Acidification - Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health

Excerpted from
The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health
By Robert O. Young, Ph.D., Shelley Redford Young

Acidification and overgrowth of negative microforms in the body are root causes of every symptom, illness, and disease (which are really only symptoms themselves). Here I just want to mention some of the common symptoms that are a direct result of over acidification and yeast and fungus overgrowth. That includes vaginal infections, menstrual difficulties, impotence, infertility, prostatitis, rectal itch, urinary tract infections, and urgency and burning with urination. Respiratory manifestations abound: In addition to allergies. congestion, excess mucus, postnasal drip, frequent clearing of the throat, habitual coughing, sore throats, earaches, and even asthma and bronchitis are often the result of fungus. So is the habit of catching everything that's "going around"-coming down with every cold and flu. The skin also has a variety of ways of manifesting microlonn overgrowth: athlete's foot, jock itch, skin rash, hives, moles, birthmarks, dry browning patches, ringworm, rough skin on the sides of the arms, fungal nails (nails are modified skin), acne, and even skin tumors.

Infants and Children Are Particularly Susceptible

Most childhood infections and symptoms are caused by negative microform overgrowth, including diaper rash, thrush, ear infections, tonsillitis, colic, constipation, and diarrhea. Even the poorly understood Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is linked. As children become older, conditions like attention deficit disorder (ADD), hyperactivity, aggressiveness, irrational behavior, poor self-esteem, learning disabilities, and short attention spans can develop. A mother's acidity or overgrowth of negative microforms will certainly affect her newborn, and mother and child often have similar problems.

How Acidic Are You?

You can check your pH levels at home with paper pi I strips, available at many pharmacies, or with a battery-operated pH electron meter, available from health catalogues.

The strips, which are relatively inexpensive and should be easy to find, test the pH of your saliva or urine. The pH of saliva is much more variable, so you are better off testing your urine. Urine pH changes too, in response to what you eat, so first thing in the morning, after you've fasted overnight, is the ideal time to test.

The strips change color to indicate acid or base, and are lighter or darker depending on the intensity of the reading. They come with a color chart to help you translate the color into a number. In most cases, you're looking to turn your strip a medium green-not dark, or bluish, meaning too basic, or light or yellowish, meaning too acidic.

The meters can also be used to test saliva or urine, and the same recommendations apply: It is best to test your urine, and do it first thing in the morning. These meters are quite accurate and give you your pH with a number-no color charts to mess with. But they can be hard to find, and expensive, running into the hundreds of dollars.

So test yourself to see where you are right now, and then retest to keep tabs on your progress. You can also see for yourself the effect of meals on pH, by regularly testing with a meter. Though the results are not definitive, you will at the very least be able to see trends. Test yourself after the basic meals like the ones described later in this book, and compare the result to results you got on your usual diet.

Your doctor can also do a blood pH test for you. As mentioned, the ideal blood pH is 7.365. The American medical establishment accepts 7.4, but that is too alkaline, and actually indicates tissue acidification. It indicates that the body is collecting and storing alkaline minerals to tame excess acidity. If it isn't fending off acidity, the body has no need to get so far alkaline.

How Overgrown Are You?

If your urine or saliva (or blood) are acidic, it's a safe bet that you have microform overgrowth. The simple fact is, most people do.

Live blood analysis more directly detects overgrowth. In a standard lab evaluation, drops of blood are basically dried onto a slide to be examined under a familiar bright-field microscope, where many of these negative microforms cannot be seen. Live blood analysis, by contrast, looks at unaltered live blood, under special dark-field, phase-contrast microscopes. The high-powered microscope can magnify objects up to twenty-eight thousand times, so you can clearly view bacteria, yeast, fungus, and mold in exact detail in the blood. You can also sec red and white blood cells, crystallized microforms, mycotoxins, cholesterol, metals, blood clots, undigested fats, and many other things-all in one drop of live blood! Bottom line: Though it can also provide a lot more information, live blood analysis gives you a plain view of how crowded your blood is with undesirable microforms.

Live blood analysis requires some fairly expensive technical equipment, and well-trained and experienced practitioners to interpret what is seen. It may not be easy to find a practitioner in your area, although the test is quickly growing in popularity as its importance is understood. You can call the Inner Light Biological Research Center for a referral.

Finally, after years of researching German techniques in dry blood analysis, I've developed a test called the Mycotoxic/Oxidative Stress Test (M/OST), which involves a small amount of blood allowed to dry and clot on a microscope slide. Under the microscope, blood from healthy people forms a standard pattern-a dense mat of red areas interconnected by dark, irregular lines. The blood of people under mycotoxic/oxidative stress-meaning excess acidity and microform overload and the resulting harmful wastes-has a variety of characteristic patterns that deviate from that norm. One common (and visually striking) abnormality is the presence of "clear" or white areas interrupting the standard pattern. The extent and shape of the clear areas reflect the symptoms that are likely to arise as a result of excess acidity and overgrowth. That is, the pattern the blood reveals not only the presence of microform overgrowth and excess acidity but also the particular ways that overgrowth is affecting the individual. Certain patterns match certain symptoms, such as diabetes, arthritis, atherosclerosis, and cancer.

In the end, however, getting all the details about your cxact situation isn't necessary (though witnessing a live blood analysis may be motivating like nothing else!). Anyone on the standard American diet is, to a greater or lesser degree, imbalanced-acidic. If you have any symptoms, you can be sure you are imbalanced. On the other hand, if you follow the program outlined in this book, doing what you know is right for your body, you can rely on your body to handle the complex details of sell-repair. Your results, in how you look and feel, will speak for themselves. Freed from acid overload, you'll be symptom-free, full of energy, and mentally wide awake. You'll also rcach your body's own best, healthy weight.