The pH of Your Body

Though many people are vaguely aware that an alkalizing diet is generally healthier than one that causes excess acidity in the body, most people probably do not even know that pH stands for "potential hydrogen," and they also probably do not know what diseases are caused by pH imbalances nor how diet and herbs affect pH balance.

ABCs of pH

The speed of biochemical reactions in the body is affected by the "potential hydrogen" which is measured on a scale of zero to 14, with seven being neutral. Anything below seven is acidic and anything above is alkaline. The main characteristic of alkalinity is electrical resistance, meaning that metabolism is slower and there is also more potential for taking up hydrogen. Acid, on the other hand, is hot and "catabolic": it results in faster breakdown because electricity travels faster in an acidic environment, an environment that for these and other reasons is less stable than an alkaline milieu.

There are many theories of illness, but one of them that is rather widely accepted is that all disease begins in an acidic terrain and is reversed when the conditions supporting pathogenicity are corrected.

Different parts of the body have a different normal pH. In order to break down food efficiently, the stomach must be acidic, usually in the range of 1-2. The acidity is caused by the presence of hydrochloric acid and when there is insufficient production of hydrochloric acid, food is broken down by fermentation instead of digestion. This is a serious but oft neglected problem. Early symptoms may consist of abdominal rumblings, distention, and gas, but chronic poor digestion is a recipe for disaster.

Blood pH must remain highly constant. Most people think it should be precisely 7.4, a bit on the alkaline side, but it can fluctuate half a point one way or the other without crisis. When the blood is tending towards acidity, the body will compensate by leeching minerals from the bones. In my opinion, this is probably one of the causes of osteoporosis, but there are additional factors contributing to this chronic weakness.

Minerals are alkalizing; they buffer against acidity and impede the overrapid movement of electricity and the ravages that attend excess movement and commotion. Minerals are actually coenzymes and they are necessary for vitamin utilization. Taking vitamins in the absence of minerals is not very effective. Personally, I take mineral supplements from time to time but I consume vitamins in food, not in pills. I have good reasons for this controversial habit: while it is relatively easy to find 100% natural sources of minerals, there is no such thing as a natural multivitamin.

Minerals

My preferred source of minerals is pravalmoti, an Ayurvedic powder made from coral and pearls. Unfortunately, it is not always readily available so my next favorite is fossilized sea vegetables from the Great Salt Lake. The reason is that these are not merely natural, they are produced in a manner to retain the balance of the trace minerals to each other. Many people take calcium or magnesium or some other form of supplement, but precisely how much of each mineral we need depends on assimilation as well as what we have been eating. Many cancer patients, especially those in the midst of conventional therapy and those in a seriously degenerative state, cannot assimilate conventional mineral supplements so most of what is ingested is not utilized. In severe cases, the tablets or capsules pass all the way through the gastrointestinal tract without breaking down. People having such experiences might consider liquid forms of trace minerals or Willard Water.

There are some other sources of minerals worth mentioning. One is shilajit. Even experts are not sure whether shilajit is a vegetable or a mineral. Many authorities regard shilajit as the most important member of the Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia. It is "harvested" from rocks when the weather is hot. It is a sort of resinous exudate, sometimes called asphalt or pitch, that is caused by runoff from the Himalayas. Though opinions differ, it is generally believed that vegetable matter seeps into the rocks where it ages and absorbs additional minerals. Then, when the sun is very intense, a substance emerges from fissures in the rocks that has potent medicinal value. Pundits believe that shilajit enhances the action of all other Ayurvedic formulas.

Though not prohibitively expensive in the West, in India, shilajit is regarded as a rich man's medicine. Thanks to the end of the British raj, clinical trials are beginning to emerge from India. These suggest that shilajit reduces damage caused by free radicals, especially in the pancreas. It is hence becoming the medicine of choice for diabetics as well as those suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Pleomorphism

Since the day I first heard about pleomorphism, I instinctively knew the theory was right, but then I tend to be iconoclastic and somewhat wary of people whose names have become too well known. In this instance, that name would be Pasteur. It's difficult for those who have repeatedly heard the same partial truths to turn their minds back to prior times to see how generally difficult it is to gain acceptance for a new idea.

