Weight Loss - What's Blood Got to Do with It?

Excerpted from
The pH Miracle for Weight Loss: Balance Your Body Chemistry, Achieve Your Ideal Weight
By Robert O. Young, Ph.D., Shelley Redford Young

In a word, everything. Blood's central role in your health and weight makes sense when you consider just how much of it your body contains-exactly how much of your body is blood. Everyone has about 5 liters of the stuff. To circulate it through the body, the heart beats over 100,000 times a day, moving two and a half ounces of blood with each pulse-about 8 tons each day. All the blood in the body passes through the heart every three minutes.

You probably already know that red blood cells deliver oxygen throughout your body and remove cellular wastes. Beyond that, even, your blood holds the key to living at an ideal, healthy weight. First of all, the blood dictates your body 's internal environment: acidic blood, acidic body; alkaline blood, alkaline body. In addition, your blood cells eventually become body cells (and vice versa). You need to keep your blood clean and pure-and nonacidic. I choose the food and drinks I recommend accordingly: They will build healthy blood cells. Your body makes between 3 and 4 million new blood cells and 11 to 13 million body cells every second, so you need to make sure it has the very best materials to work with at any given time.

Later in this chapter, I'll tell you how and why I always put my clients' blood under a microscope-in a procedure different from anything traditional doctors or labs do-and what I can learn from the astonishing things I see. You'll see a series of pictures of real clients' blood samples, taken before and after they followed this program, so you can see for yourself the dramatic difference adhering to these principles makes. But first, let's start with some background on how blood is made and what blood makes, so you can truly understand how crucial healthy blood is to permanent healthy weight loss.

Blood is the most basic material of the human body. Body cells from all types of tissue are continually being formed from the blood. It's actually a two-way street, and body cells can also be transformed into blood cells. Better, however, is when the body follows the normal course of blood production, which is intimately connected to both digestion and respiration. Not only are you in this most fundamental way literally what you eat (and drink), but also what you breathe.

Normal blood cell production originates in the small intestine. Nutrients set free by the digestion process are circulated through the delicate microvilli (microscopic fibers lining the villi of the intestine walls) along the (9 yards of) small intestine, and into the bloodstream, building blood cells, tissues, and organs. Air breathed in through the lungs enters the arteries and chemically unites with the minerals and other elements in the blood to create new blood cells. These red blood cells can then be transformed into bone cells, muscle cells, heart cells, liver cells, and so on, as needed.

When your body is healthy, and you are eating alkaline/electron-rich food, you build healthy blood cells-and so healthy body cells. The digestive process breaks down the foods you eat through a clean, efficient process called oxidation/reduction, which bathes the body cells in a continuous supply of oxygen. Your body stays energetic-and stays at a healthy weight.

When you are subsisting on acidic/proton-rich food, and the intestine becomes damaged or congested, blood production is impaired or stops. In order to keep constant the amount of red blood cells in the body (five million per cubic millimeter!), the body will convert body cells to blood cells-literally wasting away.

As is the blood, so is the body. As is the body, so is the blood. The quality of the blood-and so, the body-depends on the quality of what we eat and drink. If you are eating acidic foods you will have weak blood cells and then weak body cells-and you'll be overweight. You have another choice: With alkaline food and drinks, you'll build healthy blood-and a healthy body, which naturally seeks its own ideal healthy weight.

Live Blood Analysis

I estimate I've performed blood tests on about ten thousand people in the course of my research over the past twenty years. What I've seen makes a more dramatic case for this program than anything I could tell you in just words. I think you'll agree after you look at the following samples: The blood of a person eating a standard American diet of acidic foods looks incredibly different from the blood of someone eating alkaline. I arrived at the principles of the pH Miracle through observing differences in the blood I tested, and each new set of "before-and-after" blood tests I see confirms their power.

My main techniques differ from those of standard laboratory tests, which can involve fixing blood on a slide with preservatives before putting it under a microscope. Stains may be used to help show up white blood cells, sickle cells or some other distinctive condition, or bacteria, although the addition of those chemicals compromises the blood sample and changes the way it looks. Or the blood drawn in your doctor's office is put in a vial, sent to a lab, spun to separate out the various elements, and weighed with specialized machinery to determine the density of the blood-no microscope needed. In any event, blood prepared in these ways is no longer a living substance. And the purpose of these tests is generally quantitative (i.e., how many white blood cells are there? How many red blood cells?) rather than qualitative (what is the condition of the cells?) like mine. They may also be useful in diagnosis or pathology.