Thursday, October 20, 2011

Science Experiment Part 2 - The Research

So, to continue my previous post, I have been a faithful student at the University of Google for some time now.  I really ramped up my hours while I was in the hospital, and have tried to maintain my full time status since.  So while researching acidic foods I made all sorts of important discoveries.

One has to do with the ph content of foods and your own body.  Well, I am not a scientist at all and so I'm not going to try to explain in detail what I don't fully understand. Not to mention there are a host of inconsistent articles out there on the topic.  However, here is what seems to be simple and consistent:  The ph scale goes from 0 to 14, 7 being neutral.  Values greater than 7 are base (alkaline) and less than 7 are acidic. Your body and its fluids all have a reading.  The foods you eat are considered one or the other based on what your body does with the food after consumption.  Being acidic is bad in a whole lot of ways.  It can cause mouth ulcers, kidney problems, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease and cancer to name a few.

The inconsistencies come when trying to determine what the normal ph reading should be (you are generally testing urine and saliva), and the values of foods. I also stumbled across something called a PRAL value for food which is some number that's supposed to tell you the alkaline or acid load of a food.  It gets a little confusing here because using these numbers, the lower number is alkaline and the higher number is acid.

And then there is this one website called quackwatch which basically discards the whole theory.

SO, you could really spend all day on the internet looking up this sort of thing and you just have to draw the line somewhere.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go brush my teeth.  I'll tell you about the actual experiment in Part 3.

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