Why Do Alkaline Food Lists Differ?

If you’ve looked around on the net for a good alkaline foods list, you’ll notice that they all seem to differ in what they class as alkaline and acidic foods. How can this be?

Well some of the ones which are plain wrong define an alkaline food as one which has a an alkaline pH in it’s physical form. This takes no account of the effect it has on pH in our bodies, once consumed.

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Another way some lists define an alkaline food is purely by its mineral content – if it leaves an ‘alkaline ash’ of an alkaline mineral, it’s classed as alkaline.

Alkaline minerals include potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, copper, zinc, iron and silver and so one could argue that any foods containing these are alkaline.

In contrast, the minerals sulphur, chlorine, phosphorus, fluoride, silicon and iodine are acidic.

However, there’s a bit more to it than that. Let’s take cow’s milk as an example. As we’re all told, it contains the mineral calcium, so one could assume that it’s an alkaline forming food, right? Wrong.

We cannot easily access the calcium in milk because we do not produce the correct enzyme (rennet) to break down the casein in milk easily. It therefore requires your OWN body to utilise its OWN alkaline mineral reserves to metabolise milk. The net effect is acidification.

In fact, drinking milk has been proven in large scale studies to be the number 1 cause of osteoporosis is women! A perfect example of why we need to question all the info we are fed by the food industry and media. See the Acidic Foods pages for more info and details of these studies.

The main bone of contention with the alkaline foods list, however, is with the humble fruit family.

Most fruits contain alkaline minerals that can be easily used by our bodies. However, some scientists argue that the sugar content in fruit causes a net result of acidification, which overrides the alkalizing effect of fruit. So some alkaline food lists class fruit as alkaline and some as acidic.

My View About Fruits on The Alkaline Foods List

My view and the view of many other credible researchers and writers in this field is this:

Our bodies run on simple sugars. Pretty much all of our energy originates from glucose. Our cells break down the glucose and store the energy in the form of ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate). Therefore sugar is ESSENTIAL. That is why we are built with a sweet tooth! The sugar in fruits is natural and unrefined and we are designed to eat it, just like all of our primate cousins. If we do not eat enough fruits, we tend to go and ‘pig out’ on other high carb foods, sooner or later – breads, pastas or cakes, chocolate, sweets, fizzy drinks etc.

Fruits in themselves, when complementing a high alkaline leafy greens-based diet will very unlikely cause acidification in your body and will probably have a neutral affect. But other forms of refined sugars (acid foods) will most definitely cause acidification.

If you are in a state of crisis with your health then it may be necessary to cut down or abstain from fruits, to restore a higher pH in the body for a while but other than that – go ahead and eat lots of fresh, ripe, raw, organic, whole fruits along with your alkaline veg (although not at the same time lol – remember proper food combining – fruits on their own, on an empty stomach).

True Alkaline Fruits

There are 5 fruits that appear on any alkaline foods list – they are low in sugar and leave an alkaline ash in our bodies. These fruits are:

• Lemons
• Limes
• Grapefruits
• Avocadoes
• Tomatoes

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Does this clarify acid and alkaline foods list uncertainties for you? Leave a comment below