How to diet correctly.

Which Foods are Acid-Forming?

Ideally, we should be following a healthy eating diet that is 80% alkaline and 20% acidic. Obviously, this is not the case for people. In fact, it's the complete opposite. Unfortunately, our society enjoys the most acid forming foods such as milk and dairy products, meat and animal products, and refined grains. At the same time, the vast majority of North Americans consume less than the recommended amount of alkalizing fruits and vegetables.

The following are just two of the numerous consequences of eating a nutrient void, acid-forming diet.

Acidosis and Weight Loss

When your blood becomes too acidic, your body goes to great lengths to protect its vital organs and tissues by storing the excess acid into your fat cells. More acid, means more storage needed. Therefore, your fat stores grow in size to accommodate the extra acid.

To lose weight for good, then, you should adopt an alkaline diet that will cleanse your body of acid.

Cancer Cannot Grow in an Alkaline Environment

Alkalinity increases the oxygen in your body. The Nobel Prize winning work (1931) of Dr. Otto Warburg showed that cells weaken, mutate, or die in the absence of oxygen. Several years later, 2-time Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling was the first to show that cancer cells are unable grow in an oxygen-rich, alkaline environment.

When your body is alkaline, you create an environment for it to thrive, to feel energized, and to prevent disease.

How to Alkalize Your Body for the Best Health Ever!

1. Minimize your intake of acid-forming foods such as refined sugars, dairy, meat, and most other animal products.

2. Eat more greens. Green vegetables are your greatest source of alkalinity! Challenge yourself to eat one green salad and/or one green juice each day. After just a few days, see how you look and feel! Some ideas include wheat or barley grass shots, and fresh juice made from kale, parsley, celery, cucumber, apple, lemon, and ginger.

3. Start your day with a glass of lemon water. Contrary to what you might think, lemon is actually alkalizing once metabolized. Adding fresh-squeezed lemon to a tall glass of water is one of the easiest ways to immediately add alkalinity to your body.

Soft drinks presently account for the single largest amount of refined sugars in the American diet. In fact, if you were to consume an average 12-ounce (360 ml) can of soda pop, you would be delivering almost 40 grams-or 10 teaspoons-of refined sugars to your body (yummy!).

Given these numbers, it's easy to see why so many of us are in hormonal havoc these days. The pop we drink elevates our insulin levels through the roof, enhancing our fat cell expansion (weight gain), and making us feel lousy from both a physiological and psychological standpoint.

What about the artificial stuff?

Statistics show that at any given time, close to one-third of women and one-quarter of men can be found on the latest fad diet! Even though fad diets are nothing more than short-term solutions to a life-long problem (obesity), we still buy into them-to the tune of more than $30 billion each year. A large part of this confusion lies in the diet pop industry. How many times have we heard about someone who has ordered a double cheeseburger, large fries, and, of course, a diet cola?
The artificial sweeteners these soft drinks contain can affect your health just as negatively as sugar (and in some cases even more so). Sugar substitutes didn't exist when our bodies were evolving over thousands of years. Our bodies don't know what to do with them other than treat them as a type of sugar. Laboratory tests confirm that artificial sweeteners can boost our metabolic storage hormone insulin by fooling the body into thinking the sweetener is sugar and stimulating sugar cravings. In case you are unaware, insulin is the hormone responsible for causing our bodies to switch into fat-storage mode. When insulin is stimulated, it looks for sugar. When insulin can't find any real sugar from these substitutes, the insulin ends up going after our blood sugar, causing us to experience an energy decline and a fat-storage increase.

One study published in the International Journal of Obesity even showed that artificial sweeteners may actually enhance your desire to overeat by hindering your body's ability to estimate overall calorie intake, and in his ground-breaking book Aspartame (NutraSweet) Is it Safe? (Charles Press, 1992), Dr. Hyman Roberts states, "The American Cancer Society (1986) documented the fact that persons using artificial sweeteners gain more weight than those who avoid them."
Excess sugar cravings, enhanced calorie intake, and weight gain are far from the only things to worry about when consuming an abundance of artificial sweeteners. The USFDA and other health organizations have been bombarded with numerous reports linking aspartame use to seizures, dizziness, visual impairment, disorientation, ear buzzing, tunnel vision, muscle aches, numbness of extremities, pancreas inflammation, headaches, high blood pressure, eye hemorrhages, and more. According to Dr. Roberts, "Hundreds of thousands of consumers, more likely millions, currently suffer major reactions to products containing aspartame. Today, every physician probably encounters aspartame disease in everyday practice, especially among patients with illnesses that are undiagnosed or difficult to treat."36 And, just in case you're wondering, aspartame is not the only artificial sweetener that may potentially be compromising your health. So-called healthy artificial sweeteners such as Sucralose (which contains chlorine by the way) may also be toxic to some individuals