs, but I'm alkalizing them. One of the other principles, the 80/20, is more that, you know, you know, you've been knowing about the work for a long time, which I'm grateful for, and I really appreciate that you get what I've been doing all these years. So few people do, but I just wanted to say we can learn about acid alkaline, and then we can learn how to great balance in our diet. So can you speak to that?

Yes, sure. You know, and the carbohydrates is so interesting because many carbohydrates are alkalizing. In fact, a simple way to balance, to move towards balancing pH is to cut the grains, which are acid-forming, and do the root crops. So like your sweet potatoes, your turnips, your cabbage, your beets, all these things are very alkalizing, very high mineral alkalizing where the grains are generally acid-forming. Now quinoa might be different. Millet's not so acid-forming. In the book, I detail which grains are most acid-forming, but that's a good move. Like we don't wanna throw the water, a baby out with the water there. There's certain types of people like, I'm like that too. I do much better with carbohydrates, having those root crops. And certainly honey is really a very powerful healing medicine.

Well, actually, Paul on his carnivore diet, he does have honey, which I was kind of surprised, but yeah, he loves honey. You know, I was also just going to bring this up because this gets back to that principle of uniqueness and how we all have different things. The root crops that you were just talking about, they, like sweet potatoes, for example, they're high in oxalates, so I personally can't eat them because I've I dealt with a yeast infection for so many years. I'm super sensitive to oxalates. I get a really dry, painful left eye from eating them. So I'm chopping things all over.

I see. So you have to sort through which you can have.

But you know what works great are the butternut squash, acorn squash. They are carby in the vegetable world, but they go really— they help alkalize the the same. Yes, you know, that's very good. Of course, other things like carrots and, uh, so potatoes and sweet potatoes are both high in oxalates, but it depends on how much you're using. So maybe you, um, put it— and a lot of something I actually substitute a lot for potato is daikon. Uh, oh yeah, okay. In a vegetable soup, for example, if you— a lot of times it'll have potato in the recipe, but I'll just put in daikon and it's Yes, that's a very great—

that's a very good idea. That's a really highly alkalizing form of radish.

And so you definitely can do this. It's quite possible. But I think what you have to start off with is just understanding about the principle. I see.

I see.

Which foods on your, um, are really good for you to eat and how. And we need to lean more toward the alkaline, which is why I say eat 20 and, but still add in something else. So what would you list these, some of the acid foods?

Acid foods. Well, you just, I think I got what you're talking about. Let me just comment. It's if a, like you're thinking of someone has particular digestive issues and particular needs of food, like you say you have to avoid certain types of food, then the book is great because we categorize food as either highly acid-forming, moderate acid-forming, low acid forming. So you can pick out, you know, those alkalizing foods, for example, that you are safe with because you know you're safe with them. So that is a very great idea. And so take advantage of the knowledge that there is. They've been all classified and don't ever worry. Like if I say tomatoes are slightly acid forming and someone else says they're slightly alkalizing, don't worry because there's different ways of calculating this. And I explain the different ways here in the book, but don't worry about it. Go by results. Measure your first morning urine. If you say, look, I ate a bunch of tomatoes and it didn't have an acid effect, so we just go by results. We don't waste our time worrying about little details like this person said this was highly acid-forming, this person said it wasn't because most of all the foods are the same. All the charts have similar points like the acid-forming food. Anything that is protein is going to be acid-forming because when we metabolize it, it leaves some acid residue. So whether it's beans that are acid-forming or whether it's meat that's acid-forming or fish or turkey, it's going to be acid-forming.

Certainly, like when you're talking about the sandwich earlier, lots of people eat sandwiches every day.

Yes.

Bread, everybody seems to eat bread and so very acid forming. So after, maybe on your acid forming sandwich, you need a lot of alkalizing.

Yeah, there's breads, yeah, and there's breads that they're trying to make that aren't so acid forming, but that's right. So, but what else?

Adding salt too.

Well, this is a very important thing. The new research is suggesting that sodium chloride, chloride as a form of salt is very acid-forming. And so, of course, we need a certain amount of salt, but you don't want to eat excess salt, sodium. What's the recommendation? Probably a teaspoon or something a day. You don't want to eat too— if you eat too much salt, it causes a loss of calcium in the urine and it has an acidifying effect. Now, if you use Himalayan salt or Celtic salt, that's high mineral I don't think it's going to have that same effect, but the sodium chloride will. And certainly, all kinds of processed foods because they're denatured. They've lost their minerals. They've lost their enzymes. They've lost their antioxidants. So all of this synthetic— practically anything in a box or nearly any processed, highly processed food is going to be acid-forming because it's just doesn't have the minerals in it you need to produce the alkalizing compounds.

