How to Heal Your Body the Alkaline Way with Dr. Russell Jaffe

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer and four time New York Times best selling author JJ Virginia. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Love Whoa, whoa, whoa.

This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Hello, welcome to this week's podcast.

We're a go in Science Geek today.

Yes we are. I have got, first of all, I've got a guest that is going to help us unpack this whole acid alkaline balance question. I get asked all the time about this and I was like, I'm gonna go straight to this source. I have someone now. I'm gonna warn you in advance, I got show notes on this. You're gonna be able to really figure out if you are as alkaline as you need to be, if you need to be taking more magnesium. In fact, what's super cool in this interview is you're gonna be able to now have a way to know how much magnesium you need. And instead of taking magnesium until you have to run to the bathroom, which is never the fun way to figure out how much magnesium you need. Right? So today we are going to be talking about how to heal your body the alkaline whale way. And I have someone I've heard about forever and ever and ever. And I was super excited when I got him on this show. It's Dr. Russell Jaffe. He's an MD, PhD and certified clinical nutritionist and he's board certified in clinical pathology and chemical pathology. I mean he is it is crazy amount of stuff he's done. He's a recipient of the Merck Sharp and Dom Excellence in Research Award, the J.D. lane Award, the USPHS Meritorious Service Award. He was honored as the International Scientist of 2003 by the IBC, Oxford, England, UK for his lifetime contributions to clinical medicine, biochemistry, immunology, methodology, and integrative health policy. Got his BS, MD and PhD from the Boston University School of Medicine. He did his clinical chemistry training at the National Institutes of Health. And I mean, just like he has an incredible resume, but what he really does is unpack this whole concept of alkalinity. And again, I know that we have been asking questions over here in the community for ages about this, so I'm super excited about having them on. You're going to hear a lot of science speak, so I'm just telling you that in advance. What I've done is@jjvirgin.com alkaline you can pick up all the show notes and Russ's Alkaline Way Guide. And again, you'll be able to figure out some really cool things he's taught. We talk about things like transit time, magnesium, being alkaline or acid and how to really know. And there's simple at home tests you're going to get all of the information on. But before I dive in and share another favorite with you, I've decided what I want to do is showcase our awesome review of the week at the front end. And again I want to remind you, if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe and share the show. And I want to just give a little shout out to Jess Escobar who said five star review. Very informative and helpful. I've been listening to JJ's podcast back to back and have learned so much. I love the questions she has for each guest and the listeners. Questions at the end. My favorites so far are how to optimize your gut health and have poops to be proud of. You know that's my favorite line and I immediately had to share it with my parents. The second one is Willpower doesn't work. I seriously can't get enough of jj. I am hooked. I also love her sense of humor. You feel like you actually know her after listening so much. Ah, I love that so much. If you have not left a review yet, this is my my pretty please beg bag bag moment because it just helps a lot to know what direction to go on the show. So I super super appreciate that. All right, Dr. Russell Jaffe, welcome to the show. I am super excited to talk to you today.

Pleasure to be here with you. Let's jump in about evoking human healing responses through the Alkaline Way.

Well, let's do that. But we have to back it up because as I told you offline, like, we've actually never addressed this topic. Now, it's come up a lot in questions on Facebook and Instagram. So I was like, this is awesome, because we need to talk about it, and who better than you, right? So we, we are going to dig into Alkaline Way today. But before we even get into there, I just want to kind of set the stage of how did you get into this?

Well, I came as a skeptic, so I was trained in academic internal medicine in Boston, at Boston University. Then I matriculated to the National Institutes of Health and Laboratory Medicine. Clinical Pathology, helped introduce new methods, was on the permanent senior staff, and I heard that molecular biochemistry and nutritional choices mattered. But I'd learned in medical school that you just needed three square meals a day, and I wasn't quite sure what a square meal was, but you needed three of those and vitamins made expensive urine. Although the guy who said. Who was quoted, Abe White, is the man who's quoted as saying that he personally said to me, he never said it, but it's a good quip.

So, yeah, you really do have this big academic background, as everybody heard in the intro. So I always love it when we kind of make this shift, talk about what, what it means to be, you know, what is this whole alkaline, you know, the acid alkaline balance. What is it?

