Buying Health Drinks is Not Always That Healthy, Especially When Choosing an Alkaline Food Diet

Look at the ingredients in most commercially advertised sport drinks and vitamin waters, and you will quickly see they are far from being health drinks. If you are trying to stick to a diet high in alkaline foods, then these drinks are even more detrimental to your health.

Here are a few things to avoid the next time you are shopping for health drinks, especially for those on an alkaline food diet.

· High Fructose Corn Syrup – This is concentrated sugar that contributes to weight gain and abnormal blood sugar levels, which can also lead to diabetes. Excess sugars have no place in health drinks, and you certainly won’t find processed sugar in any alkaline foods.

· Phosphoric Acid is just what it says it is – acid. It is often defined as, “A clear colorless liquid used in fertilizers, detergents, pharmaceuticals and food flavoring, irritating to the skin and eyes and moderately toxic if ingested.” When your diet is supposed to be 80% alkaline foods and only 20% acid forming foods for proper pH balance, this really puts you upside down quickly.

· Artificial Flavors – Some experts call them, “Excito-toxins!” When artificial flavorings are in health drinks, they begin to resemble soft drinks and candy. These artificial substances interfere with your pH balance and force you to consume more alkaline foods to neutralize the acid from the toxins in your blood.

· Artificial Sweeteners – These are so unnecessary in health drinks today. In addition to the acid forming properties of artificial sweeteners, nutritionists express concerns about their effects on the human body. Many consumers now believe that artificial sweeteners may play a factor in diseases of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s. That is one reason why corporations such as Pepsico and Coca Cola are beginning to market health drinks and other products containing Stevia, an all natural sweetener that is actually beneficial. You can learn more about Stevia Sweetener and discover alkaline foods for pH balance by taking the Alkaline Food Test at BestHealthFoodStore.net.

· Isolated Vitamins – When isolated, processed, heated, liquefied and bottled, vitamins and minerals break down before your body can use them. You need vitamins and minerals from whole foods, not from so called health drinks that are really bottled, heated, highly processed waters with colorful dyes and artifical ingredients.

Someone showed me a well-known sport drink the other day and I couldn’t believe the ingredients! This tropical mango flavored health drink didn’t mention mango anywhere in the ingredients, but let’s take a look at what it did list, along with some things to think about when choosing health drinks:

· Sucrose Syrup (this is sugar)

· High Fructose Corn Syrup (more sugar) – A total of 56 gms of sugar

· Phosphoric Acid (the opposite of alkaline foods)

· Glycerol ester of wood rosin (acid forming)

· Modified Food Starch (how was it modified?)

· Natural and Artificial Flavors (your guess is as good as mine)

· Yellow 6, Yellow 5 and Red 40 (artificial dyes)

Another bottle of this not so healthy drink says “Specially Formulated for Tiger Woods” with the same ingredients, but blue dye instead of yellow. I guess that secret blue stuff is what makes Tiger play so well. In fact, experts could argue that Tiger’s recent knee problems are because of too many acid forming foods and not enough alkaline foods in his diet. Many medical and health specialists now believe that an acid/alkaline imbalance can contribute to weak bones and damaged joints.

When shopping for a good health drink, here are some important considerations to keep in mind.

· Is it liquefied, pasteurized or otherwise heated in the bottling process? If so then the enzymes have been destroyed and the nutrients will not easily be absorbed by the body.

· Does it give you chlorophyll from plants to help your cells absorb more oxygen?

· Does it provide natural antioxidants to destroy free radicals? Natural antioxidants are essential for anti-aging.

· Is it made with whole food ingredients like real fruit or other alkaline foods?

Now, let’s take a different look at health drinks on the market today that are not advertised with flashy TV ads or filled with colorful dyes: Here are some of the characteristics of these truly healthy drinks:

· Not liquefied or bottled, but in powder form

· Processed at low temperatures

· Contain live enzymes from whole alkaline foods and chlorophyll from plants

· Complex structures of the whole food ingredients are fully intact

· Loaded with natural antioxidants to combat free radicals

If you buy your health drinks in a convenience store, a grocery store, or in the health food store at the mall, then you are falling short of a truly beneficial alkaline food diet. You will find far better choices online by Googling all natural health drinks.

Losing Weight Following the Alkaline Diet

About the Alkaline Diet

Eating alkaline foods or starting an alkaline diet refer to consuming those foods and drink which have an alkaline effect on the body. This effect is based upon the ash residue that remains after our foods are consumed.  Some foods leave an acid ash, whereas others leave an alkaline ash. Conveniently for us, our bodies have been designed to categorize which foods leave which kind of ash into the body.

