What is up you guys? Welcome to another edition of controversial thoughts. This is my weekly soliloquy. It's my week weekly my weekly. It's my weekly opportunity to do a little monologuing about something that I find interesting or relevant.

Last week's controversial thoughts episode was about kids and what diet might be ideal for kids is an animal based diet appropriate for kids and the short answer there in my opinion was clearly yes.

I believe that an animal based diet based on organs meat fruit things like honey is quite appropriate evolutionarily clinically physiologically for children with so many precedence and so many examples of kids self selecting those foods.

During that controversial thoughts video I reviewed an article about an experiment that was done in the 1930s by a physician looking at kids self selecting diets and these were children between the ages of six and 11 months and one of the interesting things that I came across in the article that I mentioned on the controversial thoughts was that in this study.

All of the kids selected at least a balance of what they considered to be alkaline and acidic foods during the self selection process and the majority of the kids actually had a moderate preponderance for potentially alkaline in the six month period of observation of those children when they were self selecting their diets.

So I found this interesting and it reminded me of these discussions that I've had a little bit in the past and I thought I might update my perspective on acid alkaline elements in your diet.

The first thing I will say is that I've never seen any convincing evidence that an excessively alkaline diet is healthy for humans or that alkalized water is good for humans or that you can prevent cancer by eating an alkaline diet these are generally non science based claims that come from the realm of plant based rhetoric and fairy tales like this.

I mean, so that I did find it interesting that when children were self selecting diets they tended to balance acid and alkaline elements and I think it's worth asking whether we should do that in our own diets and where we might find acidic versus alkaline foods.

Now another thing to note from the beginning is that the blood the pH of your blood doesn't change based on what you eat it's pretty tightly regulated between 7.35 and 7.45 if you don't know what pH is it's a logarithmic scale of the concentration of a hydrogen ion and that is what a lot of biochemistry is based upon what is the pH of a given tissue.

And what is the concentration of acid or specifically the hydrogen ion in that tissue and so it's important to realize that your blood is extremely tightly regulated in its pH.

Now your interstitial fluids that is the fluid between your cells maybe a little bit more variable based on what you eat and certainly your urine which may be an indicator of your interstitial fluids varies significantly based on what you eat because excess acid or excess base that is alkaline are excreted in your urine and so you can take a urinary pH which is a very easy.

Simple thing to do you can buy urinary pH test strips on Amazon or wherever you choose to buy your goods and you can get a sense of your urinary pH and I think urinary pH is an interesting thing for most of us to experiment with if we're into that sort of thing urinary pH will vary throughout the day will vary post brandy early that is after eating if you are waking up in the morning after a long fast maybe a little bit lower and it may rise a little bit throughout the day depending on what you are eating.

Now the other thing I will say here is that there's been an evolution my thinking here a little bit many of you know my own story starting out with a carnivore diet that was quite strict and strict in the best sense of the word I should say it was very intentional it was meat it was organs it was fat and I did great on it for about the first year I've also done a recent controversial thoughts about my concerns with long term ketosis ultimately I did run into issues myself with long term ketosis including muscle cramping heart palpitations related to.

Recalcitrant that is unsolvable electrolyte issues that I think occur in humans when the actions of insulin at the kidney are not present as happens in long term ketogenic diets.

This is not to say that I don't find value in ketogenic diets for certain conditions or in the short term but I think that long term ketosis and otherwise healthy humans is a recipe for.

Basically unfixable electrolyte issues muscle cramps palpitations sleep disturbances and hormonal imbalances so I spoke about that in probably two controversial thoughts podcasts ago.

I will be the first person to say that I think a carnivore diet an animal exclusive diet of meat organs fat etc like I was eating is incredibly beneficial for many people and I think that the things we learn from this should not be forgotten which are that many people benefit from.

I think that the people benefit from cutting out plant foods in their diet whether it's GI issues psychiatric issues autoimmune issues in general I think what we learn clearly from a no citel carnivore diet that is a diet that includes both meat and organs is that getting more of these very nutrient rich very bio available nutrient full foods in your diet is a huge benefit.

I discovered was that adding some plant foods the least toxic plant foods into my diet back into my diet was another huge benefit so what are the least toxic plant foods I talked about that many times in the past on previous podcasts basically you can think about it from the perspective of a plant and realize that a plant has roots stems leaves and seeds that is trying to protect.

All of those are highly defended those are all much more toxic parts of plants in my opinion is the fruit or the flowers that are much less full in general of plant toxins now one of the things we know about plant fruit is that it is much less full of toxins when it is ripe and the seeds that it is carrying are ready to be consumed and hopefully pooped out somewhere and not destroyed by chewing so this is all stuff of previous podcasts but the point that I'm making here is that by including.

Some of the least toxic plant foods in my diet specifically fruit I was able to change the urinary pH and probably the inner social pH of my body significantly if you're wondering about ranges when I was a strict carnivore I would often see a urinary pH of 5 or 5.5 with the addition of fruit in my diet on a daily basis at this point my urinary pH is usually between 6.5 and 7.5.

So this I think is important to consider and I found it quite interesting that the kids were doing this instinctively and I will say that instinctively there is something that feels more balanced and this is completely subjective to me about including some of the least toxic plant foods in your diet some in the health space may argue that this is a reason to include vegetables and from the perspective of acid based balance which I'll get into a little bit more in a moment potential renal acid low.

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