from "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" pub. 1939, p.299
"An important source of misapprehension is the literature and teachings of fadists. Such, for example, as is the misapprehenion of many people that they must only use alkaline producing foods and that a great danger is associated with the use of acid producing foods. In the primitive races I have found practically no difference between the acid balance meat diet of the isolated Eskimos of the far north and the less acid vegetable and milk diet of the other groups as efficient factors in control of caries(cavities). It is important to keep in mind that our bodies have a mechanism for maintaining proper acid and alkali balance in the blood and this varies through only a very narrow limit whether the total balance of food eaten is acid or alkaline."
Do keep in mind that the dietary systems Price is comparing are NON-Westernized. All local, whole foods, no chemicals, pesticides, or cheetos.
I am particularly curious about this:
"It is important to keep in mind that our bodies have a mechanism for maintaining proper acid and alkali balance in the blood and this varies through only a very narrow limit whether the total balance of food eaten is acid or alkaline."
Can someone illuminate me on that point?
from the bottom of the learning curve, with love, Wombat
well, i have not finished reading Prices book yet, tho i am making good headway and it fascinating to say the least.
but as i understand Price, he belived that there are two critical factors in the diet - minerals and plenty of the fat soluable "mineral activators" by which he mostly meant Vit A and D, and also 'activator X' which is a concept i don't want to get into in this post (mainly because i don't yet fully understand it)
so, according to Price, if a person is getting plenty of minerals and plenty of mineral activators, then the ph level can be maintained quite easily. thus a person may eat liver (an "acid" producing food), and it creates an acidic reaction in the body, HOWEVER the liver is so full of vit A and D and other minerals, that the OVERALL impact is to provide the person's body with all the raw material it needs to maintain ph balance, and in that instance its easy to do so.
my comment - however, if those factors are missing, then you may need pay close attention to the diet and choose foods carefully in order to maintian ph.
i think Price was saying the ph is easy to maintain IF the person is eating a diet close to what he called the true primitive diet. this is my understanding of Price's work so far. i could be off a bit tho.
His information is a little unclear here. He refers to an "acid balance diet". One would presume that an "acid balance diet" would lead to a condition of acidosis. It seems that that is too simplistic a view, that's like saying "fat makes you fat".
So, with proper mineral and vitamin uptake, the body has the tools that it needs to maintain proper pH, no matter the source of those vitamins & minerals? Once again whole food sources, of course.
BTW, high vitamin butter(activator x)/fish oil blends are available through links on the Weston Price site...
It's called buffering. Here is my layman's explanation.
For any given acid added to water (or something else it can dissolve in), there is a certain degree that the acid can dissolve into hydrogen ions (protons) and the negative ion. Substances that can dissolve well are strong acids. Substances that do not dissolve well are weak acids.
Consider hydrochloric acid. In water, it breaks down into hydrogen ion (H+) and chloride ion (Cl-), and it does so extremely well, so much so that you can get extremely low pH with not so much hydrochloric acid, and pretty much all of the molecules break apart. Hydrochloric acid is, therefore, a strong acid. On the other hand, the chloride ion, Cl-, is the complementary ("conjugate") base for hydrochloric acid, and it is a very weak base, because it does not want to rejoin up with hydrogen.
Consider acetic acid, a.k.a. vinegar. Acetic acid is a weak acid, in that most of the molecules (>99.5%, usually) will not break apart into hydrogen ion (H+) and acetate ion (CH3COO-). Because of this, the acetate ion (CH3COO-) is considered a strong base. If many acetate ions are floating around in water, they will tend to pull any additional hydrogen ions (H+) out of the water and form acetic acid (CH3COOH).
In blood, human blood, anyway, carbonate (CO3 2-) is the ion of choice for buffering. This comes from carbonic acid, H2CO3, which can be formed by dissolving carbon dioxide in water. (Even so, very little of the carbon dioxide joins with water to form carbonic acid.) By keeping carbonate ion in the blood stream, any hydrogen ions that find their way into the blood stream are rapidly vacuumed up by the carbonate ions and find themselves converted into carbonic acid. This is helped by a friendly little enzyme called carbonic anhydrase which makes the operation occur about a billion times faster than it ordinarily would.
Now, the nice thing about using carbonate is that, not only does it scoop up hydrogen ions, but carbonic acid prefers to become carbon dioxide and water (CO2 and H2O) instead of remaning a single molecule (H2CO3) and then breaking back apart into hydrogen ions and carbonate. Because of this, using carbonate as a buffer means that we convert any excess acidity in the blood stream into water and keep it that way by exhaling the CO2.