Right. So here I stand on the shoulders of Albert San Giorgi. He's best known for isolating vitamin C from Hungarian paprika and then showing the importance of polyphenolics to work along with antioxidants like ascorbate. But he famously said, and I had personal contact with him, I'm pleased to tell you, he famously said that the human body is acidic by choice, by design, but it's alkaline by function, which means you must take in minerals like magnesium and potassium, because there's going to be a net acid production that causes cellular metabolic acidosis. For anyone who's a biochemist. What it means is the cells run out of energy if they are not replenished on a daily basis with sufficient magnesium and or other buffering minerals to keep the cell alkaline so that it functions efficiently, effectively at high energy, and it can distinguish itself from its neighborhood.

Let's talk about the Negative effects of.

Being too acidic, chronic illness, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune, self attack, chronic disease in general are all. Notice I said all, either caused by cellular metabolic acidosis or made worse if you have a typical American diet which is deficient in those essential minerals and beneficial antioxidants and cofactor factors.

Someone eating a typical. Most people listening here, I'd say almost everybody listening is not eating a typical. It's not eating the typical American diet. They've, they know better and they're a sophisticated audience. But again, this is like the next level. How would someone know if they're too acidic, if they're getting enough, like, if they are alkaline enough? How do you know?

We have developed self assessments, including checking the urine acidity, technically known as urine ph, after rest. Because after six or more hours of rest, you know, like sleep and yes, you can go to the bathroom. You just can't go to the kitchen or the gym. After six or more hours of rest, the fluid, the urine, equilibrates with the lining cells. And it's the only time during the day when you actually get a measure of cellular metabolic acidosis or alkaline sufficiency. Alkaline, meaning enough minerals and a healthy urine pH is 6.5 to 7.5. If you're below that, you need magnesium, and maybe desperately. Because magnesium activates the ATP work molecule, you need one molecule of magnesium per ATP. Magnesium keeps the battery of the cell functioning. The mitochondrial battery functions if there's a proton gradient created by magnesium. And magnesium is a buffer. It protects essential fats like omega 3 fats when they're in transport. So there's a lot of things that magnesium does, including activate hundreds of catalysts in the cells. And the absence of magnesium is what we call cellular metabolic acidosis. And then you get up and go, got up and went, and you can't find it anymore.

So is this the best way to really tell how much magnesium you need then?

Yes. Yes. Basically, if your urine ph is between 6.5 to 7.5, you can celebrate. If it's below 6.5, you're an American. That's typical. That doesn't mean it's healthy, it's just common. And then you need at least one, maybe two, three, four doses a day of 220 milligrams of elemental magnesium in soluble salts, along with. And here's the secret sauce, along with a teaspoon of choline citrate in the liquid of your choice.

We will have show notes, everybody. Do not worry. Oh, my Gosh, if you're driving right now wondering about this, we will have show notes. They will be@jjvirgin.com Alkaline I also know you're going to be giving out your alkaline way guide. And let's talk about that. What is the alkaline way?

Right. The alkaline way is following nature, nurture and wholeness. It is the physiologic, the healthy alkaline approach, which means enough of these buffering minerals, especially magnesium, zinc and potassium, so that your cells aren't hungry for the minerals. Now, let's say, because your audience is a much more sophisticated audience than average. But magnesium, even if you're mostly buying locally fresh materials at some Whole Foods type market, magnesium in the diet has reduced by half. It's 50% lower than it was 50 years ago, says my colleague Dr. Ron Alien and others who.

Is that just because of soil demineralization?

Yes. No, you're very sophisticated and that's exactly what it is. In order for the magnesium to get into the vegetables or the fruit or the foods, it's got to be in the soil. When the soil is depleted by monocropping, repeated, you know, the same crop over and over again, the soil gets depleted. Not only that, the need for magnesium has more than doubled in the last half century because of stress and toxin exposures and other changes in the environment. So as my grandmother used to say, the rents are going up and the ceilings are coming down.

Yeah, overfed and undernourished is where we're at at this moment.

