pH Balance
Let's start at the beginning.
In the beginning, life formed on planet earth in the primordial soup of salty ocean water. The chemical brew that gets called salt water is interesting stuff. It contains many more chemicals than just salt and is more bouyant than plain water.
Sharks are one of the older species that still roam this world. They have a bony jaw and the rest of their "skeleton" is cartilage. You don't need a bony skeletal system if you can live in salt water, so lots of ocean species simply don't have one.
Bony fish which developed lungs were an intermediary step that allowed life to begin venturing forth onto the land and eventually developed into land-based life forms. So far, so good, this all sounds real obvious: You need a skeleton to help hold up the fleshy parts if you aren't in water.
Less obvious and perhaps more critically, you need a store of calcium to mediate your blood pH in order to leave the ocean and not die rapidly of acidosis.
You don't need that if you live in salt water. The chemical stew in the water mediates your pH and you simply don't need an internal mechanism for mitigating chemical derangement of that sort.
Now what do we mean by acidosis?
If you have diabetes, you are at risk for a condition called ketoacidosis. It is a build-up of acids in your bloodstream.
This is a life threatening condition and if you get diagnosed with it, they promptly hospitalize you because you could be dead within 72 hours.
So acidosis means basically that your blood in specific has gotten too acid. Human blood is kept to a pretty narrow pH range and anything outside that range is considered a problem:
If you are a reasonably healthy person, this ends up being a very minor imposition on the system. The body pulls a little bit of calcium out of the bones periodically and then pretty soon puts it back and you never notice a thing.
If you have certain kinds of serious conditions, such as Cystic Fibrosis or long-standing biofilm due to endemic infection or metal poisoning (which makes people too acid), welp, that's not what happens. Instead, your body draws on the calcium in the bones on a regular basis in order to try desperately to NOT DIE and the calcium doesn't get put back.
Please note that CF almost always involves both biofilm with chronic infection AND metal poisoning (and further note that metal poisoning promotes biofilm and chronic infection). I exchanged some emails with a guy with a PhD in Biology who assured me my hypothesis that CF makes one especially vulnerable to metal poisoning is not straight up crazy talk given what the CFTR does. (The CFTR is the defective cell channel at the root of CF pathology.)
So in such cases, the body is making an ongoing heroic effort to mediate the blood pH so you don't die imminently and people with CF can develop osteoporosis as early as their teens. They also fairly frequently develop other conditions that are associated with chronic, excess acid, such as frequent heart burn, Gout, etc.
At one time, I figured I would go down in history for DISCOVERING that CF causes excess acidity and everyone would promptly treat that and voila! Nobel Prize in Medicine FOR ME.
That's a big fat nope. The entire CF community and doctors who treat it already know that people with CF are typically way the hell too acid. They just are certain that it's crazy talk to attribute CF pathology to this known issue.
Let me say this again: If you have diabetes and develop ketoacidosis, they HOSPITALIZE you because you could be dead within 72 hours. If you have CF and are slowly boiling to death with chronic acidosis of the TISSUES instead of the blood and your life expectancy is a mere 36 years of age: LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. Your chronic acidity is NOT relevant to treating your DEADLY medical condition.
So sayeth the world. I sayeth otherwise.
If you have metal poisoning, chronic infection, CF, etc. you need to figure out a means to remedy systemic acidosis, not just acidosis of the blood. Your body is letting myriad tissues slowly DIE in order to keep your blood within a very narrow pH range because it's the lesser evil.
Your body places a super high priority on keeping your blood functional. Which suggests that by the time your issue is detectable with a blood test, other tissues are very seriously fucked to hell and back.
I have known people via internet who bought little pH test strips and peed on them to check their pH. I have never done this. I track it symptomatically.
If I have heartburn, I'm too acid. When I'm too acid, I get more gunk in my lungs. Historically, when my acidity was extreme, having diarrhea made me feel like I had sat on broken glass.
