What Are Your Body’s pH Levels?

Do you know what your body’s pH levels are today? Those numbers are reliable indicators of whether you’re trending towards health or towards illness. They’re a helpful thing to keep track of. Water everywhere on the planet has a pH level — it’s acidic, alkaline, or neutral — and the body’s water is no exception. These bodies are 70% water and the pH levels are determined by us. Water is in all tissues and it surrounds each cell to keep it adequately moist. If it’s chronically over-acidic, we become ill; if it’s typically slightly alkaline, we are healthy.

How to Measure Your pH Levels

We can measure our own body’s pH by using litmus paper, available at pharmacies and many health food shops. It comes either as strips in a small jar or as a roll in a dispenser. The paper turns pale yellow when dipped in more acidic liquids and darker and greener and then shades of dark blue in more alkaline liquids. It comes with color patches for comparisons. Urine testing is most indicative of our health when done first thing in the morning. It tells us the overall acidity or alkalinity of what we ate and drank the previous day. Saliva can be tested any time and that result gives us a longer view — the pH of our body fluids overall as determined by our diet and lifestyle in the recent past.

• The blood’s pH is always slightly alkaline, at or near 7.365. Our bodies see to this. They draw calcium from the bones and magnesium from the muscles to raise any acid pH and keep it close to 7.365. If it ever moved far from that number, we wouldn’t be here to tell the story.

How We Make Ourselves Too Acidic

Do you spend time in the kitchen? If we repeatedly eat processed or fast foods, we’re filling ourselves with acid. And our long-time favorites such as eggs and bacon, meat and potatoes, fish and chips and pancakes and syrup — they’re all acidic. They may not taste acidic when we eat them but when the body digests them, the waste products are acidic. Then our lymph system must pick up those acidic wastes and carry them to our venous blood which must take them to the liver for excretion or storage. When the liver gets overloaded, the wastes are stored in fatty tissue and the skin or wherever space can be found. Thus the whole body becomes over-acidic.

Microbes and parasites thrive in acidic environments. So to remain healthy in the long haul, our bodies need to be slightly alkaline. Specifically, 7.2 or 7.4 are good levels to shoot for. When our body fluids stay at those levels, microbes and parasites are not invited in. They may get into the body from contaminated air, poor drinking water, or our foods and beverages, but they’ll be unable to settle in the body’s alkaline environment and therefore will be excreted.

Keep an Eye on Your Health Status

Urine pH can be improved pretty quickly by eating more veggies and fruit and less meat and potatoes etc. Saliva pH changes more slowly as we must build up a reserve of alkalinity in the body.

If you are a very busy person, like most of us in the Western world, it would be worth your while to give two-and-a-half minutes some mornings to the pH level of your saliva and urine. By keeping track of this one feature of the human body, its pH levels, we can be aware of whether we’re heading for illness or not.