This is one of those soups, which I increasingly crave the more I eat it. The main ingredient is asparagus, which is alkaline and packed with healthy nutrients. Asparagus has been used for centuries as a vegetable and medicine.

It is a great source of magnesium, calcium, zinc, vitamin B6 and rich in vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin C, vitamin E, thiamin, riboflavin, rutin, niacin, folic acid, iron, phosphorus, potassium, copper, manganese and selenium.

It is also a great alkaline vegetable for the weight conscious amongst us, as it is very low in sodium and low in calories.

I hope you enjoy this delicious alkalising leeks and asparagus soup, which has a lovely lemon tang!

Leeks and Asparagus Soup

Serves 4

Ingredients

800g fresh green asparagus
3 leeks, peeled and chopped
1/2 lemon
2 tbsp Olive Oil or Udo’s Choice Ultimate Oil Blend
4 mugs of vegetable stock
Himalayan crystal salt or celtic sea salt
Freshly ground pepper

Instructions

Wash the asparagus and chop off the woody ends of the stems. Cut off the asparagus tips and keep to one side, as you will need to use them later on. Chop up the asparagus stalks.

Add 2 tbsp of oil into a large saucepan and gently fry the leeks for about 10-15 minutes until they start to soften. Add the stock and chopped up asparagus stalks and simmer with a lid on for about 25 minutes.

Remove the soup from the heat and blend in a food processor or with a hand-held blender.

Season the soup to taste, add the asparagus tips and bring the soup back to the boil. Cook the soup on a very low heat for another 5 minutes until the tips have softened. Add fresh lemon juice.

Enjoy!

This week I interviewed alkaline diet expert, blood microscopist and nutritionist Gareth Edwards on the subject of alkaline water. In this 25 minute interview we talk about the alkaline diet, water ionizers, antioxidants and more.

Click on the play button to hear my interview with Gareth Edwards:

Click here to book a live blood analysis appointment with Gareth Edwards

Click here to book a 1 hour telephone consultation with Gareth Edwards

A Bit About Gareth Edwards

Gareth, who heads Food for Life, the UK’s leading live food nutrition and live blood microscopy clinic is perhaps the UK’s most qualified and experienced blood microscopist and we are extremely excited to have him on board!

Gareth has a real passion for natural health and nutrition through real, live, whole foods and his philosophies sit exactly with ours. I know many of you will already know Gareth or will have met him at the Dr Young Event and for those of you who do know him – you will understand why I am so excited!

Gareth brings a wealth of experience and as a qualified, highly respected nutritionist he will give us insights and angles that we have previously not been able to explore.

In the coming weeks Gareth will be contributing regularly to the Energise Blog and newsletters and will also be answering your questions – but more on that next week.

Here is Gareth’s official bio:

Gareth Edwards helps people to overcome health challenges with fresh living foods. He has a degree in Natural therapeutics, a diploma in nutritional therapy and is a nutritional blood microscopist.

Gareth has helped people with health challenges as diverse as wanting to loose a few pounds to potentially life threatening disease diagnoses. He has been explaining the importance of food selection and choices to customers and clients at the new Whole Foods market since it opened in June and also practices at London’s leading complimentary health Hale Clinic.

His fresh food based approach draws inspiration from his visit to the Hippocrates Centre in Florida and personal tuition by leading American microbiologist Robert Young. He was also taught by British Nutritionist Patrick Holford during his studies at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition.

One of the corner stones of maintaining or re-discovering optimal personal health is healthy blood. Made aware of this by recovery from a severe infection, Gareth uses the cutting edge technique of live blood analysis to help patients see the state and shape of their red blood cells. This test provides information and insights that are unlikely to be apparent from tests more widely used in conventional medical practice. This test can be really useful and fun to do, whatever your current health goals are. It requires only four small drops of blood.

Gareth is also acutely aware that sometimes, in spite of good intentions, we sometimes struggle to choose healthy foods. He also helps people to assess what may be getting in the way of eating the foods and quantities that they want to eat.

Gareth has won three sporting national championship titles and writes a weekly column in the Daily Star.

The Importance of Healthy & Alkaline Water by Gareth Edwards

American personal development guru Tony Robbins opens his “living health” presentation with the statement that anybody teaching wellbeing who doesn’t start by discussing air and water is best avoided. His argument is that any discussion of macro-nutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrate) is over-shadowed by our body’s need for the super macro-nutrients oxygen and hydrogen dioxide (H2O).

In days gone by, a frequent “prescription” for healing was a recommendation that patients spent time in the Alps. The purity of the air was perceived to be the major potential benefit.