Acidity makes infection harder to treat. So feeling infected can be an indicator of excess acidity.
I get too red in the face and my face feels chemically weird and my face gets too greasy when I am suffering chemical derangement.
It is a known thing that people with CF hoard calcium in their cells. High levels of calcium in the cells is associated with apoptosis (cell death), so people with CF frequently avoid dietary calcium because they fear that calcium is bad for them.
I believe that the cells of people with CF hoard both calcium and glutathione in order to mitigate extreme chemical derangement. I think high calcium implies high levels of whatever the calcium is a shield against and when you don't get enough calcium, you die quicker.
So I think blaming calcium is like blaming fire fighters for the house burning down. "Look, wherever you see fire fighters, a house burns down. Stop calling the fire department and things will be FINE!"
No, they won't be.
Okay, so you need to find some means to track systemic acidosis in the tissues AND then you need to find some means to mitigate the acidity in the tissues. This is the tricky part because the stomach uses acid to help digest food (plus digestive enzymes).
If you are extremely, highly acid, you can drink a glass of diet tonic water to knock it back. That works just fine if your chemical derangement is severe enough.
But as your chemical derangement gets less severe and/or if you want to take heroic measures and drink LOTS of tonic water (for the quinine it contains), it is possible to overalkalinize the stomach. If the stomach becomes too alkaline, the result is you can no longer digest food and you begin throwing up when you try to eat.
This is known as "a bad thing."
So you want to leave your stomach acid enough to digest food while alkalinizing OTHER tissues while running all consumable through the tummy. It's a little tricky but it can be done.
Step one is you have got to stop consuming things that are extremly acidifying and highly persistent in the system. This means you need to stop consuming peanut oil.
If you are consuming peanut oil on a regular basis, you are never going to be able to adequately mitigate your excess acidity AND desperately trying to do so will put you at risk of overalkalinizing the stomach, thereby creating additional problems.
Pro tip: Never get food from Chik-fil-a again. The chain brags about using 100 percent peanut oil in its high heat fryers. Not only is this terribly pro-inflammatory (acidifying), it basically creates mustard gas which is hell on the lungs. (I suspect Jack in the Box also uses a lot of peanut oil and I don't eat there either.)
I also avoid or limit some other oils, like corn oil and canola oil.
Yes, I do eat French fries regularly. I am a potato fiend and I do buy them from fast food places where they are deep fried. But if I make them at home, I bake them in the oven.
Step two: Address any known deficiencies of alkaline minerals, such as calcium and magnesium. If you have a calcium deficiency, you likely have a magnesium deficiency. You also need to be taking vitamins D and K with the calcium and magnesium so they absorb properly.
Step three: Up your consumption of alkaline foods, such as lettuce, apples and corn.
Yes, I both avoid corn oil and also eat a lot of corn. You did hear that correctly. Corn oil: Bad. Corn: GOOD.
I didn't really make BIG dietary changes when I realized I needed to be less acid. As noted previously, I do things like order the hard corn shell at Taco Bell instead of the soft wheat shell to help me avoid being too acid.
I did take a lot of calcium supplements for a few months until my nose bleeds stopped. I did have a big bowl of lettuce four to six days a week as part of lunch for a few months until my chronic heartburn cleared up, basically. But mostly I read labels, tracked down all the peanut oil and eliminated it and added a little extra corn, lettuce and apples to my diet.
I like corn, lettuce and apples. If that's not your thing, google up some food lists and pick alkaline foods you like and eat those.
You need to make this a habit and a permanent change. Over time, you will gradually get less acid and then stay less acid.
If you do have biofilm and chronic infection and yadda, there will be drama along the way. You will hit a threshold periodically where moving the needle to more alkaline kills infection and infection won't be happy about that and so forth.
So I'm not saying this will not involve health drama, just that in some sense it's really not that complicated.
In the beginning, life formed on planet earth in the primordial soup of salty ocean water. The chemical brew that gets called salt water is interesting stuff. It contains many more chemicals than just salt and is more bouyant than plain water.
