Does the alkaline diet hold the key to turning back the clock?
There are a lot of diets around these days, which promise to do everything from helping you shed kilograms to helping you put more weight on. A lot of these eating regimes, however, simply address the ingredients of the food, and the amount you eat. On the contrary, the alkaline diet looks at what is going on inside your body and seeks to right an imbalance brought on by modern life.
So what exactly is the alkaline diet? Well it involves eating mainly alkaline foods in order to keep the body’s pH between 7.35 and 7.45. The ultimate aim is to eat 80 per cent alkaline foods and 20 per cent acidic foods. What does this mean for our insides? Well our digestive tracts should alternate from an alkaline and acid pH environment so when digestion begins in your mouth, which works best as an alkaline environment, then the stomach should be at an acidic level, your small intestines should be alkaline, and your large intestines should be acidic.
As the average modern diet is sugar-rich and loaded with preservatives and fats, this balance is often disrupted. In other words, the foods we’re eating today could be responsible for throwing this delicate alkaline/acidic balance out of whack. The Alkaline Sisters, the creators of the diet, believe that this imbalance can be the cause of things like the common cold or a rash, all the way through to heart disease or cancer. So they believe this imbalance can be corrected by following some simple rules.
You can eat:
- Most vegetables (especially leafy greens)
- Some root vegetables (beetroot, carrot, parsnip, etc)
- Some fruits like lemons, avocados, limes and tomatoes
- Grains and legumes
- Some nuts like almonds
While you should avoid (or eat in moderation):
- Most meats (chicken, pork, beef, veal, fish)
- Dairy products
- Some nuts like cashews, peanuts, and pistachios
- Anything with sugar or artificial sweeteners
All of those leafy green vegetables are believed to help bring the imbalance back from a more acidic level throughout our bodies, to a more ideal level. And as an added bonus, a diet loaded with leafy greens has been known to reverse the growth of grey hair – allowing people to grow their natural hair colour again.
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