The Vital Acid—Alkaline Balance

Another important aspect of any diet for super health and beauty is one that most nutritional systems completely overlook. It is the question of using foods to help maintain the delicate acid—alkaline balance in your body. For we can reach truly positive health—health beyond the simple absence of disease—and remain permanently healthy only when the foods we eat supply us with a surplus of alkaline-reacting foods. These include green and root vegetables, avocados, fruits (including citrus fruits which, though acid, have an alkalinizing effect on the body), seeds such as sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin, and yogurt.

Your body contains mineral salts. Some of them are alkaline and some are acid. In a healthy body the ratio between alkaline and acid is four to one—that is, 80 percent alkaline to 20 percent acid. To maintain this natural balance, you need only to eat foods which, when digested, produce alkaline salts in approximately these proportions. If, instead, you eat a diet that is highly acid-forming, as the typical Western fare is, then your body is forced to work very hard indeed to regulate the internal acid—alkaline balance and keep your blood slightly alkaline. Without this natural slight alkalinity, your body is unable to repair tissues and heal itself. Overacidity can lead to acidosis, chronic indigestion, irritability, nervousness, excess appetite, rheumatic and arthritic conditions, as well as skin problems and cellulite. Stress, too, is an acid condition. The acid- forming foods, which should make up 20 percent of any diet but no more, include meat, eggs, hard cheese, bread, cereals, sugar and honey, some nuts, and some fats. Coffee, ordinary tea (not green tea or herb teas), and alcohol are also acid-forming.

To give you some idea of what it feels like when your body is too acid, think back to the last typical "good" breakfast you ate—processed cereal with sugar, perhaps an egg, bacon, white toast and jelly, and coffee. Do you remember the immediate feeling of stimulation followed in an hour or two by an unpleasant sense of jangly nerves or tiredness, so that by eleven you had to reach for another cup of coffee to keep yourself going? That is an acid state. In fact, this breakfast is made up of almost all acid-forming foods—the bacon, the white toast and the coffee, the packaged cereal, sugar and so forth. A far better breakfast would be a bowl of Birchermuesli (not the kind of muesli you find in supermarkets, which may be labeled "natural" but is chock-full of sugar) made from natural yogurt, a tablespoonful of rolled oats, a couple of teaspoonfuls of honey and a little cinnamon. On such a breakfast where the fresh fruit and yogurt, which are the alkaline-forming foods, balance the small quantities of acid-forming foods—the grains and the honey—to maintain the ideal ratio of 80 percent alkaline to 20 percent acid, you will find you can work well throughout the morning without suffering "acid rebound." Your body will also be protected against the unnecessary stress of having to work hard to rebalance the blood.

Forget the Salt

Recent studies indicate that the daily sodium requirement for a human being is probably not more than 200 milligrams a day, perhaps slightly higher in someone who performs great physical exertion or in nursing mothers. This small quantity is available naturally in foods alone—vegetables, meats and fish, fruits, and grains for instance—without our ever having to add salt to our foods. Where we do add it, not only when cooking but also at the table, the average sodium intake is thought to be more than twenty-five times that amount. Thanks to the research of Professor Lot Page at Harvard, salt—the ubiquitous substance which the ancient Greeks considered divine—has now been shown beyond all reasonable doubt to be at the root of hypertension, one of our most common twentieth-century illnesses.

Can you eat too much fibre?

Many fibrous plants contain organic acids that bind minerals such as calcium, magnesium, zinc and iron. Although this has caused some concern in the past, there is no evidence that people who eat natural high-fibre diets (such as vegetarians) have low mineral levels, probably because this type of diet is particularly rich in vitamins and minerals. Including about 40g dietary fibre a day in your diet is regarded as being perfectly safe. However, where caution is necessary is in the taking of fibre extracts.

One of the lesser-known effects of fibre-rich diets is an increase in flatulence. When fibre ferments in the large intestine it produces odourless gases, which are not dangerous to health but can cause concern in some people. (Incidentally, offensive odour is caused by gases which are produced as result of the breakdown of other substances in the large bowel - such as sulphur-containing proteins - which have escaped digestion in the small intestine.)

Fibre extracts - handle with care!

If a natural high-fibre diet does not solve the problem of constipation, try taking not more than three tablespoons (9-12g) of digestive bran, divided into three dosages, on a daily basis. (If you don't like the taste of bran au nature], you can improve the flavour by baking it for three hours at 100 °C.) At the same time, increase your fluid intake to at least two litres per day and decrease excessive fat intake. This ensures adequate hydration of the 'extra' fibre.

Beware of over-enthusiatic dosage with fibre extracts or concentrates, as this can be harmful. As a general guideline, a third of the prescribed dosage should be taken for a week and two thirds for another week before the whole amount is taken.

The 'fibre message'

All in all, then, there is agreement that fibre forms an important part of a healthy, balanced diet. High-fibre diets are easy to follow and inexpensive if natural foods are eaten in their unrefined forms.