Sharks are one of the older species that still roam this world. They have a bony jaw and the rest of their "skeleton" is cartilage. You don't need a bony skeletal system if you can live in salt water, so lots of ocean species simply don't have one.
Bony fish which developed lungs were an intermediary step that allowed life to begin venturing forth onto the land and eventually developed into land-based life forms. So far, so good, this all sounds real obvious: You need a skeleton to help hold up the fleshy parts if you aren't in water.
Less obvious and perhaps more critically, you need a store of calcium to mediate your blood pH in order to leave the ocean and not die rapidly of acidosis.
You don't need that if you live in salt water. The chemical stew in the water mediates your pH and you simply don't need an internal mechanism for mitigating chemical derangement of that sort.
Now what do we mean by acidosis?
If you have diabetes, you are at risk for a condition called ketoacidosis. It is a build-up of acids in your bloodstream.
This is a life threatening condition and if you get diagnosed with it, they promptly hospitalize you because you could be dead within 72 hours.
So acidosis means basically that your blood in specific has gotten too acid. Human blood is kept to a pretty narrow pH range and anything outside that range is considered a problem:
The pH scale ranges from 0 (very acidic) to 14 (very alkaline). Blood is usually between 7.35 to 7.45.So what happens is that when your blood gets too acid, your body strips your bones of calcium to mediate your blood pH because that whole "could DIE within 72 hours thing" is a fairly high priority.
If you are a reasonably healthy person, this ends up being a very minor imposition on the system. The body pulls a little bit of calcium out of the bones periodically and then pretty soon puts it back and you never notice a thing.
If you have certain kinds of serious conditions, such as Cystic Fibrosis or long-standing biofilm due to endemic infection or metal poisoning (which makes people too acid), welp, that's not what happens. Instead, your body draws on the calcium in the bones on a regular basis in order to try desperately to NOT DIE and the calcium doesn't get put back.
Please note that CF almost always involves both biofilm with chronic infection AND metal poisoning (and further note that metal poisoning promotes biofilm and chronic infection). I exchanged some emails with a guy with a PhD in Biology who assured me my hypothesis that CF makes one especially vulnerable to metal poisoning is not straight up crazy talk given what the CFTR does. (The CFTR is the defective cell channel at the root of CF pathology.)
So in such cases, the body is making an ongoing heroic effort to mediate the blood pH so you don't die imminently and people with CF can develop osteoporosis as early as their teens. They also fairly frequently develop other conditions that are associated with chronic, excess acid, such as frequent heart burn, Gout, etc.
At one time, I figured I would go down in history for DISCOVERING that CF causes excess acidity and everyone would promptly treat that and voila! Nobel Prize in Medicine FOR ME.
That's a big fat nope. The entire CF community and doctors who treat it already know that people with CF are typically way the hell too acid. They just are certain that it's crazy talk to attribute CF pathology to this known issue.
Let me say this again: If you have diabetes and develop ketoacidosis, they HOSPITALIZE you because you could be dead within 72 hours. If you have CF and are slowly boiling to death with chronic acidosis of the TISSUES instead of the blood and your life expectancy is a mere 36 years of age: LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. Your chronic acidity is NOT relevant to treating your DEADLY medical condition.
So sayeth the world. I sayeth otherwise.
If you have metal poisoning, chronic infection, CF, etc. you need to figure out a means to remedy systemic acidosis, not just acidosis of the blood. Your body is letting myriad tissues slowly DIE in order to keep your blood within a very narrow pH range because it's the lesser evil.
Your body places a super high priority on keeping your blood functional. Which suggests that by the time your issue is detectable with a blood test, other tissues are very seriously fucked to hell and back.
I have known people via internet who bought little pH test strips and peed on them to check their pH. I have never done this. I track it symptomatically.
