Eating More Vegetables is Good for Your Heart

Eating More Alkaline Foods is Proven to be Better for You

I have waited for this study to be done for years. This is hugely important. The study is simple. Take folks who are showing metabolic stress by having high blood pressure enough to be putting out albumin in their urine. That means they are on the path to kidney disease and eventually heart attacks. Split them into three groups: control, oral bicarbonate, or fruits and vegetables - 2-4 cups a day. The core idea is to see if reversing our acid diet of animal products is good or bad for us.

Results? The fruits and vegetable arm dropped 1 point on BMI (body mass index) weight scoring, from 28 to 27 (still not ideal - we like ,25). But their blood pressure dropped more (129 versus 135), their HDL's went up more, their Lp(a) dropped more than the controls. The bicarb group didn't improve as much. What does this mean and how did these results come about?

Mammals evolved for some 50 million years eating green plants and fruits. Hominids, (gorillas, chimps, orangutans, bonobos,) all eat pounds of leaves a day and all the fruit they can find in fruit season. Plants have a biological ash that is alkaline so when all is fed and done, the animals that eat plants have an alkaline diet and they show it by having alkaline urine. Animals have more sulfur-containing amino acids so their digestion and metabolic processing leave an acid residue. You can see that in yourself. If you eat nothing but salads, fruits, and green vegetables, your urine pH will be higher than 7.0. If you focus on dark green vegetables, you can even gut your pee up to pH 8.0.

We humans had to start eating animal to support or enlarging brain with its calorie demands. So our metabolism had to try and adjust to that. Could we? If you measure the urine of hunter-gatherers, their urine pH is alkaline most of the time because they eat plants that don't run away. When the occasionally catch an animal, they feast on that and their pH becomes acidic for a day or so.

The formula is simple. It takes 3 servings of plants to neutralize the acid in one serving of animal. It takes 6 servings of plant to neutralize one serving of cheese. Grain-derived products are about 1 serving of acid to 1 serving of plant. Hence, a Big Mac has 2 hamburger patties (2x3=6) and 2 cheese servings (2x6=12) and 2 bread servings: (2x1-2). You have to eat twenty servings of vegetables and fruits to make up for the acid in a Big Mac. Hmmm. Hence, you can understand my American's urine is usually pH 5.0, very acidic. That's the transition we made. Some humans eat only animal. But most eat a combination and generally, animals are not as common as plants so plants make up the majority. In the 19th and 20th century, we became much more wealthy and could afford much more animal. This is a new and abrubt transition, to a large degree. Has it been bad for us?

Yes, it's bad for us.  For every serving of animal, you lose amount a milligram of calcium from your bones, because that's the reservoir of bicard to neutralize the acid that's going through the system. In this modest study, with just a whisper of fruits and vegetables, not even close to getting their urine alkaline, their serum bicarb actually went up a teeny tiny bit. from 25.05 to 25.40. Not a lot but a bit. Their dissolved CO2 went from 26.25 to 26.7. Those are small, but meaningful. You can change the bicarb in your blood, and the pressure on your bones to sacrifice some bicarb to neutralize the acid.

Maybe most importantly, their renal function as measured by the decline in GRF (glomerular filtration rate=the ccs of blood washed clean per minute) declined from 102 at baseline to 97 in the fruits and vegetables, and to 92 in the untreated controls. That was a halving of their loss of function.

And that's just what Khambatta shows in his diet with his book, "Mastering Diabetes". On a pure, vegan, 0% fat diet, insulin consumption drops 98% and coronary artery disease goes away. Esselstyn proved the same thing. On a pure vegetable, very low fat diet, Essylstyn proved reversal of heart disease. Ornish has proved the same. We can rid ourselves of the curse of heart disease with this alkalizing diet taken to its logical conclusion. 

Did you get that? More fruits and vegetables helps at whatever level you can muster. You have to have some animal for the B12 found nowhere else. But the crushing metabolic load of animals and their fat is hard on our hearts, our arteries, our kidneys and our bones. This research proves it.

www.What will Work for me? My blood pressure this week was 102/65 at the doctor's office. My weight has been slowly drifting down as I eat mostly vegetables and fruit. I had two eggs for breakfast today and 2-3 times a week. But two apricots for lunch, or two apples for many days have been a staple during the wonder of summer. Most suppers are large salads and an Esselstyn recipe here and there. I'm on a chickpea curry binge recently making samosa chaats (Indian snack food) with lots of onion, tomato and chickpea curry on a samosa. Yummy supper. If you make this recipe, make sure you get the associated chutneys from tamarind and cilantro bases (add water to make a topping sauce). They make it pop with flavor. (Indian Grocery across from Mayfair has shelves of them. As do all Indian Groceries.)

References: Am J Medicine ,

Pop Quiz

1. When you eat animal products (meat, eggs, cheese, milk, fish,) what happens to the pH of your urine? Answer: It goes lower (Do your own science project. Get some pH paper at Walgreens or CVS. You can measure it for yourself.

2. Why?                  Answer: All animal products have more sulfur-containing amino acids that get turned into sulfuric acid. That makes for more acidic urine.

3. If you eat a pure vegan diet for a week, what pH will your urine be?                  Answer: Greater than 7. As much as 8 if you stick with it for a week.

4. What happens to your bones when you eat an all-meat diet?                  Answer: The acid content, flowing through your system is calling for "neutralizing" and balancing out the acid by sharing some of the bicarb locking in your bones with calcium. You lose the calcium too. Any wonder we are having an epidemic of osteoporosis along with our heart disease?

5. What happens to your blood pressure on a more alkaline diet?                       Answer: It falls. The more vegetables, the further it falls. Being alkaline is good for you. It's our basic biology.