Diets aren’t always about losing weight. Sometimes, an eating regime can be about healing the body and protecting oneself from disease. Enter the alkaline diet.
The alkaline diet is based on a whole lot of chemistry and science mumbo-jumbo, but it basically breaks down to this: acidic foods suck away your very life force, while alkaline foods supercharge your fluids and make you a superhero. Alkaline foods are supposed to balance the body’s pH levels, reducing the risk of things like osteoporosis and cancer.
Of course, a side effect of cutting out acidic foods happens to be weight loss, since, surprise, surprise, all the tastiest foods really mess with your body’s pH. Breads, sweets, meat, alcohol, and coffee are all no-nos on the alkaline diet. But, there are some other foods you wouldn’t expect on the acidic side of the spectrum. Nuts, most grains, beans, and fish are also disease-causing culprits.
Alkaline foods are a sneaky bunch, too. Things that taste acidic, like citrus fruits and apple cider vinegar, are some of the most alkaline foods of them all. And, somehow, almonds have snuck in as the only nut that doesn’t up your acid levels.
The popularity of the alkaline diet is on the rise this year, thanks to endorsements from celebrities like Kirsten Dunst and Gwyneth Paltrow. Healthy lifestyle bloggers, like Toronto’s Joy McCarthy, are all about the alkaline diet, to the point of recommending a complicated and expensive system for alkalizing your tap water. Yes, even plain old water has become a target in the never-ending quest to complicate the hell out of healthy eating.
It’s no surprise that, like any other diet that tells us to cut out everything but vegetables, the alkaline way of eating has its critics. Mostly, these critics point to the fact that there’s little to no evidence that what we eat changes our pH balance, since our body is self-regulating, no matter what we ingest.
Of course, cutting out processed food and alcohol in favour of a pile of vegetables will lead to better health, but some say that alkalinity has nothing to do with it.