Alkaline Water

Alkaline water is all the buzz these days. Is is healthy or harmful to ingest? What are the best sources or best methods of producing alkaline water?

Let's start with the science:

Regular water has a pH of 7 (neutral). The pH scale ranges from 0-14. Anything below 7 is considered acidic and anything above 7 is considered basic. Too much acid or too much base can be hazardous at a certain point-- for instance, we would not drink battery acid or bleach.)

Alkaline Beverages
There are plenty of beverages we drink that are considered acidic: Orange juice, lemon juice, tomato juice to name a few. However despite their initial pH, because these fruits naturally contain minerals like potassium, calcium, magnesium, and selenium- they actually have an alkalizing affect on the body. This applies to most FRESH squeezed juices. The alkalizing effects change when cane sugar is added to the juice, (sugar increases acidity) or when chemicals are added. Now coffee is another weird one; Coffee is by definition acidic, however the better quality the coffee, the less acidity. The more pesticides and chemicals added to the coffee, the higher the acidity, and it applies again here that adding sugar to the coffee increases acidity. The best way to drink coffee is black, and made from good quality organic beans. Dairy products are alkaline or at least have a highly alkaline component to them (calcium) and an acidic component (protein). Different dairy products have different pH values. For instance: ice cream has lots of sugar or artificial sweeteners added to it. But good goat milk and whole milk, are both alkaline.

The key to understanding alkaline benefits of beverages and foods is to know how our body metabolizes something in order for us to understand whether it will have a acidic or alkaline influence on the body.

Alkaline Water
First of all, do we need water to be alkaline? The normal pH of water is actually neutral. But of course we are talking distilled water here. The addition of minerals like magnesium, calcium, sodium increase the pH of water. Water that is naturally running over rocks and through streams is in a naturally alkalized state due to picking up all sorts of minerals that naturally occur. Now, tap water is generally acidified in order to put it in a more sanitary form by adding things like chlorine and fluorine to the water to allow it to be drinkable for a general population and be free of any harmful bacteria. So the typical glass of fresh tap water is around a 6 in pH....still not horribly acidic, but ingesting chlorine and fluorine might be a problem.

There are many water alkalizing devices out there and most of which use platinum and titanium rods to 'ionize' the water. Ionizing the water will move electrons around, therefore casting off the acidic water by exchanging the left over hydrogen to create a more alkaline pH. These ionizers increase alkalinity still by sometimes adding minerals to the water after the water is alkalized, creating a water with as high as 9.5 pH.

The cost of these ionizers can be thousands of dollars to install into a home system and usually only effect one source of water like the tap you drink from or cook from, leaving out the shower, and other faucets you may use in the house. Now, while alkalizing water could be good for us, the quality of the water is in question if the source is coming from a tap. For example: Chlorinated/fluorinated water that has been alkalized. We then just change the pH with a ionizer and still leave in all the crud. The better option to consider is to first filter the water and THEN ionize it. But still, what would be best for our health would be to have minerals in filtered water that increased pH naturally. So maybe all we are left with by drinking ionized water is a changed pH, and when filtering water THEN alkalizing it, we are left with VERY expensive water that could be replicated by adding some sodium bicarbonate to filtered water.

Lastly, determining the nutritional benefit of alkaline water is a hard one. There are many claims made on it suggesting it has anti-cancer properties and helps to alkalize our blood as acidic drinks and foods are thought of as harmful to our health and linked with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc. Alkaline substances are beneficial to our health but as far as water goes, I wonder if it is better to just filter our water VERY WELL and look to food for the rest. ??

What do Naturopathic Doctors Treat?

The answer is we treat all types of conditions from Allergies, common colds, sleep problems, to mental health, cardiovascular disease, thyroid problems, autoimmunity, and diabetes.