The Alkaline diet (also known as the alkaline acid diet and the acid alkaline diet) is a controversial dietary protocol based on the consumption of mainly fresh fruit, vegetables, roots and tubers, nuts, and legumes and avoiding grains, dairy, meat and excess salt, in order to balance the acidity and alkalinity (the “pH balance”) of one’s body.

In recent years it has been a popular topic among authors of diet and nutrition.

How the Alkaline Diet Works

The alkaline diet offers a simple, basic understanding of what causes the body to become ‘out of balance’. Through what has become the typical Western diet largely based around meat, dairy, sugars, alcohol, saturated fats and caffeine, millions of us have created a hostile, acidic environment within our bodies.

The pH level of our internal fluids affects every living cell in our bodies and the effect that over-acidification can have upon the health of our bodies is immense, with a chronically over acidic pH creating an extremely negative environment which affects all cellular functions from the beatings of the heart to the neural workings of the brain.

When our pH level is unbalanced, almost any area of our bodies can be negatively affected creating results such as cancer, heart disease, obesity, weight problems, allergies, fatigue and premature aging as well as problems with our nervous system, cardiovascular system and muscles.

Goals

The nature of body varies but most of us should aim to eat 75-80% alkaline foods and a maximum of 20-25% acid forming foods.

What Food is Allowed

To begin to alkaline diet it is important to start consuming alkaline foods and drinks while eliminating acidifying foods and drinks from your diet. As a rough guide you should try to remember:

* Vegetables (spinach, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, celery, cucumber, lettuce, courgette, cabbage, greens, swede, squash (summer, butternut, yellow etc)
* Salads
* Essential Fats (such as Udo’s Choice, Flax/Linseed, Evening Primrose, Olive Oil, Avocado Oil etc)
* Fruits (ONLY – Lemons, Lime, Grapefruit, Watermelon, Tomato, Avocado)
* Soy, Grasses and Sprouts

What Food is Not Allowed

Sugar, dairy, meat (apart from fish occasionally or when transitioning), caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, wheat, yeast, fruit (apart from those mentioned above), bad fats (saturated, trans-fatty acids, hydrogenated) and salt.

The most effective way to reverse the trend of over-acidification is to ‘cleanse’ the body of toxins and rapidly create an alkaline environment in which the body can heal itself. Cleansing is a natural, holistic method of healing in which the body detoxifies itself and regenerates healthy vibrant cells, effectively becoming more alkalized.

Known Benefits

USDA Study has shown Alkaline foods prevent muscle and bone loss. Alkaline diet is similar to a practice in the traditional Chinese medicinal diet, in which patients with minor illness is made to eat vegetables or fruits and forgo nuts and meat, a practice called “quench the fire”.
Additional Suggested Health Benefits

According to some alternative medicine practitioners, the shift to an acid-producing diet is the cause of a number of chronic diseases. Some practitioners recommend the alkaline diet if a person has the following symptoms and other illnesses have been ruled out.

* Lack of energy
* Excessive mucous production
* Nasal congestion
* Frequent colds and flu
* Anxiety, nervousness, irritability
* Ovarian cysts, polycystic ovaries, benign breast cysts
* Headache

Potential Risks of the Alkaline Diet

An alkaline diet is a diet that emphasizes, to a varying degree, fresh fruit, vegetables, roots and tubers, nuts, and legumes. Because Alkaline Diets promote the exclusion of many foods, thos can be harmful to the body.

The alkaline diet should not be used by people with acute or chronic kidney failure unless under a doctor’s supervision. People with pre-existing heart disease and those on medications that affect potassium levels in the body should check with their doctor first.

What the Experts Say About the Alkaline Diet

Advocates of alkaline diets claim that they help you lose weight, increase your energy, and even reduce your risk of heart disease and cancer. Although conventional doctors do believe that increasing consumption of fruit and vegetables and reducing one’s intake of meat, salt, and refined grains is beneficial to health, most conventional doctors do not believe that an acid-producing diet is the foundation of chronic illness. In conventional medicine, there is evidence, however, that alkaline diets may help prevent the formation of calcium kidney stones, osteoporosis, and age-related muscle wasting.

The common belief among most medical practitioners, however, is that the blood alkalinity (pH) is not significantly affected by diet, except for pathological cases (e.g., of ketoacodos produced by diabetes).

Bottom Line

Studies of alkaline diets are limited to animal and test tube trials. There’s no scientific evidence at this time that alkaline diets are beneficial to humans.