And that's a good book, by the way. There's a book by that title, really America is Overfed and Undernourished. And you, you very succinctly said it. And the alkaline way is the answer to being well fed and well nourished, as opposed to overfed and undernourished.

Let's talk about what people should be eating. You know, we'll go back over to supplements too. But you know, if you, if you Google this, I know it can be very, very confusing for people as to. Is a food acid or is it how it reports to your body? Like, so how do you know whether foods an acid or alkaline producing food? And I think it's the producing that's the important word there, probably. Right.

Yes. It's the function, it's the effect of the food on body chemistry. And this is where something that we've contributed over the last three decades, it's a chart, it's a table that has foods that are metabolically alkaline forming and foods that are metabolically acid forming. And if you want to recover from ill health, you want 80% of what you eat to be on the alkaline forming side. That's mostly grasses, fruits and vegetables. Fresh, fresh things, but not cow, dairy, not meat or flesh. Some fish, but not a lot, because you got to be careful where the fish came from. And no, no grains. No grains. They're hard to digest. So the true alkaline way means taking in foods you can digest, you can assimilate and eliminate without immune burden. If you have maldigestion, dysbiosis, some atrophy and enteropathy, or long transit time. And we can talk about how important a healthy digestive transit time is. If you lack fiber, if you lack prebiotic fiber, if you lack bugs, probiotic healthy bugs, if you lack symbiotics, recycled glutamine to energize and repair your digestive tract. If you lack those, you're a typical American. Even a more conscious American today doesn't get the 40 to 100 grams per day of healthy prebiotic fiber that you need. If you're not chewing your food a lot, you're not getting enough fiber. That's the takeaway message. Probiotics, 40 to 100 billion bugs a day. Talk to me by Dennis Burkett, a wonderful scientist whose shoulders I stand on. And then we contributed the recycled glutamine. So you get the benefit of repair from the glutamine energy molecule without a buildup of glutamate, ever, ever.

So where would you be getting a lot of these? I would love to talk transit time. Another thing that we haven't talked about on this show. We are big. I'm a big fiber fan here, but let's talk about prebiotic fibers and some of the best places to get those and the role of them.

Yes. My lunch today is going to be garbanzo beans, black kidney beans, red kidney beans, and cannellini beans, which are light colored. And they will be mixed with a red onion, a whole red onion that we've sauteed and that in turn will be mixed with the salad that we wilt into that kind of chili, along with enough savory herbs and spices that if you want, you can break a sweat.

Wow. And is that a pretty typical lunch for you?

Yes. And by the way, I eat two meals a day, not three. If I eat three meals a day, I gain weight. I don't want to gain weight. I'm not saying if you're young and more athletic. You can eat more food. But at my age, since I don't jump around as much as my son does, I eat two meals a day, one of which is likely to be mostly soup, wet, and mineral.

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And I love you're saying this too, because this whole idea, I remember, gosh, it was probably 20 years ago. I was doing a show and the book we were. I was on a show for two years with Dr. Phil and he had a book out and it was breakfast snack, lunch snack, dinner snack. And I'm like, oh, you know, like, what do we need all these snacks for? And I really love where we're going now with the idea that, you know, you don't need to eat these. We've gotten off the snacking, but we don't even necessarily need to have three meals. I know for me, I don't do three meals every single day. I might do them, you know, a couple days a week. Some days a week I have two meals. So you Know, and I think that being metabolically flexible and also varying when you eat is super important.

Oh, yes. So, so today it's chili and lots of beans for fiber and the red onions for detox. Tomorrow it's likely to be a curry. Could be a yellow curry, could be a red curry, could be a green curry. Curry is not only a nutritionally alkalinizing food, it turns out to enhance your native anti cancer mechanism. And yes, when you want, we should talk about transit time because 12 to 18 hours is healthy and most Americans have a three to seven day transit time.

Well, how would they know this? How can they be testing this and checking this?

Well, because one of the self assessments that we've developed is called digestive transit time. And hopefully you'll make that information available to your, your listeners, your audience.

Is that in the Alkaline Way Guide?

Oh, yes. Oh, sorry. It is.

