By Mark Epley
Excess Acidity is a condition that weakens all body systems.
Acid as a Cause of Corrosion
Excess acidity forces the body to borrow minerals – including calcium, sodium,
potassium and magnesium – from vital organs and bones to buffer (neutralize) the
acid and safely removes it from the body. As a result, the body can suffer severe and
prolonged “corrosion” due to high acidity – a condition that may go undetected for years.
It affects virtually every person in our society because of the way we live, the way
we eat, and the environment we live in. The result is an internal environment where
disease can easily manifest, as opposed to a pH-balanced environment, which allows
normal body function necessary for the body to resist disease.
It is true that if we have a healthy body we will maintain sufficient alkaline reserves
to meet emergency demands. However when excess acids must be continually
neutralized, our alkaline reserves are depleted, leaving the body in a weakened,
disease-prone condition.
Unfortunately, there are still many practitioners who believe that the body can somehow
miraculously and “naturally” balance its pH – as if we are still living in the woods, eating
raw foods and herbs. The truth is so far beyond this ideal.
In fact the truth – according to Dr. Lynda Frassetto, acid/alkaline researcher from the
University of California, is that we have turned an evolutionary corner. We do not
handle acid waste the way we used to.
Her research showed the sheer volume of acid waste our body has to handle has forced
it to take drastic “war” style action to preserve its “strategic reserves” – and to protect
the kidney and liver, our major essential detox organs. In her study of almost 1,000
aging subjects, she found that we are now “stockpiling” acid in fatty deposits rather than
eliminating it via kidney and liver.
In its infinite wisdom, the body has chosen to save the kidney and liver from degradation
by excess acid. Of course, there is a cost. It’s called obesity, lowered immunity, lack of
energy and the whole host of acid related diseases we are subject to including cancer,
diabetes, osteo-arthritis and more – much more.
Acid a Cause of Disease
The concept of acid/alkaline imbalance as the cause of disease isn’t a new one. One of
the first people who talked about the need to alkalize the body was the great “Sleeping
Prophet,” Edgar Cayce. He always referred to body detoxification with herbs, colonics,
fasting, massage, steam baths and diet modification with the aim of alkalizing the body.
Way back in 1933, Dr. William Howard Hay published a ground-breaking book, A
New Health Era, in which he maintained that all disease is caused by “auto-toxication”
(or “self poisoning”) due to acid accumulation in the body:
“Now, we depart from health in just the proportion to which we have allowed our alkalis
to be dissipated by introduction of acid forming food in too great amount. It may seem
strange to say that all disease is the same thing, no matter what its myriad modes of
expression, but it is verily so.”
Dr. Theodore Baroody, author of Alkalize or Die, says:
“The countless names of illnesses do not really matter. What does matter is that they
all come from the same basic root cause . . . too much acid tissue waste in the body!”
Unfortunately, according to Sang Whang, author of Reverse Aging, even if we eat the
best of organic fruit and vegetables, 97% of our food still consists of carbon, nitrogen,
hydrogen and oxygen, which will still be reduced to acid waste. He says that it is not
what we put into our bodies . . . it’s what stays in our bodies as waste that creates our
over-acidic condition and causes us to age prematurely.
He says that in terms of acid/alkaline balance, the only difference between “good” food
and “bad” food is that “good” food will have less acid waste and more acid neutralizing
result. “Your pH balance depends on what is left after metabolism.”
Acid Waste Effects on Your Body
Very few if any of us are physically capable of ridding our bodies of all the acids we
create from food, stress and our own metabolism.
These acid wastes move around the body via the blood and lymphatic system until our
overloaded kidneys decide to dump them or, as we have mentioned, they can be stored
in fat. Cholesterol and crystallized uric acid are solidified acids that have been dumped
within the body for “later” removal – the “later” that never comes.
Acid coagulates blood. Blood has major problems flowing around fatty acids.