You need to think of something too, though. If you make a salad dressing, you've got oil, which is more—

well, different oils, different— there's some, some oils are acid-forming and some are not.

Yeah, but when you add the salt, it doesn't taste good to have oil and say lemon juice or something without putting in that piece of salt, that little bit of salt.

Oh, no, no.

We need a certain amount of sodium.

It's just that when people eat processed foods, they eat too much sodium. Not that they're putting it in their diet, but that they eat commercial foods that are very highly salted for the flavor. People eat more if there's salt in them.

And it's really bad salt. I have salt-sensitive genes, which I found interesting when I learned 'cause I have to have salt. And then I found out as I did more research that even with those salt-sensitive genes, which some doctors say don't eat any salt, which I think is a big mistake unless they're telling them to avoid the salt in processed foods. But so I looked up and did more research and found out that you can still have up to a teaspoon a day, even if you've got the salt-sensitive genes, you can still have up to a teaspoon a day. Of that high-quality salt that you're talking about. And I get my salt from Selina Naturally. She's got great Himalayan. She tests salts from all over the world and they are very high and rich. And yeah, such as the Celtic salt, Himalayan salts, and salts from everywhere. Right, right, right.

And the more stress you're— I think you're absolutely right. Like, the salt plays an important role. In fact, some of the native peoples that I studied, salt was an exchange of currency because it's so variable. You need salt in order for the body to survive. And so it's like all things, we want to have the right balance. And some people can tolerate more and others can tolerate less. But excessive salt is not a great idea because it, amongst other things, it acidifies.

And so again, I was looking at coffee, caffeine, mostly caffeine. And, you know, it is dehydrating. And do you think do you think dehydration is playing a role in the whole acid alkaline issue?

Well, I mean, dehydration is never a good thing. And so many times we drink coffee because we're running low on energy. The body is not able to produce the energy. So my argument is if you go back to work on pH balance with all those fruits, vegetables, nuts, and certain supplements like magnesium. And we supplement with a whole series of bone-building nutrients which are also very good for pH minerals. Then you, then you have a, you have a much better balance.

And yeah, well, you know, I know I'm encouraging people to go back to listen to our podcast on bone building It's essential, but I wanted to put in a little plug for a book I've been working on for a long time. So I wrote The Body Called Your Diet for people with yeast infections, but years down the road I realized that the, you know, what about viral infections? So I developed a diet for that, but basically whether you get, you know, that virus that we're not supposed to name that went all over the world, seasonal flu or any anything, you, you have to go on an antiviral diet, which is vegetarian and highly alkaline, because the, the virus or yeast or whatever, they're making the body very, very acidic. So the balance to that is to alkaline. So I just dropped my acid alkaline food guide on the floor, and so, uh, you showed it, you held up, but just for people that aren't watching anything, could you first of all, you know, show the book again and tell us about it? But also, how do they get more information? Where do they buy the book? Can they get it on Amazon? Or do you— do they come to your site?

Okay, certainly. I have written, like you, Dan, thousands of articles on, on the website. But we have two websites and the website that has the most information on pH and if a person says, "I wanna understand this a little deeper," we have some very considerate yet not complicated blogs on pH balance and that is on the website, alkalineforlife.com. That alkalineforlife is the website that we have where we have all our information about pH balance, our articles, and that's also the place where we sell products like The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide and the pH Test Kit, which I don't have one here, but it's a wonderful book that— it's a kit that has the book, has the pH paper, has sample menus. So the best thing is to get the Alkaline Diet Starter Kit and that has everything in it. And like you said, you sort out what's best for you, what you can have, what you can't have, knowing that if we give the body a full deck to play with, we're going to have much better chance of resisting infection and keeping that life energy vital, which is really—

Well, one of your supplements is ionized magnesium. Is that— what does that mean, ionized, for people?