Okay. Yes, you guys will be getting this then lists and this and so, but just briefly. So transit time should be what and what is typical and how do we change that?

Right? Transit time should be 12 to 18 hours. If, for example, you have roast beets as the main course for dinner in the morning, you should see red in the commode. And I'll tell you, we do have roast beets and I do see red in the commode in the morning. But my first thought is never, oh, I had roast beets.

It's like, oh, no.

You use charcoal capsules. We and many others are concerned about charcoal, but there is healthy charcoal, there is medical charcoal, charcoal grade. There's really only one source. We recommend that depending on how much you weigh, you take a certain number of these charcoal capsules and you mark the time when you swallow the charcoal. And then when the black crumbly stuff comes out of your tush, you mark that time. And the difference in hours is your transit time.

Got it? So another thing to consider. And again, if you're eating more fiber, and especially prebiotic fibers, that's going to be one of the key things to help that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Fiber is the friend of your digestive tract.

It's also that friend of weight loss. Everybody like, besides feeding your microbiome, it also helps you feel fuller, longer, and gives you poops you can be proud of.

Right around here, they're known as jaffe poops. They should be bulky. Dennis Burkett taught me this. They should be bulky and float. They shouldn't be pencil like in sink. And what he said was, if the country produces small pencil like stools, we'll have large hospitals. If the country has a diet and lifestyle that produces large bulky stools, we'll have small hospitals.

That's a, that's a memorable one. We'll pull that line out. You probably already have said this, but a couple other things. So you personally, what you're doing every day to stay alkaline sounds like you've pretty well nailed that with how you're eating. Yes. And what about supplements?

Well, when it gets to supplements, my metabolism, my brain and gut chemistry, my metabolome and microbiome require high intensity nutrition. I take over a dozen meaningful supplements or supplements in meaningful amounts on a daily basis, which means I open all of those bottles. And why do I do that? Because my restorative sleep is that much better. I keep my weight where I want it to be rather than where it wants to go. I no longer have mood oscillations and swings. People tell me that I'm much easier to get along with friendlier. I see things as optimistic rather than, you know, the sky is falling. There are a lot of benefits to living the Alkaline way.

Just if you were going to give people one takeaway for today, and I know everybody listening, you're going to get the Alkaline Way guide. And again that will be@jjvirgin.com alkaline but leaving people with one thing that they can take action on because you've just given them a ton of stuff. And again, that will all be in the show notes because I know you used some large words. So what would be the one thing that they should get started on first?

First, the first thing to do is hydration. The first thing to do is to make water and herbal beverages your rehydration source. Dehydration stresses every part of you and makes everything worse. So if you say to me, what's the one thing now you're quite right. I'm not going to stop with one thing. But if you say to me, what's the one thing for people to start with? It's having a least four quarts, four liters a day of water or herbal beverage, plus a glass of water for every caffeinated or diet beverage you have.

No one drinks diet beverages here.

Oh, good. Because I think you're sweet enough as you are. You don't need added sugar, artificial beverages or artificially sweetened beverages. Addict your tongue and your brain in ways that I do not recommend. Herbal beverages. Yes, India spice tea can be quite interesting. There are all sorts of mint teas here. We have a half a dozen different herbal teas and we let people choose the one they want.

Awesome. And then you can do those hot, iced, et cetera. But yes, we have hopefully gotten people to realize that artificial sweeteners are the devil on this show. And if you have anything you want to say about those, just as one.

Last final kick, well, you've gotten my message, which is nature, nurture and wholeness. We are very confident that when you follow Mother Nature, she rewards you. And when you try to fool Mother Nature. And there are all sorts of things on the web today about what I will call false alkalinity. For example, swallowing bicarbonate to make your cells alkaline, that is not recommended. It impairs your digestion. It does all sorts of harmful things. And the people who are talking about it frankly are not biochemists because no biochemist would ever say that bicarbonate swallowed in the mouth is going to alkalinize your cells.

Well, I have never heard that.