Capillaries clog up and die. The skin, deprived of life-giving healthy blood, loses
elasticity and begins to wrinkle. Even with a face-lift or liposuction, the acid remains
and continues its relentless advance.
Without a basic acid-alkaline balancing plan, every part of your body works ever harder
to maintain health – because every system; all the organs, the lungs, even the skin –
are involved in the maintenance of correct blood pH.
Your Optimum pH Level
Within your body, your organs and cells are totally subservient to your blood. All organs
work to keep your blood at a balanced pH, to the point where your body is willing to
inflict major damage on organs if they appear to stand in the way of correct blood pH.
If your blood’s pH dips from its optimum pH 7.36 down to pH 7, you will lapse into a
coma and die.
That’s why you get such a charge from a can of Cola. Its pH 2.5 acidity sets alarm bells
ringing all over your body. Alkaline chemical stores that should be used elsewhere are
sacrificed to the call of the needed adrenalin that floods your system.
The “high” you have learned to expect is no different to the high a drug user gets as he
experiences his artificial sensory elevation. It is your body screaming “Help,” and you,
enjoying the thrill of the fear. It’s “The Real Thing.”
It’s not just a glass of Cola that causes such effect. (32 glasses of neutral pH water are
needed to balance one glass of Cola). Most of us already have a running battle within,
as our body struggles to counteract acid-producing foods, acid-producing pollution and
acid-producing stress.
In fact – of all acidifying factors – stress is the greatest. It can neutralize and acidify an
alkaline diet with one surge of adrenalin.
Long-term acidity is like rust. It corrodes our tissue, eating into our 96,000 kilometers of
veins and arteries.
Left unchecked, it eventually interrupts all cellular activities and functions, from the
beating of our heart to the neural firing of our brain.
In summary, over-acidification interferes with life itself leading to virtually all sickness
and disease! Finally, it ages us . . . then kills us. When we die, it celebrates by turning
the whole body acid, inviting foreign antagonistic organisms to the party!
Dr. Baroody expresses it very well:
“Too much acidity in the body is like having too little oil in the car. It just grinds to a halt
one lazy Sunday afternoon. There you are – stuck. The body does the same thing. It
starts creaking to a stop along the byways of life and you find yourself in some kind of
discomfort. I watch with great concern as people of all classes and lifestyles suffer from this excess.”
He attributes no less than 68 major health conditions to a prior existent acidic inner
terrain.
Fat in Your Body
Why are Westerners prone to obesity? Is it just food? Of course, the food we eat, its
quantity and quality has a large effect on our waist measurement. But because the
body has made a habit of its “last chance” solution (pirating calcium from the bones and
teeth) of what to do with excess toxic acid waste, there is another reason we deposit fat.
As Dr. Frassetto discovered, when we are faced with shortage of options due to an
acid-besieged inner terrain, we dump toxic wastes in fatty deposits as far away from the
organs and heart as possible; on the buttocks, the chest, the thighs and the belly.
Another theory is that sugar is an acid and the reason we are so fat, but not quite as we
have been taught. The body has to protect itself from the excess sugar we consume,
and so it creates fat – to encase it and protect us from it. So you could say that fat is
actually saving our lives!
Acidity or alkalinity of our internal fluids has a profound effect even at the individual
cellular level in our bodies. Our entire metabolic process is dependent upon balance,
right down to the cellular level.
Our 75 trillion cells are slightly acidic within, dependent on our inner sea – the
surrounding alkaline interstitial fluid to surround them.
Without this relationship, no useful chemical or energy interchange will occur because
no pH balance exists. pH opposites – acid and alkaline – in the body are the chemical
method for electricity to flow.
Without sufficient “polarity” between the interior of the cell and the fluid surrounding it,
the energy of the cell has difficulty flowing into the surrounding tissues.
Weight loss and the regaining of energy occur more easily when we take the first steps
toward an Alkaline “re-balance.”