Naturopathic Doctors are skilled primary care physicians. We are trained in prevention. Our job is to find out why you have a certain ailment or disease and use therapies that support your body to heal on it's own. Let's take cardiovascular disease for instance. The reason for high blood pressure is not a deficiency in Lisionpril or Metoprolol but it means your heart is doing more work than it should be to pump blood to the rest of your body. A reason for this may be that is does not have the right nutrients available to contact and relax properly like calcium and magnesium. It may be that you are stressed all the time, and stress makes your blood pressure raise up, meaning we need to correct the stress!  Other influences are excess weight putting pressure on the heart and other organs to do their job. Correcting the weight will help improve blood pressure. While some of our therapies will require you to do some work and participate in your health, we are garunteeing that by participating and taking care of yourself-your quality of life will improve and you will live longer.

How do Naturopathic Doctors Treat Disease?

Let me explain Naturopathy. Let's start with the suffix -pathy or -pathic. This refers to a system of treating disease. The prefix Naturo refers to the idea of treating disease Naturally or Holistically. As I have previously discussed, Naturopathic Doctors have rigorous training in the basics of medicine but are further trained in subjects that help us to understand the body's innate healing process or function. Here are the main modalities:

Nutrition: Nutrition is a complicated subject and requires a deep understanding of the biochemical processes in the body. Telling someone to 'eat their vegetables' or 'take a multivitamin' can be good advice for us all however, some of us may need more of certain nutrients than others depending on our pathological state or imbalance. Nutrients can help treat a variety of conditions. Often times we have less of an imbalance of Lisinopril or Lipitor but actually have a calcium/magnesium, or fatty acid deficiency. While an even more compelling thought is: our diets effect our health! The state of our diets currently is that of concern. Due to elements outside our control, our diets are much less nutrient rich because our soils have less nutrients, food is shipped all around the world to get to us, and processing depletes nutrients. Cooking and frying will even further decrease the nutritional value. Ill speak more of this in time, but the skinny is- our diets are not what they used to be, it is something we need more training and awareness about AND nutrients are powerful treatment tools when initiated by a skilled physician.

Botanical Medicine: Botanical medicine encompasses the healing properties of plants. Before the pharmaceutical boom, we relied on botanicals to treat all sorts of ailments. Actually, pharmaceuticals were developed from isolating toxic components of plants. For instance Aspirin or salicylic acid is derived from willow bark. Willow is rich in salicylates that can be isolated and turned into our common aspirin.  As with most botanicals, when leaving them in the whole plant form we are treating medicine like food for our bodies. We are not extracting a specific component from the plant but using a particular form such as: whole plant, leaf, root, etc. to use in a synergistic sense to obtain all sorts of nutritional benefits.

Physical Medicine: Physical Medicine includes the study and function of basic anatomy and physiology. To understand a person in a wholistic sense we have to consider muscles, nerves, bones and their anatomical placement or behavior in the body. Our training in this area includes a spectrum of modalities to include manipulation (moving a bone back into place with simple, gentle adjustments), stretching and exercising muscles (fatiguing muscles that are holding bones and nerves in the wrong places), and using other treatments like micro-current and ultrasound to heal soft tissue.

Homeopathic Medicine:  This branch of medicine has been around for a very long time dating back to the 1700's. It is based on the law of similars which means it uses small dilutions of substances that have a similar behavior to the offending organism, whether it be a joint problem, sprain, common cold, allergy, or even cardiovascular disease; there is something to remedy the patient. Determining the appropriate remedy require a very in-depth evaluation of the patients symptoms.

All other therapies are considered around a few main principles:

1.  Identify and Treat the Cause of Illness
2.  The Healing Power of Nature
3.  Do No Harm
4.  Doctor as a Teacher
5.  Treat the Whole Person
6.  Prevention

The use of other modalities such as pharmaceutical drugs are used if needed and indicated. Overall, if something is outside the scope of Naturopathic Treatments, it is common to refer to a more appropriate alternative.

I am not just a Naturopathic Doctor, I am a seeker of wellness, happiness, good food, wine and exercise. Welcome to my blog! This blog is about living our passions. I hope this can inspire others to follow their passions, live their dreams and learn how to navigate obstacles because that is truly wellness. xxoo