Oh, sorry. It's coming in. It's going to be in the news. But you should be and your listener audience should be aware that there's true alkalinity. That's what we're talking about, true alkalinity, that comes from the high alkaline foods. They are mineral rich. Then there are alkaline amino acids like recycled glutamine. And then there are certain short and medium chain fats known as mct. Medium chain triglycerides. They help, they soak up extra acid. But swallowing bicarbonate or trying to fool Mother Nature, in my experience, it never comes out well.

Yeah, it always comes and bite you. So all of these things are the way that we teach everybody to eat. So I think we're on track here. But there's always, I love the idea of testing and really making sure that you're where you need and being able to know how much magnesium you really need. So that is fantastic and a great little hack there. And again, I want to remind everybody, jjvirgin.com magnesium alkaline. And you're going to get that alkaline way guide. And just real quick, Russ, tell us what's in the guide.

Oh, well, first it's a summary of everything that I've learned in the last half century. So we bring it all together about what you can eat, digest, assimilate and eliminate without immune burden. And if you want to be specifically gluten free, how to do that, if you want to do self assessments, how to do the self assessments. If you, you want to eat the alkaline way so that 80% of the food on your plate is alkaline forming. Then you look at page 14 and you find it there. It's also available in dynamic forms. You can actually download an actual Excel spreadsheet if you want to design your shopping lists around this. But thank you for bringing the message of true alkalization. One of my colleagues wrote a book called Alkalinize or Die. Now, I'm not that dramatic.

I remember that book.

Gary Rogers, a very, you know, an esteemed colleague, environmental medicine physician. My message is alkalinize and live. You know, I don't want to scare you, but I really want to get your attention.

Exactly. I like the aspirational, personally. All right, well, thank you so much. Now, after the break, we'll be answering a listener's question. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. I love this time. And we grab these from all over the place a lot on Facebook and Instagram, some on Facebook @jj virgin official and on Instagram @jj virgin. So feel free to pop on in, especially when I'm doing my lives and stories and mention stuff and ask questions. And this one came from Maria, who says, I'm not hungry for breakfast. Do I really need to eat it Now? If you'd asked me this 20 years ago, I was like, breakfast Nazi. You know, like, yes, you have to eat breakfast and you have to have breakfast and lunch and dinner. And here's the thing, what I want you to think of is eating less, less often. Now, I'm always going to be looking at the research and there's some amazing research, more and more coming out all the time about intermittent fasting and fasting and the benefits to your health. In my program, my green Smoothie Cleanse Detox reboot program, we actually have two days in there where you do intermittent fasting. With lower protein. I call them my power plant days. And so you do those for two days. And I think it's very important if you can start to incorporate into your life. And you heard Russ talk about this today, that he eats two meals a day. Now, I tend to eat three meals a day most of the time, but a lot of times on the weekends, I will eat a later breakfast and an early dinner. That's what I like to do because I really would advocate first, first off, eat not just by the plate. And you know, both with my Virgin diet book and my sugar impact diet book, I've laid out the platform plate of how I want you to eat, but also eat by the clock. So I really believe that, that we are going to become much more sophisticated in the next couple years about when someone's best time to eat is and that someone who's a night owl is probably someone who can skip breakfast and someone who's an early bird is someone who can't. I've never been good at skipping breakfast and I find a lot of my clients feel the same way that it kind of sets them up to fail during the day. But if you're one of those people that can easily skip breakfast, then skip breakfast. Just make sure that that's not setting you up to fail later on the day. So if you can skip breakfast or eat breakfast a little bit later, make sure that you're giving yourself at least a 12 hour overnight fast between dinner and your next meal. Right. What I prefer to do is eat breakfast a little later and eat dinner a little earlier and get it that way. And then on the weekends, I really love to get 14 to 16 hours if possible. A lot of times over the weekend we'll have two meals and maybe a snack. I think the biggest takeaway here is that the old rules of breakfast, lunch and dinner are out. It really is what works best with your health goals, your own biological clock and circadian rhythm and your schedule your lifestyle and see how that goes and what you can do. And again, eating less, less often works really well because it gets insulin low. So you can use stored fat for fuel and reduce inflammation. Alrighty, I will see you next week. And again, if you have not subscribed yet, hit that subscribe button, share it with a friend and thank you so much.

Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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