I was there two weeks ago and along with enjoying the fresh “nourishing” air on the mountain tops, I really enjoyed the moments when I stuck my hands into a mountain stream and drunk the glacial melt water copiously. This tasted like the most refreshing and energising drink on the planet and made me wonder why we were carrying plastic bottles of water with us.

Momentous Event:

Two years ago human kind passed something of a mile stone. For the first time ever there were (and still are!), more of us living in urban environments (towns and cities), than in the country side. No matter how we look at it, the water in good old father Thames, the River Ouse, Rhone or Rhine, is not the same (in the cities) as that healthy life giving, negatively charged (and therefore alkaline) glacial melt up in the Alps.

Further Complications:

Water treatment plants make a pretty good job of cleaning up water from rivers and reservoirs but a certain amount of it is recycled. The increasing use of fertilisers means the water table becomes polluted with substances that aren’t filtered out.

Pharmaceuticals consumed by humans and livestock can also find their way into the municipal supply. Additionally fluoride may be added to tap water and there is an acid that is added to all tap water to prevent leaching of lead from old mains. These are being progressively replaced by plastic pipes but plastics can present challenges too.

What’s the Alternative?

All of these concerns and issues have led us to invest in different solutions.

The most prevalent is bottled water, but if we care about ecological issues at any levels and the potential harm from xeno-oestrogens, this absolutely isn’t the answer. Trucking water from the mountains in plastic bottles that require further fossil fuels to be re-cycled at best and that end up in land fill at worst isn’t good for making clean air and water and keeping the rising seas at bay. Xeno-oestrogens are compounds found in plastics that are disruptive to health.

Reverse osmosis and distilling water are other possibilities. The challenge with both of these methods of water purification is that they strip the water of minerals. These minerals can carry a charge that contributes to the waters pH. The product of these methods is often acidic. The fact that marine life cannot survive in the water produced by these methods suggests that these minerals need to be present to support life.

What’s the Answer?

The smart, abundant thinking reader who enjoys winter sports will of course have no hesitation in replying “move to the Alps”. It’s got merit and I may do that, one day. I’m not sure however that there is enough space up there for all of us and not everyone likes skiing, cold weather and climbing!

I really think that a water ioniser offers the best solution anywhere near sea level in producing healthy and alkaline water.

Filtering tap water, separating positively charged (acidic) ions from negatively charged (alkaline) ones, reducing cluster sizes and increasing the anti-oxidant potential are all things that you want in the water you drink.

The Cost…?

It took me a long time, and a lot of bottled mineral water to psych myself up to spend the money on our water ioniser. I’ve never regretted it. They cost a bit but it definitely got in ahead of a television, a new car, a new computer and even a mobile phone.

60% of our bodies are made up of water and if you take health seriously I’d say they are a great way to get filtered alkaline water from the tap. However healthily you eat, flushing stored acids from your body is essential to promote health. Acidic water will make that more difficult to achieve.

Click here to read our ultimate alkaline water guide in order to learn more about the importance of healthy and alkaline water!

Remember: you can now book in a 60-minute telephone consultation with Gareth for just £65. Gareth is an exceptional nutritionist and will be able to offer you specific advice and guidance and help you build a nutrition plan specific to your needs. Click here to book a telephone consultation with Gareth Edwards.

Disclaimer: Not intended to diagnose any condition, please seek help of nutritionally aware physician if experiencing health challenges.

I love my alkaline salads and therefore discoverd this delicious warm broccoli salad, which also contains a number of other alkalising ingredients like tomatoes, onion, fresh lemon juice and parsley.

The main ingredient is broccoli, which has numerous health benefits! The main ones are its cholesterol-lowering benefits and its strong, positive impact on our body’s detoxification system. It can even help with a Vitamin D deficiency, as broccoli has a very strong combination of Vitamin A and K.

Enjoy this delicious and warming broccoli salad, which is ideal for an alkaline snack in between!

Warm Broccoli Salad

Serves 2

Ingredients

400g fresh broccoli, cut into little florets
1 onion, cut into small pieces
100g cherry tomatoes, cut into small pieces
Fresh juice of one lemon
2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped up
2 tsp dried oregano and thyme
1 tbsp cold-pressed virgin olive oil or Udo’s Choice Ultimate Oil Blend
Himalayan crystal salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Instructions

Cut all ingredients into small pieces as stated above.

Steam the broccoli florets very shortly in a frying pan until they get a very nice green colour. Make sure the florets still have a crunchy texture.

Put all the vegetables into a salad bowl. Pour over the fresh lemon juice and olive oil, add the herbs and season with salt and pepper. Mix everything together and add some more seasoning if needed.

Enjoy!

