Oxidizing Food

Answer Yes or No to the following:

Raw fruits and vegetables are alkaline – yes?
Meat and milk are acid – yes?
Eat 80% alkaline foods – yes?
If you answered Yes to any one, you are wrong!

Acid And Alkaline Foods
For more than a century scientists have tested a food for its alkaline or acid content by burning that food down to its ashes, its inorganic minerals. Minerals are teeny rocks, all that’s left after a fire, which we see as ash. They pour these ashes into pure water and test the solution to see if the ashes are more acid, or alkaline.

Some minerals are alkaline, like sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and silicon. Others are acid, such as sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine and iodine. So if a food has more acid minerals, its ash will test acidic, and a food chart will list that food as "acid."

If a food has more alkaline minerals – like raw fruits and vegetables – we used to believe its alkaline-forming, that it leaves more alkaline minerals in our blood after digestion. Same for acid foods such as meat and milk, we thought they left an acid ash in our blood.

Do You Have a Fire Inside You?
Just one error here, everyone assumed our digestive systems are burning food down or oxidizing it perfectly, one hundred percent. That when our digestive and energy systems are finished with a food, there’s nothing but ashes (minerals) left.

For most of us, that’s simply not true. We don’t have little fires inside us! We have metabolic pathways where a gazillion things are gawky. That’s “clumsy and bumbling along.”

First we gulp our food and don’t chew it to a liquid – drink your food and chew your drinks! From there it’s an endless sea of problems right through our digestive tract, such as low HCL (hydrochloric acid) in our stomach after age 40, or collapsed intestinal villi from a lifetime of grains – collapsed villi can’t absorb food, so perfectly good food passes on to your colon and out into the toilet.

Sang Whang writes in Reverse Aging © 2001:

“Many diet books contain tables with acid forming foods and alkaline forming foods.”

“The big assumption made here is that the food will be completely oxidized (metabolized) by the cells; therefore, the acidity or alkalinity of the food residue (ash) is exclusively determined by these inorganic minerals.”

“Unfortunately, 97% of all foods (the organic elements of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen) do not burn completely and they leave organic acidic waste products.”

“For this reason, even if you eat nothing but alkaline forming foods, your urine will be acidic and so will your perspiration.”

What’s Your Dominant Metabolic System?
For argument’s sake, let’s say we DO digest our food perfectly, then are raw fruits and vegetables alkaline? Meat and milk acid?

Nope, wrong again. Dr. Gabriel Cousens at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona is proving that some people can eat raw foods and have excess acid in their blood afterwards. He tests how alkaline or acid his patient’s blood is after a meal (measures the change in their blood pH).

He reports in his book Conscious Eating © 2000:

“The blood pH tests are totally different than what is taught in medical schools and in most of the naturopathic literature ... The research shows that food behaves differently in people ... it is the dominant metabolic system of that person which determines whether a nutrient will react in an acid or alkaline way in the body.”

What is a metabolic system? It is the organ and pathways that take care of a specific function, e.g. our heart and circulatory system, our lungs and pulmonary system.

Our Oxidative System is in every little cell. It plucks atoms from the food we eat, to make molecules of energy called ATP.


60% Are Oxidative-Dominant
Dr. Cousens writes: “The oxidative system is dominant in approximately 60% of the population ... fruits and vegetables in the oxidative-dominant system will cause the blood to move to the acid side.”

Wow, for the 60% of us who are oxidative-dominant, raw foods will acidify us! David Wolfe in The Sunfood Diet Success System prints a chart showing most fruits to be slightly acid-forming.

But Cousens’ clinical work shows that this is true only when your oxidative system dominates over your other systems. We could be fast oxidizers or slow oxidizers.


Slow Oxidizers
Fast Oxidizers

high-carbohydrate foods like fruits and grains make you feel good emotionally and energetically
high-carbohydrate foods don’t satisfy you or they make you feel worse

you love sweets and need sweet with a meal to feel satisfied
you prefer fatty foods over sweet – you don’t feel good after fruit and candy

excess fatty foods (avocados, nut butters) or high-protein foods (beans, nuts, flesh) make you feel lethargic and sleepy
a high-protein or fatty meal (like seed milk) gives you energy and a feeling of well-being

perhaps you grew up with an aversion to flesh foods
you crave flesh foods

you don’t like sour foods like lemons
you like sour and salty foods

you can skip meals and maintain energy
you have a strong appetite for each meal

you have trouble falling asleep if you eat too late
eating before sleep helps you to sleep through the night

you can handle fasting without dreadful shakiness or headaches
you don’t enjoy fasting, you feel jittery, weak and hungry

Click through to next page for best food to eat if you’re slow or fast oxidizer


How an Ionizer-Filter Helps
Some of us are mid-range, neither fast nor slow oxidizers. As we get healthier, we shift toward a mixed oxidizer. Yet still for most of us our oxidative system remains dominant among all our metabolic systems. This means we need to take in more alkaline minerals if we’re a raw-fooder eating fruits and vegetables.

This is why I chose the Jupiter Melody alkaline water filter as my filter of choice. It’s obvious to me I’m oxidative-dominant. I’m a slow oxidizer. I need more carbohydrates in my diet. I do well on lots of fruit and raw grain crackers.

Same with fast oxidizers, and anyone whose oxidative system is dominant – it’s likely you’ll feel a difference in your energy and overall sense of well-being, when you drink alkaline water.

If you eat meat or cooked food, then for you alkaline water will quench all those free radicals – see Quench Free Radicals.

Biochemical Individuality
We are each biochemically unique. No two faces are the same and no two humans work the same inside. This is so clear when it comes to our food choices.

Respecting your neighbor’s food likes and dislikes is Step Four of the 12 Steps to Raw Foods by Victoria Boutenko: “I shall live in harmony with people who eat cooked food” [cooked includes flesh such as chicken, meat, fish].

Step Two is: “I believe that live vegan food is the most natural diet for a human being.” [vegan is non-dairy vegetarian]

One reason we crave different foods is because our oxidative system is converting food into energy at different speeds.

Our oxidative system is the metabolic pathway in each and every cell whereby proteins, fats and sugars from food, are converted into ATP and heat.

ATP is our gasoline, the molecule that provides energy to enzymes when they need a little “push” to do their work. Every cell has about two million ATP molecules in use every minute, providing energy for its chemical reactions.