This week Gareth Edwards, one of the UK’s best qualified nutritionists and alkaline diet experts, writes about the world of alkaline smoothies and explains why they do not only taste absolutely delicious but are also one of the most nutritious and alkalising foods you can feed your body with.

As they are also very easy to make, there are no excuses not to start juicing your favourite alkaline smoothie straight away!

Alkaline Smoothies: Why They Are Awesome by Gareth Edwards

Can man (or woman!) live on green smoothies alone? Well I have to say that for most of the month of January I’ve been giving it a go. And the answer ….. I’m still here and feeling good.

The great thing about an alkaline smoothy is that it can be both delicious and nutritious.

If you cleanse your body by drinking lots of green vegetable juice and water with powdered vegetables and mineral pH drops added, you can end up ….. hungry! By adding just about everything except the kitchen sink(!) you can make a therapeutic and delicious meal in a glass. The difference between this and something that you might mix up from a packet or a tub though, is that it will be packed with fresh, vibrant, alkalising, living food.

There are two ways of making an alkalising smoothy and which option you go for will be a little bit dependant on the time you have available and maybe your budget. So without further ado let’s get started on how (and why!) I make my smoothies the way I do.

You’ll find an ingredients list here. Do remember that this is a recipe (suggestion) not a prescription. So if you are going to start blending breakfast (or lunch or supper), then have fun experimenting with different alkalising foods.

So, when I’m doing the “deluxe” version I actually start by making a green juice. Not to drink separately, but to provide the fluid for the smoothy. Juicing liberates nutrients (vitamins, minerals and other phyto-nutrients) in a way that will make them more available for absorption than blending will. So if you want to turbo-charge your smoothy, you are going to need to wash up two bits of kit. I’ve got an Oscar Vital Max jucer and that’s pretty straightforward.

I put celery and cucumber into the juice because they give lots of fluid and hen I’ll add cabbage and a dark green leafy vegetables like chard, kale or spinach. Cabbage juice is great for intestinal healing and health and the dark greens are packed with blood building chlorophyll, vitamin C, Calcium, Magnesium and loads more good stuff. I’ll squeeze half an alkalising lemon into it to add a delicious citrus tang.

I add this juice to “food” in the blender. I’m keen to get healthy fats in there, because they will give calories and fat soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids. On top of that our bodies use fat to buffer (neutralise) acids. So in goes almonds (soaked overnight for easier absorption – if you’re keen) olive oil, hemp oil (full of omega 3 and 6 fats) and half an avocado (vitamin E, potassium, omega 3).

I then chop up and add a small lettuce, some broccoli florets and some sprouted sunflower seeds, mung beans or lentils. Like any good meal (or soup) season with crystal or sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

I run the blender in short bursts, rather than a constant long blast. Chopping the ingredients at high speed and increasing heats can lead to oxidation of your lovely fresh plant ingredients.

Three years ago, the next thing that would happen would be that I would pour the (delicious) mixture down my throat at high speed. Don’t! You’ve created a meal and you need to eat it. Juices are easily digested because the plant cell walls are all broken apart. Although a lot of the chewing work is done with a smoothy, you still need to let the digestive juices of the mouth and stomach act on the delicious mixture. So take a teaspoon and chat to your family while consuming it. If that’s out of the question, then have some and put the rest in a thermos with one or two ice cubes and take it to work to finish it off.

Variations:

If the washing up time of cleaning both the blender and the juicer makes you want to have Weetabix or a cup of coffee instead …. don’t! You can make a smoothy by putting the cucumbers (and the cabbage) straight into the blender and adding some (ionised or filtered) water, green powder and pH drops. Add the water slowly or it’ll be too liquid.

If you find the mixture too “green” to start with, then you could put ½ an apple or ½ a carrot in the juice, but give it a go without first. The lemon juice and avocado really do add flavour.

How Much? How Often?

I really have had fairly sustained periods (3 – 4 days), when I’ve lived on green smoothies with water and green powder with pH drops in between. They should contain all four of the essential food groups you need to build healthy tissue and facilitate optimum metabolic body function. These as you probably know are summarised by the acronym COWS. This stands for Chlorophyll (the pigment in green plant foods), Oils (avocados, hemp and olive oil and almonds), Water and Salt.

If you are cleansing by having regular (or even occasional) smoothies you have the added benefit that there will be a lot of fibre still “in the mix”. When you drink juice only some people find they need to use additional fibre or cleansing supplements to keep regular elimination happening. You may find the reverse is true with a smoothy.

What About The Cost?

Once you start changing the pH of your body fluid and tissue and improving the health and efficiency of your digestive tract, you’ll probably find you actually start eating less food.

The smoothy that I’ve described is so packed with nutritious goodness that, as long as you absorb it, it could keep you satisfied for longer than a normal meal. Do keep hydrating with water, green powder and pH drops though.