Guidance from and education by dietitians, nutritionists and doctors, as well as increased advertising of high-fibre products, have brought the 'fibre message' to some sections of our population.

Sadly, however, in other sections the situation is in reverse. As South Africa's rural black people grow increasingly urbanized, so their diets are becoming lower in fibre and higher in fat - and more and more, the so-called 'diseases of affluence' are being seen among them. For the 'fibre message' to have any significant effect on the health of the majority of our population, it must therefore also reach the very people whose diets once gave them natural protection against the degenerative diseases of Western civilization.

When all is said and done, education is only worthwhile when put into practice. So unless you, the consumer, choose high fibre, unrefined foods in preference to refined ones and unless pressure is put on manufacturers to produce the healthier alternatives, medical research and nutrition education will be of little use. Ultimately it is up to you to make your voice heard and to combat the influences of society, lifelong nutritional habits and perhaps simple apathy, in order to put the fibre message into practice.

Worthwhile Sources of Dietary Fibre (Food Cereals & Fibre rating)

• Bread, brown: Fair
• Bread, wholewheat: Good
• Wheat bran: Excellent
• Pronutro: Excellent
• Kelloggs All Bran Flakes: Excellent
• Kelloggs Cornflakes: Good
• Oats: Good
• Oat bran: Excellent
• Weet-Bix: Good
• Maize meal, white: Fair
• Maize meal, unsifted: Good
• Popcorn, plain: Good
• Rice, brown: Fair
• Ryvita, Ryeking: Good
• Provita: Good

Food additives and contaminants

This much-publicised aspect of food production is well provided for in food legislation. A number of specific regulations exist to control any additives and contaminants that may be present in foods, either by direct addition or through indirect absorption. The adding of

colourants is an example of direct addition. Colouring can only be added to a food if the legislation for that food permits it, and only one or more of the colours listed in the regulations can be added. It may not be added in greater quantity than prescribed and it must comply with the standard of purity laid down in the regulation.

An example of indirect absorption is the maximum amount of lead that may be present in food, irrespective of the source. If you're about to argue that there shouldn't be any lead in your food at all, consider that the word 'source' includes the soil in which the plant is grown, the food consumed by an animal used for meat, or equipment in which a food is processed.

Chemicals- cause for concern?

An increasingly large number of additives and processing methods are used to produce the food we eat every day and understandably, public concern is once again on the increase. The amount of chemical substances used in food processing is possibly the major source of worry. Yet the use of these chemicals has been given the green light by legislators, or they would not be present in just about every food on our supermarket shelves.

Why are chemicals necessary in foods? In the simplest terms, because food itself is nothing but chemicals. In fact, the common foods we eat every day are such complex mixtures of chemicals that it would take a brash scientist indeed to assert that the composition of any single food is completely known. Even mother's milk - the only product designed by nature exclusively as a food for mankind - is known to contain more than 140 chemicals!

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that many of the chemicals which man produces are exact copies of those already found in nature. Just one example of this is vitamin C, a vital nutrient which of course occurs abundantly in foods such as citrus fruit and tomatoes. The vitamin C produced by man is identical to the natural chemical, both in terms of chemistry and efficacy, and its widespread use is the only reason scurvy is no longer the scourge of many populations whose normal diets do not provide sufficient of/this essential vitamin.

Interestingly, only a small proportion of pest resistance in plants is manmade. Plants develop their own defence mechanisms against pests and these include the use of natural toxins. Indeed, breeding crops for pest resistance may actually increase their natural toxin levels. For example, it is known that a pest-resistant potato had to be removed from the marketplace in the USA when its natural solanine and chaconine concentrations were found to have reached highly toxic levels. Similarly, a pest-resistant celery had to be discarded when workers handling it suffered outbreaks of dermatitis. It was belatedly discovered that the concentrations of 8-methoxypsoralen (a carcinogen) had inadvertently been increased ten-fold! Unfortunately, since new `disease-resistant' crops are not subjected to the same regulatory scrutiny imposed on man-made pesticides, we may never know how the risks and benefits of reducing pesticide use versus natural toxin consumption ultimately balance out.

To a large extent, the assumption that nature is benign has become ingrained in consumers' minds and even embodied in our regulatory codes. Biological materials are regarded as innocent until proven guilty, while man-made ones are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Without a proper body of balanced scientific scrutiny to back them up, assumptions such as these are not only simplistic - they could bedangerous.

However, solutions to problems such as the above will no doubt be found as more and more research is done in this area; there is no doubt that biotechnology will have an increasingly dramatic impact on the agriculture of the future. The genetic improvement of agricultural crops so that they become more resistant to disease, viruses and drought is clearly an important goal in a world already struggling to feed its billions of inhabitants. While the development of pest-resistant plants may never totally replace the need for agricultural chemicals, it could certainly help to decrease our dependence on them and so lessen the level of contamination to the environment - one of the majorconcerns of our times.