Ionized means that it's active. It's ready to be used by the body. The magnesium has to be in an ionized form, which means it has an electrical charge to it so that it could be assimilated. And what we do in our ionized magnesium are 3 different magnesium salts, all of them alkalizing like magnesium citrate, magnesium glycinate, and I think the third one is magnesium ascorbate. So magnesium is a little hard to absorb. Some people have difficulty absorbing it. So we found best to use 3 alkalizing forms of magnesium. If you don't absorb one, you're going to have better chance absorbing the others. And the real trick about, see magnesium, remember if you measure your first morning urine and it's not 6.5, 5, you know you don't have enough magnesium. And if you say, "Okay, but I can't take magnesium. I take magnesium and I get diarrhea." You know what that means? That means— what's that?

Magnesium citrate?

Well, no.

Is it because of the magnesium citrate form?

No, it's because magnesium gets into the cell through one channel, which is the calcium-magnesium ATPase. That's like the entryway. Way. That entryway can become blocked with pesticides, toxins, a whole bunch of stuff, and the magnesium doesn't get into the cells. So it stays in the gut and it causes some annoyance to the gut. If this— one of my mentors has discovered, he is very creative. He now has a patent on this, that a certain type of choline— now choline is like a B vitamin that 90% of the people are deficient in. It's very important for brain health to produce acetylcholine. It's important for children to develop their brains. I could tell you really interesting stories about that. But anyway, if you get diarrhea from magnesium, you just try this. Get the choline citrate. It's a particular product we have at Alkaline for Life. It's a bottle. You take a teaspoon of that when you take the magnesium, maybe twice a day, and you will not get a loose stool from— you won't get diarrhea from magnesium. You'll get the magnesium into the cell. And choline citrate, of course, is alkalizing itself because it's a citrate. Citrates alkalize just like an ascorbate. Like when we sell vitamin C, we sell ascorbate form because that's the form the body uses.

Yeah.

And it alkalizes.

Your vitamin C is different.

It's different. It's packed under nitrogen. You want nutrients that in the form the body uses, and then you want them to be active. Like vitamin C is an electron donor. It's got all these little electrons spinning around ready to give it away to quench free radicals. But if that has been exposed to light or heat in processing, those electrons have already been given away. So they're not potent. That's why we pack it under nitrogen, keep it sealed very carefully There is a science to all of this. And the amazing thing is the body survives no matter what, but we want like peak performance. That's what we're trying to get. And peak—

You know, Dr. Russell Jeffrey told me about the—

Yeah, yeah.

A long time ago, the choline citrate. I didn't know where to get it, but the fact that it can enhance the uptake of magnesium is huge. I'm glad you thought to bring that up too. And they can get it from you. Well, I guess I need to let you go. And I guess I got through everything here, but I'm glad you have all those blogs. It's a big topic and it's an important topic. And like I said, people don't— practitioners don't understand acid alkaline, and a lot of their decisions would be different and better. And I mean, the advice they give you.

But I don't think we have to understand so much. Just think that we all are getting the idea that fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, this is what our ancestors ate. This is what our machinery likes to eat more of those. Look, can I get this 8 cups of fruits? Now, that's a lot, but that's what we need. So can I just have some vegetables for breakfast, for example? Can I have some more nuts and seeds with my lunch? Just take it step by step. Measure your first morning urine. You'll see it change. Add a few alkalizing supplements like Visit Alkaline for Like and look at some of the supplements supplements. We love ascorbate because a buffered ascorbate will also be the major electron donor. It energizes. What we're looking at, Donna, and we'll talk about it next time, we're looking at energy, how the body produces energy, how can we set the stage for optimum energy production. Alkalinity.

That'd be a great podcast 'cause everybody's exhausted today, especially if they're long haulers and maybe we can help people with a podcast like this.

Well, yes, and we have to be easy on ourselves. That's right. We have to be easy and think about everything from adequate rest to the energy that we get just being out in nature. But I thank you very much for your work. I hope the whole world returns to an alkaline state, and it will. We won't be in such acidic—

Only if they somehow stumble across this information and the other podcasts in your website and all, because I've always said that we— I strive to produce really excellent products, especially for the gut, but knowledge is more important than products even. So that's what we're doing here is sharing knowledge, and I thank you for knowing all this. I know what you're saying in a simple form represents decades of knowledge, learning yourself, so thank you for sharing with us.

Yeah, we all learn and we all share. It's been my pleasure, and I congratulate you on your work. You've helped a lot of people and you've really come to understand this whole very important issue of digestion, which we haven't paid enough attention to till recently.

That's true. Surprisingly. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. To be continued.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.