And anyway, what else would you spend the money on …… a new mobile phone? Naaaah!

Note: This blog is only my opinion. It is not medical advice or diagnosis. Only opinions based upon our own personal experiences or information detailed in medical/academic journals or other publications is cited. WE DO NOT OFFER MEDICAL ADVICE or prescribe any treatments. Please consult with a medical professional before making any diet or nutrition changes.

About Ross Bridgeford

Ross is known as THE Alkaline Diet Expert...especially when it comes to implementation and making the alkaline diet REAL in your life. He has been living, learning, teaching, coaching and loving the alkaline lifestyle since 2004 and has written over 600 articles, alkaline recipes, videos and guides on how to live alkaline and stay alkaline for life. Ross loves life in Brisbane, Australia (although is a proud Englishman) and is healthily-obsessed with nutrition, fitness and Tottenham Hotspur F.C.

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From Energise Alkaline Diet & Natural Health Blog - health news, alkaline diet resources & tips to make you happy! do something nice today...

This week Gareth Edwards, our Alkaline Diet Expert and highly qualified nutritionist, writes about the various temptations on snacking on sweet and high-sugar foods like chocolate and how we can resist those temptations.

He explains how we can get real energy boosts without the intake of high sugar snacks, which we usually associate with a quick energy increase. Most importantly Gareth outlines his plan of action, as to how we can replace these sweet temptations with healthy and alkaline alternatives.

How To Stop Snacking On Chocolate & Sugar Instantly by Gareth Edwards!

By accident, I think we have discovered the ultimate deterrent to snacking on chocolate and sweets during the day. When we (wholegrain, no added sugar) biscuits or (organic, dark) chocolate, it lives in the same small kitchen cupboard as our greens and salts. If I ever want to eat it, I have to pass Dr. and Shelley Young’s smiling (janitorial!) faces to get to it.

I first got into healthy eating when I was 21. Leslie Kenton’s “Raw Energy” was the book that started my Mum thinking I’d gone completely “off the rails”. After starting with raw vegetable juices (mainly carrot) and eating big salads, it wasn’t long before carob and dried fruit bars began to play far too big a part in my healthy eating plan. It wasn’t really until I was forty two that I got any kind of proper idea how to fuel my body in a way that made saying no to chocolate and sweets logical and (relatively) effortless.

There are, I believe, two facets to addictive eating (drinking, smoking or narcotic) patterns. Understanding the biochemistry of how most efficiently to fuel your body can really help. For some of us however, all the understanding and “knowledge” in the world will not be enough to dissuade us from giving ourselves a “treat” that ends up becoming a daily or regular staple.

We All Need Energy

When you wake up and contemplate what the day ahead holds for you, part of your brain is going to be aware that, in order to get where you want to be at 10pm you’re going to need some energy. Sugar (biscuits, fizzy drinks, sweets or even bananas, mangos and other sweet fruits and their juices, cakes and white pasta) and chocolate will provide that. The trouble is that it’s at a cost. The acidity that these foods produce is likely to result in weight gain or other illness.

Chinese Medicine

At 42, my acupuncturist friend and college, Monica, finally got it through to me that in order to support the action of the (blood sugar controlling) pancreas you need to have green (plant!) foods. These low sugar, high nutrient, blood building, nutritional power house foods need to be juiced, eaten or drunk in powdered form (without any added probiotics, digestive enzymes or sweet fruit extracts!) as often as possible. Drinking two to three litres a day of the powdered version with pH drops may be the easiest way to get started.

Raw and Salty

When you cook food the glaecemic index increases. In basic terms, that means it becomes more sugary. Eating sweeter foods can make you want to keep fuelling your body that way. Find more ways to eat your fresh vegetables raw.

Healthy oils, nuts and seeds, fresh herbs and crystal salt and pepper should all help to make them tasty.

Using salt to fuel body, rather than sugar, can help too. The pHlavor spray can act as a powerful antidote to sugar cravings.

Chocolate

Periodically research is published suggesting that chocolate is in fact good for you. Presumably this is carried out by people who …. Like chocolate! A year ago, I’d have been firmly in that camp, but when I noticed that my gums bled whenever I ate it, I soon found ways to stop.

Chocolate does contain some anti-oxidant substances, but tomato ketchup contains prostate enhancing lycopene. That doesn’t mean that either of them should be used medicinally.

Chocolate acts as a stimulant, creates similar chemical reactions in the body to being loved and has a lot of magnesium in it. Fuelling your body with highly nutritious foods, finding love from other areas than the sweety counter and eating and drinking more chlorophyll (and therefore magnesium) rich foods are good ways to start kicking a chocolate habit.

I’ve had patients who have found Jason Vale’s “Chocolate busters” book very helpful. He’s speaking in London on Wednesday night at the Yes Group.