Every day we are told to drink more water, but we are never told what water we should drink. Is tap water OK? Should we filter? Do we have to buy bottled? Is any water OK?!

In my six years of researching and blogging in the health and nutrition industry I have to say: staying hydrated with the right water is the most important thing you can do for your health.

And if we are going to drink 3-4 litres of water each day it would make sense that we should know what the healthiest water is, right?

Alkaline Ionized Water: The World’s Healthiest Water

This is a detailed run through of what I have repeatedly found to be the cleanest, most healthy water you can drink, alkaline, ionised water.

Alkaline, Ionized water has so many benefits and advantages over any other source of water so before I detail the benefits of alkaline water, here are some of the disadvantages of other water sources:

• Tap Water: I don’t know exactly where you live, but I can bet that the tap water there is far from perfect. Almost all tap water has added chlorine and chlorine compounds to try and kill bacteria and almost all tap water has toxic heavy metals including copper and lead. On top of this, tested tap water often contains pesticides and other toxins which over time can be very damaging to our health. Tap water also has an acid pH of between 6-7, which is not great for health as it adds to the overacidity caused by our diet.
• Bottled Water: apart from being an environmental disaster, bottled water is often only barely filtered (surprisingly few brands are actually ‘mineral water’ most are just filtered), still contain toxins and have often suffered from being stored over long periods in harmful plastic bottles. Bottled water is devoid of any antioxidant activity and often have a very low, highly acid pH. Recent research has also found that around 70% of bottled water brands had high levels of bacteria.
• Distilled Water: whilst providing a clean source of highly filtered water, distilled water comes out at around pH 7 and so is still slightly acidic, thus requiring pH drops to be added to increase the alkalinity of the water. It is much better than tap or bottled water, but still not perfect.
• Brita/Carbon Filters: do a good job of removing pesticides and heavy metals, but leave the water less alkaline than tap water. Only solves half the problem.

The Advantages of Alkaline, Ionized Water

Alkaline water ionizers are, without doubt, the best water filtration systems around. They have so many benefits it is hard to list them all! But in my mind the following three benefits mean they give by far the best quality, healthiest water on earth.

1) High pH Water: the benefits of alkaline water is a whole discussion in itself, in fact, click here to get my Definitive Guide to Alkaline Water. But, as you probably know, drinking alkaline water is beneficial to your health in hundreds of ways. So if you want alkaline water, using a water ionizer is simply the very best way to do this. You can set the level of alkalinity you desire (between approx pH 4- pH 10.5) and voila, you have accurate, alkaline water on tap all day every day.

2) Antioxidant-Rich Water: not many people know this, but ionised water is also high in antioxidants. To give a brief explanation, antioxidant content is measured in ORP (Oxygen Reduction Potential) and the lower the better i.e. the lower the ORP the more the antioxidants. Alkaline, ionised water has an ORP of approximately -200 to -450! To give this some perspective, cola has an ORP of +600 and bottled water has an ORP of between +200 and +800.

3) Up to SIX TIMES more hydrating than other water: that’s right – ionised water actually hydrates you more than other water! How? Let me explain…

When you pass water through an ionizer, it ‘microclusters’ the water. By making the cluster sizes in the water much smaller (by increasing hydroxyl ions (OH-) and decreasing hydrogen ions (H+)) it means it is able to permeate the cells of the body much more easily than tap water that has much larger cluster sizes. This creates the exceptionally healthy alkaline water, but it also serves to make the water more hydrating than normal water.

To compare, alkaline ionized water has clusters made up of five to six water molecules, as opposed to tap water that contains 12-15. With the smaller clusters, alkaline ionized water gains the ability to penetrate tissue and cell walls far more easily, giving far superior hydration. This is also why many people experience detoxification effects in the first few weeks of drinking the water, as it infiltrates areas that have not been reachable with ordinary H2O.

So this smaller particle size allows the water better access to smaller pathways through your tissue – your water literally becomes wetter! This form of “microwater” is 6 times more hydrating than conventional water, and makes more oxygen available to your cells. This accelerates your metabolism and boosts your energy.

Other Benefits of Ionized, Alkaline Water

? Hangover Cure: Ionized water, because of it’s smaller clusters and increased hydration, plus the antioxidant content and high alkaline, acid-neutralising capacity – is a FANTASTC hangover cure. Now, of course, not drinking in the first place is the best hangover cure, but if you are a little worse for wear, drinking a couple of litres of alkaline, ionised water will have you back to your best in no time at all. Combine with pHour Salts, to replace lost mineral salts and you will be rocking.

- Cleans Pesticides from Fruit & Vegetables: the high pH water is fantastic at removing all traces of pesticides from vegetables and fruits – making your food have the cleanliness of organics!

