The Importance and Powerful Effects of Alkaline Minerals
This week Gareth Edwards, our Alkaline Diet Expert and highly qualified nutritionist, writes about the importance and powerful effects of alkaline minerals, as the cornerstone to maintaining the alkaline design of the body and living with health, energy and vitality.
Powerful Alkalinity with These Super-Strength Alkaline Minerals:
“My Granny lived to 97 in good health and she didn’t do any of this alkalising.”
One of the many factors that may have helped her achieve this non-pH miracle, was the relative state of the soil back in 1910, compared to mineral depleted, fertilizer and intensive farming eroded “dust” on which many of crops are grown today.
Since regular records of mineral levels in food in the United Kingdom began there has been a relentless and steady decline in the mineral levels present in vegetables. Magnesium, an essential mineral for human health, being one of the “sufferers”.
Why We need (Alkalising) Minerals:
These (missing!) minerals serve many functions in our bodies. They provide constructional building blocks for or body elements. Calcium in bone being the most obvious example. They also act as co-factors in many metabolic reactions. Also crucially they are used by the body in order to buffer (neutralise) acids.
Basic Terminology:
When considering minerals and their therapeutic effects, it’s important to be aware of some distinctions. Certain minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium are considered macro minerals. These are present at high levels in the human body and correspondingly so in many plant foods.
Other essential (needed) minerals are found as trace levels (e.g.zinc) while others still are actually toxic (e.g. Mercury and Cadmium).
How to Become or Stay Healthy!
Remembering that we are “alkaline by design and acidic by function”, (merely existing makes us acidic…) and that we live in an ever more acidic (polluted, urbanised) and mineral depleted world, our need to support our body’s buffering system is greater than ever. Dietary, hydration and lifestyle choices have to lie at the centre of this. If you eat a lot of meat, poultry, eggs or sugar and / or drink alcohol, fruit juice or coffee your bodies alkaline mineral resources are likely to be “burning up”, faster than any mineral supplement can ever hope to replace them.
Ironically when we are overly acidic these foods often have an instant gratification appeal. The hit or boost of energy that they can induce is all too often short lived and is likely to lead to health challenges in the longer term.
Most green powders are made from vegetables and grasses grown in mineral rich soils. Minerals that are bound up in plant form should be easy for the body to absorb. Regular consumption of green powder mixed with alkalising mineral drops is often a great way to start to break this “cycle of addiction”.
Magic Alkalising Minerals:
Once you feel that you can comfortably sustain a regime, based around low sugar high nutrient foods and fluids, it is definitely worth considering adding additional alkalising minerals to your health regime.
Probably the most hotly debated player in our body’s alkaline armoury is sodium. Many alkalising and living food health specialists consider sodium chloride (salt) to be a demon, while others see it as central and essential to health. The central argument around whether you can over salt yourself, relies partly on the concept of transmutation within the body. This is the slightly surreal concept that mineral forms can be transformed within the body, given the right environment and building blocks to make changes. Proving this theory is possible and the subject for another article. Suffice it to say here, that I have several patients who have come to me with high blood pressure and found that it has dropped after following an alkalising regime including relatively high levels of unrefined and bicarbonate salt.
I am happy to recommend Dr. Young’s pHour salts and pHlavor sprays as corner stones to alkalising programmes, but do remember that pHour salts is a strong alkalising agent and may cause headaches or even increased heart rate in some susceptible people. You should therefore exercise caution when using them regularly and certainly review any medication you are taking with an “alkaline aware” physician, before launching in too aggressively to this particular aspect of alkalising.
Another way to dramatically increase your intake of a broad spectrum of alkalising minerals (macro and trace) is to use Montmorillonite clay. This can be mixed as a paste and eaten between meals or added as a powder to green drinks.
Dosage & Form:
There are of course other specific mineral formulas that can be taken alongside an alkalising regime. Levels and forms of these minerals do leave the “as nature intended” arena and move into synthetic (man made) formulation. The building blocks are natural elements but the proportions are going to be based on the formulators view. That does not of course make them necessarily wrong, but just be aware of that dynamic when consuming them.
One of the primary goals in increasing your consumption of alkalising minerals is to ……. alkalise (!) your body fluids and tissues, so in deciding on dosage and frequency, measuring the effect on urine and saliva pH is a good way to establish whether what you are doing is effective. As a general principal less more often is likely to be better absorbed than more less often. Also colloids and liquid forms are likely to be better absorbed than tablets.
Action plan:
- Be sure to drink sufficient quantities of alkaline fluid to allow your body to eliminate buffered acids, with added pH drops (such as Dr Young’s Puriphy drops) or increased intake of salt (such as young pHorever pHlavor Mineral Salts).
- Before reaching for magic mineral supplements be sure to have a close look at your dietary and hydration choices. Eliminate (or reduce) acid forming foods (animal protein, sugar, refined carbohydrates, mushrooms) and liquids (alcohol, tea, coffee, fruit juice, vinegar and fizzy drinks), replacing them with healthy, nutritious, tasty, alkalising alternatives. (See the alkaline lifestyle course and recipe book).
- Use mineral supplements such as pHour salts, pHlavor and clay alongside your alkaline regime.
- Consider also adding broad spectrum trace mineral supplements to your programme to help reduce fungus and mould and increase energy.
N.B. if you experience any adverse effects when taking mineral supplements, consult with a nutritionally / alkaline aware physician.