But I know all that:

If you are already applying these principles of nutrition and hydration daily and still craving sugar and chocolate, then my first area of inquiry as a therapist would be to look at any medication you are taking. Most medication, particularly some anti-depressants, but most others too, play havoc with your blood sugar control. They are also likely to damage the delicate membrane of the intestines, making easily absorbed simple sugars more appealing, for “instant” energy”.

Chocolate and sugar can also act as quite effective anaesthetics. If you’re stressed, anxious or feeling under-valued, they both promote a (short-term) cascade of feel good chemicals in your body. Finding someone who will listen to you and respect your point of view, might be the first step to finding a bowl of rocket, radish and avocado a more sexy treat than an epensive box of chocolates!

Action Plan:

• drink (and eat) your greens regularly
• start the day with a low sugar, high nutrient meal
• consider live blood analysis with a qualified practitioner who can show you the direct impact of sugar and chocolate on your blood
• follow your dreams and passions in work and life. You’ll need to fuel your body in the healthiest possible way to achieve them.

Remember: you can now book in a 30-minute telephone consultation with Gareth for just £45. 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.

About Ross Bridgeford

Ross is known as THE Alkaline Diet Expert...especially when it comes to implementation and making the alkaline diet REAL in your life. He has been living, learning, teaching, coaching and loving the alkaline lifestyle since 2004 and has written over 600 articles, alkaline recipes, videos and guides on how to live alkaline and stay alkaline for life. Ross loves life in Brisbane, Australia (although is a proud Englishman) and is healthily-obsessed with nutrition, fitness and Tottenham Hotspur F.C.

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From Energise Alkaline Diet & Natural Health Blog - health news, alkaline diet resources & tips to make you happy! do something nice today...

This week Gareth Edwards, our Alkaline Diet Expert and highly qualified nutritionist, writes about the importance and powerful effects of alkaline minerals, as the cornerstone to maintaining the alkaline design of the body and living with health, energy and vitality.

Powerful Alkalinity with These Super-Strength Alkaline Minerals:

“My Granny lived to 97 in good health and she didn’t do any of this alkalising.”

One of the many factors that may have helped her achieve this non-pH miracle, was the relative state of the soil back in 1910, compared to mineral depleted, fertilizer and intensive farming eroded “dust” on which many of crops are grown today.

Since regular records of mineral levels in food in the United Kingdom began there has been a relentless and steady decline in the mineral levels present in vegetables. Magnesium, an essential mineral for human health, being one of the “sufferers”.

Why We need (Alkalising) Minerals:

These (missing!) minerals serve many functions in our bodies. They provide constructional building blocks for or body elements. Calcium in bone being the most obvious example. They also act as co-factors in many metabolic reactions. Also crucially they are used by the body in order to buffer (neutralise) acids.

Basic Terminology:

When considering minerals and their therapeutic effects, it’s important to be aware of some distinctions. Certain minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium are considered macro minerals. These are present at high levels in the human body and correspondingly so in many plant foods.

Other essential (needed) minerals are found as trace levels (e.g.zinc) while others still are actually toxic (e.g. Mercury and Cadmium).

How to Become or Stay Healthy!

Remembering that we are “alkaline by design and acidic by function”, (merely existing makes us acidic…) and that we live in an ever more acidic (polluted, urbanised) and mineral depleted world, our need to support our body’s buffering system is greater than ever. Dietary, hydration and lifestyle choices have to lie at the centre of this. If you eat a lot of meat, poultry, eggs or sugar and / or drink alcohol, fruit juice or coffee your bodies alkaline mineral resources are likely to be “burning up”, faster than any mineral supplement can ever hope to replace them.

Ironically when we are overly acidic these foods often have an instant gratification appeal. The hit or boost of energy that they can induce is all too often short lived and is likely to lead to health challenges in the longer term.

Most green powders are made from vegetables and grasses grown in mineral rich soils. Minerals that are bound up in plant form should be easy for the body to absorb. Regular consumption of green powder mixed with alkalising mineral drops is often a great way to start to break this “cycle of addiction”.

Magic Alkalising Minerals:

Once you feel that you can comfortably sustain a regime, based around low sugar high nutrient foods and fluids, it is definitely worth considering adding additional alkalising minerals to your health regime.

Probably the most hotly debated player in our body’s alkaline armoury is sodium. Many alkalising and living food health specialists consider sodium chloride (salt) to be a demon, while others see it as central and essential to health. The central argument around whether you can over salt yourself, relies partly on the concept of transmutation within the body. This is the slightly surreal concept that mineral forms can be transformed within the body, given the right environment and building blocks to make changes. Proving this theory is possible and the subject for another article. Suffice it to say here, that I have several patients who have come to me with high blood pressure and found that it has dropped after following an alkalising regime including relatively high levels of unrefined and bicarbonate salt.