- Sanitises and Steralises: the low pH, acid settings on your ionizer produce water that can sanitise and sterilise your kitchen, bathroom and water bottles – all naturally and without the need for chemical cleaners.

- Removes Stains: the acid water is also fantastic for removing stains such as oil, blood, ink and more. The acid water is able to actually emulsify these liquids lifting them right out of fabrics.

- Skin Rejuvenator: spraying mild acid pH water on to the skin visibly decreases signs of wrinkles, dryness, eczema, psoriasis, acne and more. It is a fantastic toner and cleanser and is also able to remove makeup naturally without the need for chemical makeup removers.

I personally LOVE my ionizer and thank the day that I made the decision to invest in one.

Think of it this way – you HAVE to drink enough water each day to stay hydrated, so rather than tap or bottled water with its bacteria, pesticides, heavy metals and more – why not drink water that is more hydrating, alkalising, is antioxidant rich and only requires a one-off investment and will last you for life!

If you would like to know more about alkaline water and water ionizers then get your copy of my Definitive Guide to Alkaline Water here.

Enjoy alkalising and stay energised!
Ross

For more information about alkaline water click here to download my free report “The Definitive Guide to Alkaline Water”.

We all know how important it is to drink enough water and stay hydrated every day, but drinking the right kind of water could make an incredible difference to you health, energy and vitality.

The Three Biggest Causes of Disease Are…

1. Dehydration
2. Chronic Acidosis
3. Oxidization of Cells

Drinking ionized water addresses all of these points.

Antioxidants & Water

You might be wondering exactly how water can contain antioxidants. I don’t blame you. If you had asked me a few years ago I would probably have said – you can only get antioxidants from food! It is what the media tells us, eat bright coloured foods – and they’re right. Bright coloured foods such as blueberries, tomatoes, oranges contain high levels of antioxidants such as Flavonoids, Lutein, Lycopene and Phytosterols.

However, an antioxidant is, quite literally, a molecule capable of inhibiting the oxidation of other molecules. This clearly does not have to only come from fruit and vegetables. As long as something has the capacity to inhibit oxidation it will act as an antioxidant in the body.

And this is exactly what ionized water does

How Ionized Water is Antioxidant Rich

To understand how ionized water is an antioxidant I need to explain two things:

1) How ionized water is made
2) What ORP is

How Ionized Water Is Made

To keep this simple and, hopefully, not too scientific(!):

- We create ionized water by separating the hydrogen ions (H+) from the hydroxide ions OH-. To make acid and highly oxidizing water, we increase the concentration of hydrogen ions in the water. Conversely, to make alkaline and antioxidant-rich water we increase the concentration of hydroxide ions.

When the water runs through the ionizer it splits these ions into acid and alkaline and depending on the setting you select you will get the required mix of ions to create the pH and antioxidant level you are after.

What is ORP and Why ORP is Important

The antioxidant capacity of liquids is measured in ORP (oxidation reduction potential or redox potential). This is the standardised measure of antioxidants in liquids in the same way that ORAC is the standard measure of antioxidants in foods.

Basically all liquids have an Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), which, as per the definition of an antioxidant above, is the potential for one liquid substance to reduce the oxidation of another substance. It is measured in millivolts (mV) and most liquids fall between +700 and -800. In other words, the more powerful the antioxidant, the lower the ORP level. As things oxidize, the ORP rises.

To give this some meaning and relativity, here are some rough ORP measurements:

• Tap water: +250 to +400 ORP
• Cola: +400 to +600 ORP
• Green tea: -120 to -250 ORP
• Orange juice: -150 to -250 ORP
• Alkaline ionized water: -200 to -800 ORP

So, as normal tap water has an ORP of +250 to +400 this means it basically has zero potential for reducing oxidation. Alkaline ionized water has an ORP of -350 to -800, depending in part on the amount of minerals in the source water and how the ionizer is adjusted.

What This Means

This means that if you are drinking alkaline, ionized water with a pH of between 8.5 and 9.5 then you are drinking water that is very, very antioxidant-rich.

Again, just imagine the difference it could make to your health, energy and vitality if you were drinking 3-4 litres of water each day that had more antioxidants than green tea or freshly squeezed fruit juice.

Summary

So, to keep it simple – ORP basically means the level of antioxidants in liquids and the lower the better. When water is ionized it increases the concentration of hydroxide ions (OH-) which leads to a negative ORP.

Alkaline, ionized water is not only alkalising and amazing at buffering excess acids, but it is also antioxidant rich – infusing your body with free-radical scavenging antioxidants that will protect your cells and encourage your health and wellness.

For more information about alkaline water ionizers click here