While my crusade has focused on proper food selections to enhance the thermic effect of feeding as well as the hormonal response to different foodstuffs, I've recently acquired a whole new weapon for my assault. You see, different foods - based on their digestibility, micronutrient composition, protein content, and a number of other factors - can lead to marked fluctuations in the acid-base status of the body. Since many of you are probably wondering what this has got to do with looking good nekid, I encourage you to read on and find out how the acid-base balance of the body is critical to your health, your body composition, and even your exercise performance. Furthermore, find out how a few simple food substitutions and/or a few inexpensive supplement additions can correct your acid-base woes.

Before I get down to it however, I've got to give credit where credit is due. I can't assume full responsibility for stumbling across this fascinating line of research. It was actually a fellow researcher and nutrition colleague, Dr. Loren Cordain (of Paleo Diet fame) who pointed me in this direction during a recent "roundtable" we did together. So, if after you've read this article you feel compelled to thank someone for the great information, give him a shout at PaleoDiet.com (and then you can feel free to praise me at JohnBerardi.com).

Acid-Base Nutrition Basics

When a food is ingested, digested, and absorbed, each component of that food will present itself to the kidneys as either an acid-forming compound or a base-forming one. And when the sum total of all the acid producing and the base producing micro and macronutrients is tabulated (at the end of a meal or at the end of a day), we're left with a calculated acid-base load. If the diet provides more acidic components, it will obviously manifest as a net-acid load on the body. And if it provides more basic components, it will obviously manifest as a net-base load on the body.

In the past, scientists have looked for various techniques to try to quantify whether a food is acid producing or base producing. One method that was commonly used was ash analysis. Using this technique, a food would be combusted and the ash would be analyzed to determine how much of the food was alkaline and how much was acid. When examining the micronutrients present in many foods we see that:

       Acidic anions in food include chloride, phosphorous, sulfates, and other organic acids.

       Basic/Alkaline cations in food include sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium.

The ash analysis technique has its limitations, though. Since simple food/ash analysis doesn't take into account bioavailability of the nutrients in a given food, the acid-base balance of the body after consuming specific foods doesn't often match the acid or base-producing estimate generated from the ash analysis. In other words, the ash analysis ain't all that effective.