Hello there and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host

Monica Reinagle and today I thought we'd take a closer look at claims that an alkaline diet will help keep you

healthier.

There are a slew of diet books out there claiming that balancing the pH of your diet will balance your blood chemistry, prevent disease, heal your gut, help you lose weight and generally optimize your health.

You'll also find extensive lists of alkaline and acid-forming foods, even pH strips,

to test the pH of your saliva or your urine.

So let's sort fact from fiction starting with a few facts.

Every food you eat leaves a residue in the body after it is fully digested

and that residue or ash is either acidic or alkaline.

This has nothing to do with whether the food itself is acidic.

Lemons for example are acidic as you can tell by their pucker factor,

and yet lemons leave an alkaline residue.

To keep this from getting too confusing,

the preferred terminology is that lemon is an acidic food,

but not an acid-forming food.

In general, fruits and vegetables are alkaline forming, whereas meats and grains are acid forming.

Now the double of course is in the details and if you go poking around online, you're likely to run into a lot of contradictory advice.

Foods that are listed as acid forming on one website listed as alkaline forming on another.

Sometimes this is because of confusion between the pH of the food

itself and the pH of its ash or residue. Or it may be due to wellness influencers who don't really understand the science

and end up cutting and pasting bad information from some other influencers

misinformed materials. There's a lot of that going around in the world of

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