The trick is keeping enough carbonate in the blood, and I'm afraid I'm at the end of my understanding of the process here. I am told that the body dumps carbonate into the bloodstream during food digestion (hydrogen ions go into the stomach to make stomach acid; carbonate ions go into the bloodstream to help buffer any acidity found there), but I don't think Science even fully understand how this process works (unless my spies have been negligent in their weekly reports...).
Do you have a layman's dumb nephew's explanation, perhaps?
Something with pictures? Maybe the carbonates should be represented as "good guys" and the hydrogen as "bad guys"? And I see Carbonic Anhydrase as being REALLY cute, soft & fuzzy:)
"Buffering for Dummies"?
I actually DID glean a little understanding from this, thank you very much.
Just don't tell me that all these little characters I am envisioning switch roles(good boys gone BAAAADDD)...when the internal environment changes...
Blood uses a substance called a buffer, plus an enzyme to greatly speed up the process, to remove acidity from the blood as soon as it arrives in the bloodstream. A buffer is a substance that keeps acidity from running rampant by merging with it so that it cannot try to eat through something else. And what a happy coincidence it is that the buffer used eats up acid to form the very same things our body produces when it breaks down sugars for energy: water and carbon dioxide. Human bodies excel at ridding themselves of carbon dioxide and water, so eliminating acids from the bloodstream is pretty trivial, too. As long as there's enough of the buffer material and the enzyme in the bloodstream, acidity doesn't stand a chance there.
sounds like that puts a damper on the naysayers of distilled water and their "acid state" they claim is harmful when the pure water absorbs carbon dioxide. and Iodine is toxic.
My only problem with distilled is people who use it without properly remineralising, my clinic has seen many people who switched to distilled when it got big in the 80s/90s come in with general multi-mineral deficiencies because they didnt know they should remineralise it (we assume distilled may be the problem, as its a connecting factor between all the cases).
I find it funny that many people dont realise that whilst an acid state is detrimental to health, people can live with it for years. An alkaline state is death, pure and simple. Our body deals with 'aciditiy' much more effectively. I wonder what this implications this has, generally?
In a past life I used to eat a lot of sugar and had no digestion problems.Now that I am eating healthier..........I do. I almost wonder whether eating this acid forming stuff helped out an inherant weakness in my digestive system. In the post below we discussed the notion of how to increase stomach acid without adding acid....What do you think....
"I find it funny that many people dont realise that whilst an acid state is detrimental to health, people can live with it for years. An alkaline state is death, pure and simple. Our body deals with 'aciditiy' much more effectively. I wonder what this implications this has, generally?"
you are drinking a strongly alkalising drink. i made this point before about the body always going acid, never alkaline, when there is problems with diet and illness. could it be that maybe the good lord designed us this way for a reason?
Our bodies are acid forming by nature... any movement produces acid waste... lactic acid. If the body does not have enough alkaline minerals to neutralize the acid produced we get sore.
There are other examples, but the issue really is about balance. As we are acid producing by function, we need to eat a primarily alkaline diet to be at our best.
Sure we can live a long time in an acidic state, but then we start talking about quality of life.
I tend to think so... long before I found curezone I almost intuitively gravitated to high mineral dense foods and sea weeds as they made me feel better... I do not think much about vitamins any more save for one, vitamin C and I drink plenty of fresh squeezed citrus. I have more citrus than I can use, my house was built in the 50's in the middle of a commercial citrus orchard and people give it away here... some have 20 trees on their properties.
Unfortunately you have to know people who live in each of the old groves, lemon, grapefruit, orange etc. in order to get a good variety. And in some cases, as in mine, the first home owners took out the trees and landscaped :-( Still, I am VERY fortunate and count my blessings.
All varieties around me are old world varieties and they come into season just after Christmas till about the end of this month... I have the juicer out and primed and the freezer empty :-)
You are lucky, Grz. We're lucky, too, in that we planted our own:)
The thing that I find confusing is that so often these days the so-called "healthy" diet recommended is SO far away from what we evolved on. And people may be eating what they consider to be an alkalising diet(heavy on fruits & vegs, easy on or eradication of animal products). Now if you look into Price's research, NO civilizations evolved vegetarian.
Nutrient dense foods. Oil.
I don't really have a point here, you are witness to a thought process:)
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Weston A. Price on Alkaline/Acid Balance 
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