Last week, we spoke about the exponential increase in cancer and chronic disease in our community and we ended with a challenge to start tracking your body pH over the next week to determine where you stand.
If your body pH is in the 7.4 range, then you’re doing great! If your pH fell below that (under 7.0), then we have some work to do.
Today we’re going to start diving into to great action steps to begin to shift your pH into a more alkaline state. The best way to start to shift your pH is through diet. Food is either acid-forming or alkaline-forming in the body. We’ve created a great list here for you to show which food falls into each category.
Body pH Alkaline and Acidic Food Chart
We’ve designed a Free Downloadable version of this worksheet for you to track your own diet! First, take a look at the list and put a dot next to the food you consume regularly.
Are most of the foods you’re eating acid-forming or alkaline-forming?
As you can tell, vegetables are more alkaline-forming while meat tends to be more acidic. Now, before you panic about having to change your entire diet, let’s look at some baby steps that you can do to make a positive impact.
First, start adding more vegetables to each meal. Sometimes in the beginning of switching our food, it’s easier to add versus taking away. So even if you left your entire meal the same, try adding a veggie to each meal. Add a salad. Roast some veggies. When you make stir-fry or casseroles, add a veggie to that casserole that your family already loves. There are many vegetables that are easy to hide as well! For example, you can use cauliflower “rice” instead of regular white rice. You can use mashed sweet potatoes instead of mashed white potatoes. You can add cooked carrots to your child’s mac and cheese and cut out part of the pasta.
There are also many easy food swaps that you can make to shift into consuming more alkaline foods. Perhaps try having pumpkin seeds as a snack instead of walnuts. Substitute all white flour and white rice with brown flour and brown rice. Rice is acidic either way, but at least brown rice is less acidic than white rice. Have watermelon and cantaloupe for your afternoon snack instead of popcorn or chips.
Another way to increase your veggie consumption is through juicing. Juicing is one of the best ways to consume veggies because you’ll be able to drink so much more than you could ever eat in a sitting. For example, you could fit a head of lettuce, handful of kale, a few carrots, and a cucumber into one small glass of juice, whereas you probably would never eat that much as solid food
Have one less meat night and swap for a plant-based night. So if you’re anything like me and my husband were, we were literally eating meat at every meal. I’m talking bacon with breakfast, some meat leftovers for lunch, and a new meat dish for dinner. We started by taking 1 meal a day and making it plant-based. Now instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast, we do chia seeds with almond milk and berries. We purposefully plan a vegetarian dinner night each week as well.
Another BIG way to modify your body pH is through watching what you drink. This is by FAR the easiest way to change your pH because beverages have such a huge impact. The pH of soda is so low, that it takes 32 glasses of 7.0 pH water to neutralize 1 glass of coke. So the next time you pick up a soda, ask yourself if you’re ready to drink 32 glasses of water to neutralize it. Other extremely acidic beverages include liquor, wine, beer, and coffee. And if you thought Diet Soda was okay, diet is actually the worst by far… with a pH of 0.5.
Start to incorporate a few of these changes and tune back in with us next week as we talk about improving your pH through supplements and other healthy products.
Feel free to share your favorite vegetarian recipes!
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