Alkaline Diet

Beginning your day by having some alkaline breakfast foods is a great way to start your day. The reason for this is that when our bodies are in the best state of pH balance we feel more energetic, enthusiastic and motivated to deal with the challenges of the day ahead. It is well known that when our bodies are in too acidic a state then we often feel lethargic, tired and even ill. There is much more to good health than just our acid/alkaline balance but it is definitely something that we should pay attention to.

Alkaline foods are in the main, fruits and vegetables. Therefore an alkaline breakfast is going to contain a few portions of fresh produce. How we choose to prepare it is a personal choice. In this article what I want to present are a few options that you may want to try if you are wanting to start looking and feeling healthier.

Eating more fruits and vegetables is not exactly an original dietary suggestion. But the interesting thing about following the alkaline diet is that it gives an interesting rationale as to why these foods are good for us.

Alkaline Breakfast Menus

There are a host of different things that we can have at breakfast time that fill us up, give us energy and provide us with a morning alkaline boost. Below are some ideas of foods and drinks that you can consume at breakfast. If you have any other ideas, please leave a comment at the end of this article.

Grapefruit are a great choice for breakfast. They have lots of fiber and even though they are citrus fruits, they actually help us to alkalize. They are also quite good at making us feel full and have lots of vitamin C. You can read more about the effects of certain foods and see how they are classified on alkaline diet food charts.

Grated carrots are another decent option. Again, depending upon the size of your carrots, one or two of these can fill us up quite nicely and by eating these we get plenty of vitamin A as well.

Of course, it is not the case that we can or should only eat alkaline foods at breakfast time. The important point is to ensure that we eat a few servings of fruits and/or vegetables as this ensures that our breakfast will help us to alkalize. So you can have things like banana on toast.

Also, if you like cereal then why not eat that? You could make yourself a fruit and vegetable drink with a juicing appliance to go along with it. There are so many different juice recipes for health that you can find online that I shall not discuss them here.

The alkaline diet is not against a fried breakfast of bacon, sausages and eggs even. If you had a green juice to go along with this, it could potentially still be an alkaline breakfast. But we have to remember that acid/alkaline balance is not the only thing that we have to think about with regards to the foods we eat. A fry up once a week is okay but we do not want to eat a fatty breakfast every day. This could have some serious health consequences down the road.

Finally, coffee is in fact alkaline. But this does not mean that we should drink too much of it. I am a great advocate of drinking coffee because we enjoy it and not because we need it.

I hope this has given you some ideas about how to alkalize your diet at breakfast time.

The alkaline diet continues to become more and more popular. I believe this is to do with people’s desire for a healthy change from all the weight loss fad diets around today. Instead of claiming to deliver unbelievable weight loss within only a matter of weeks, the alkaline diet is not so concerned with this issue. More important to those of us following this way of eating is simply feeling good as we become healthier.

From my own experience with this diet, the more alkaline foods that I consume, the better I feel. This is not exactly rocket science. Foods that have an alkalizing effect upon our bodies are nearly all fruits and vegetables. Everyone knows that these foodstuffs are good for us. The alkaline diet just explains one reason why. Using a juicer is perhaps the easiest way to up the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet.

There are lots of different alkaline diet food charts that you can find on the internet. I would be wary of these and only use them as a rough guide as opposed to actual fact. Many of them have errors. Although in general they are reasonably accurate. In a way, this makes them even more problematic. If they were out and out wrong, it would be easier to reject them.

Instead of using these charts to determine what foods are alkalizing and which ones are acidifying, I use a PRAL Calculator to work out the Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL) values for myself. This calculation was proposed by Remer and Manz. These are two renowned scientists working in this field. A lot of the more accurate information about the alkaline diet comes from their scientific discoveries.

For example, many of you will have heard that carbonated drinks should not be given to children because they are bad for their bones. I did not believe this at all when I first heard it. However Remer and Manz have actually researched this and found it to be true.

Due to the high Potential Renal Acid Load that carbonated drinks produce in the body, their acidifying effects are neutralized by our body. To neutralize an acid, an alkaline compound must be used. This comes from calcium deposits in bone. So carbonated drinks can indeed cause bone loss in children.

This is not to say that we should never have this sort of drink. We should certainly try to avoid drinking too much. This is for a number of reasons including the fact that they are loaded with sugar. But as far as the alkaline diet is concerned, we can still enjoy fizzy drinks as long as we eat a reasonable amount of alkaline foods as well. These will help to keep the pH balance of our body at a more appropriate level.

To conclude, the alkaline diet does not propose that acid foods are necessarily bad for us. The central idea is that we have to have balance. Therefore by eating lots of alkaline foods we can negate the negative effects of our bodies becoming too acidic.