To give this argument a sort of historical context, we might consider the etymology of the word "malaria." It comes from the Latin for bad air. Since two-thirds of all people who ever lived on the Planet died of malaria, it is hard to understand that the air was deemed more hazardous to health than mosquitoes.

Scientists can err, and Pasteur erred more than most. The short version of this fascinating piece of medical history is that Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp debated the cause of disease. As we all know, Pasteur won and 20th century medicine was preoccupied with the destruction of disease through vaccines and pharmaceutical medicine. So far as vaccines go, it is now generally understood that almost all health improvements of the last century can be attributed more to improved hygiene than to injections of morbid substances into the body. Germs proliferate under specific conditions, i.e., the terrain or milieu is the problem.

For those who are new to this, I try to take the argument slowly. If you leave some fruit on the kitchen counter, fruit flies appear out of "nowhere" even if the windows were screened and the doors were kept closed. There are all sorts of ramifications to this observation. First, the forces of decomposition are inherent in the fruit. Under certain circumstances, knowable circumstances, the process of rotting and decomposition are triggered. One colleague tells me that this process is triggered by the smell of ammonia. This odor, according to him, makes mold active.

This triggered a rather tremendous satori experience in my transrational mind. I had long been obsessing over parasites and the ammonia they excrete into the blood stream (and anywhere else they are found in the body.) Ammonia is, of course, acidic. That absolutely cannot surprise anyone who has been following this thread this far. The food that best seems to help eliminate ammonia is asparagus. I stumbled on this by engaging in wild experiments on myself in my own kitchen. It led me to take a hard look at shatavari, an Ayurvedic rasayana herb belonging to the asparagus family. Naturally, someone else has already researched this and found that shatavari does indeed possess anti-carcinogenic properties.

Perhaps because I am so deeply involved in healing, it is easy for me to step back and ask how might the 20th century have been different if Bechamp had prevailed over Pasteur. I think it is totally obvious that medicine would have had to focus on diet and immunity rather than germs, vaccines, and drugs. This would have gradually empowered the patient because responsibility for health would be a more personal matter, not one legislated by politicians who serve pharmaceutical companies that are always hawking new shots and pills. We would not have the megalomaniacal corporate domination of health care—and we probably would have a totally different social program for meeting the needs of those who suffer. In short, we are paying the price for bad science and probably will continue to pay that price for a long time to come.

The Milieu

The milieu is a word for the condition of the body. Often, it refers to one site that is compromised by restricted circulation, old injury, or infection. In the circles where pleomorphism is understood and taken seriously, it is known that specific organisms, what Pasteur called germs, change under differing conditions. The milieu or terrain can be manipulated in such a way as to reverse pathogenicity. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss all the details of pleomorphism. Let it suffice to point out that according to Royal Rife, one of the experts who made a lifetime study of this subject, there are 16 stages of pleomorphism. When the pH is imbalanced, organisms change and symptoms of disease begin to appear. For instance, E. coli, an abundant bacterial form, can become salmonella typhi and then mycobacterium tuberculosum, then various yeast forms, and finally the virus he identified as causing cancer: BX (bacterium X) and then BY (bacterium Y), a virus he found in sarcomas. By applying a frequency, he reversed the progression so that the ones associated with the worst degeneration vanished. In every instance, he was able to isolate the BX virus from cancer, but he was also able to make it disappear. Gaston Naessens drew similar conclusions from his work in darkfield microscopy, but most scientists are not observing live blood and hence are completely unaware of changes that occur in microorganisms.

Most probably, every specialist simply applies the tools he or she know best so one person may rely more heavily on diet, another on herbs or supplements, another on electromagnetic frequencies, and perhaps another on sound or color. The point is simply to recognize that we have considerably more control over the disease process than we imagined since basically we choose our own foods and can self-prescribe a wide range of herbs, most of which are alkalizing.

	Shatavari, 90 capsules $
	Shilajit, 60 capsules $
	Research: Willard Water, 8 oz., dark $

Ingrid Naiman
9 April 2006

Sacred Medicine Sanctuary

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2001, 2006, and 2014