If I have heartburn, I'm too acid. When I'm too acid, I get more gunk in my lungs. Historically, when my acidity was extreme, having diarrhea made me feel like I had sat on broken glass.
Acidity makes infection harder to treat. So feeling infected can be an indicator of excess acidity.
I get too red in the face and my face feels chemically weird and my face gets too greasy when I am suffering chemical derangement.
It is a known thing that people with CF hoard calcium in their cells. High levels of calcium in the cells is associated with apoptosis (cell death), so people with CF frequently avoid dietary calcium because they fear that calcium is bad for them.
I believe that the cells of people with CF hoard both calcium and glutathione in order to mitigate extreme chemical derangement. I think high calcium implies high levels of whatever the calcium is a shield against and when you don't get enough calcium, you die quicker.
So I think blaming calcium is like blaming fire fighters for the house burning down. "Look, wherever you see fire fighters, a house burns down. Stop calling the fire department and things will be FINE!"
No, they won't be.
Okay, so you need to find some means to track systemic acidosis in the tissues AND then you need to find some means to mitigate the acidity in the tissues. This is the tricky part because the stomach uses acid to help digest food (plus digestive enzymes).
If you are extremely, highly acid, you can drink a glass of diet tonic water to knock it back. That works just fine if your chemical derangement is severe enough.
But as your chemical derangement gets less severe and/or if you want to take heroic measures and drink LOTS of tonic water (for the quinine it contains), it is possible to overalkalinize the stomach. If the stomach becomes too alkaline, the result is you can no longer digest food and you begin throwing up when you try to eat.
This is known as "a bad thing."
So you want to leave your stomach acid enough to digest food while alkalinizing OTHER tissues while running all consumable through the tummy. It's a little tricky but it can be done.
Step one is you have got to stop consuming things that are extremly acidifying and highly persistent in the system. This means you need to stop consuming peanut oil.
If you are consuming peanut oil on a regular basis, you are never going to be able to adequately mitigate your excess acidity AND desperately trying to do so will put you at risk of overalkalinizing the stomach, thereby creating additional problems.
Pro tip: Never get food from Chik-fil-a again. The chain brags about using 100 percent peanut oil in its high heat fryers. Not only is this terribly pro-inflammatory (acidifying), it basically creates mustard gas which is hell on the lungs. (I suspect Jack in the Box also uses a lot of peanut oil and I don't eat there either.)
I also avoid or limit some other oils, like corn oil and canola oil.
Yes, I do eat French fries regularly. I am a potato fiend and I do buy them from fast food places where they are deep fried. But if I make them at home, I bake them in the oven.
Step two: Address any known deficiencies of alkaline minerals, such as calcium and magnesium. If you have a calcium deficiency, you likely have a magnesium deficiency. You also need to be taking vitamins D and K with the calcium and magnesium so they absorb properly.
Step three: Up your consumption of alkaline foods, such as lettuce, apples and corn.
Yes, I both avoid corn oil and also eat a lot of corn. You did hear that correctly. Corn oil: Bad. Corn: GOOD.
I didn't really make BIG dietary changes when I realized I needed to be less acid. As noted previously, I do things like order the hard corn shell at Taco Bell instead of the soft wheat shell to help me avoid being too acid.
I did take a lot of calcium supplements for a few months until my nose bleeds stopped. I did have a big bowl of lettuce four to six days a week as part of lunch for a few months until my chronic heartburn cleared up, basically. But mostly I read labels, tracked down all the peanut oil and eliminated it and added a little extra corn, lettuce and apples to my diet.
I like corn, lettuce and apples. If that's not your thing, google up some food lists and pick alkaline foods you like and eat those.
You need to make this a habit and a permanent change. Over time, you will gradually get less acid and then stay less acid.
If you do have biofilm and chronic infection and yadda, there will be drama along the way. You will hit a threshold periodically where moving the needle to more alkaline kills infection and infection won't be happy about that and so forth.
So I'm not saying this will not involve health drama, just that in some sense it's really not that complicated.
