I have touched on this pseudoscience nonsense many times. There is no such thing as a food being acidic or alkaline to the body. However, I still see a lot of “dieticians,” “nutritionists,” practitioners of “holistic nutrition”, and “fitness coaches” claiming that our body need more alkaline foods, or worse, supplements to make it more alkaline.
If you have any understanding of human physiology, you should know that nutrients from the food is mostly absorbed in your intestines and filtered by your liver. As everything that occurs in your body, it’s a very controlled process. Only fully processed and safe nutrients enter the bloodstream. Your body will do everything it can to always uphold homeostasis, i.e., a self-regulating process that controls internal variables necessary to sustain life. And guess what? Yes, that includes the pH-level of tissues and blood. You have kidneys and tissues making sure of that. Even when extreme nutrient deficiencies occur, your body will break down tissues as needed to uphold these processes vital to life for as long as it can – or you would die. It has absolutely nothing to do with foods such as greens or silly supplement ideas such as lemon water or baking soda.
Your blood has a normal pH range of 7.35 to 7.45. This means that blood is naturally slightly alkaline or basic. In comparison, your stomach acid has a pH of around 1.5 to 3. Your saliva can be between 6.0 and 7.4 depending on detoxification and other processes, just like your urine that can vary between 4.5 and 8.0 – which has nothing to do with your body being acidic or not. The pH in tissues can vary a tiny bit because an “acidic” environment is needed for cellular repair, for globulins to work and do their job. In other words, if your cells have been damaged by toxins, poisons, radiation or trauma, that area will be more acidic while our body repair it and heals.
So, when you talk nonsense about alkalizing your body, what part do you want to ‘alkalinize’? Do you want to impair food breakdown in your stomach? Do you want to stop your natural healing process? Do you start to see how stupid this idea is?
pH-levels are controlled by four variables. The first one is iron in your blood, which is strictly controlled by your kidneys. They filter nutrients in and out as they are required. The second is carbon dioxide and oxygen as provided by your lungs, which can be adjusted to maintain the correct pH in tissues, or make it more acidic to aid in repair purposes; this is controlled by your cells and their need for carbon dioxide. The third one is protein anions such as albumin and globulin in the blood; and they are built up or broken down depending on what is needed to aid in any process. And the fourth one is body temperature, which is maintained fairly steadily. And body temperature is not really used to control pH, more a result of it, as when heavy repair and detoxification occurs, hence a ‘fever.’
None of these are food. And none of these can be altered by what food you consume, as food is simply broken down into nutrients and the rest is discarded as feces.
The only time you will actually notice a small shift in pH towards the body being more acidic is when you experience kidney failure and/or when you die. But that, again, has nothing to do with food being acidic or alkaline, which is pure nonsense. And, just to humor the situation, even if a food were perceived as alkaline, the body would still not alter its pH balance, since its pH is always where it needs to be for the current metabolic and enzymatic processes taking place. Homeostasis.