I am happy to recommend Dr. Young’s pHour salts and pHlavor sprays as corner stones to alkalising programmes, but do remember that pHour salts is a strong alkalising agent and may cause headaches or even increased heart rate in some susceptible people. You should therefore exercise caution when using them regularly and certainly review any medication you are taking with an “alkaline aware” physician, before launching in too aggressively to this particular aspect of alkalising.

Another way to dramatically increase your intake of a broad spectrum of alkalising minerals (macro and trace) is to use Montmorillonite clay. This can be mixed as a paste and eaten between meals or added as a powder to green drinks.

Dosage & Form:

There are of course other specific mineral formulas that can be taken alongside an alkalising regime. Levels and forms of these minerals do leave the “as nature intended” arena and move into synthetic (man made) formulation. The building blocks are natural elements but the proportions are going to be based on the formulators view. That does not of course make them necessarily wrong, but just be aware of that dynamic when consuming them.

One of the primary goals in increasing your consumption of alkalising minerals is to ……. alkalise (!) your body fluids and tissues, so in deciding on dosage and frequency, measuring the effect on urine and saliva pH is a good way to establish whether what you are doing is effective. As a general principal less more often is likely to be better absorbed than more less often. Also colloids and liquid forms are likely to be better absorbed than tablets.

Action plan:

1. Be sure to drink sufficient quantities of alkaline fluid to allow your body to eliminate buffered acids, with added pH drops (such as Dr Young’s Puriphy drops) or increased intake of salt (such as young pHorever pHlavor Mineral Salts).
2. Before reaching for magic mineral supplements be sure to have a close look at your dietary and hydration choices. Eliminate (or reduce) acid forming foods (animal protein, sugar, refined carbohydrates, mushrooms) and liquids (alcohol, tea, coffee, fruit juice, vinegar and fizzy drinks), replacing them with healthy, nutritious, tasty, alkalising alternatives. (See the alkaline lifestyle course and recipe book).
3. Use mineral supplements such as pHour salts, pHlavor and clay alongside your alkaline regime.
4. Consider also adding broad spectrum trace mineral supplements to your programme to help reduce fungus and mould and increase energy.

N.B. if you experience any adverse effects when taking mineral supplements, consult with a nutritionally / alkaline aware physician.

About Ross Bridgeford

Ross is known as THE Alkaline Diet Expert...especially when it comes to implementation and making the alkaline diet REAL in your life. He has been living, learning, teaching, coaching and loving the alkaline lifestyle since 2004 and has written over 600 articles, alkaline recipes, videos and guides on how to live alkaline and stay alkaline for life. Ross loves life in Brisbane, Australia (although is a proud Englishman) and is healthily-obsessed with nutrition, fitness and Tottenham Hotspur F.C.

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From Energise Alkaline Diet & Natural Health Blog - health news, alkaline diet resources & tips to make you happy! do something nice today...

Everyone gets cravings and they can sometimes feel like the most powerful urges on Earth.

When your body wants something it wants something. And when your body knows you’re not supposed to have it, it feels like the craving is ten times stronger.

I know what this is like. The craving for something sweet after lunch or dinner is the one that always used to get me. Or the lust for any food after I’d had a few beers (back in the day) used to get the better of me every time (and man, I ate some weird s**t!). For others it is that craving for chocolate that hits randomly, or the desire to hit the biscuit barrel just after 11am.

Well, this product could be about to change all of that. I don’t ever blog about a specific product, but this one deserves it. pHlavor (or pHlavour if you’re in the UK) by Dr Robert Young is an amazing product. It is a combination of all of the highly alkaline mineral salts, harvested from the Great Salt Lakes in Utah.

It is cheap, easy to use (you just spray it in your mouth) and it not only gives you an instant, alkalising boost – but it also stops cravings right in their tracks.

It really works. I’ve tried it, my friends have tried it, my girlfriend has tried it and now hundreds of customers have tried it and they have all come back with the same response – WOW.

I actually spoke with Dr Young about this last week and he gave me a little audio interview about pHlavor, so rather than me go on and on about it, here is the audio from that phone call and the transcription below:

Click here to listen to Dr Young talking about the pHlavor Salt Spray

Click here to buy pHlavor Salts now

Transcript of Dr Young on pHlavor

The pHlavor Salts is an all-natural mineral salt that comes from the north shore of the Great Salt Lakes. During the winters if you’re familiar with the Rocky Mountains in the United States, the run-off where the snow melts flows down the streams and into rivers and these rivers empty into this north shore.

So it is a great satiation programme for getting off tobacco or getting off any form of sugar! And I recommend it highly, it is one of the products that I think is critical in the foundation and I would say that pHlavor Salts is one of the essentials that you could take for the rest of your life.

Click here to buy pHlavor Salts now

IMPORTANT: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD & BAD (TABLE) SALT

It is really important to note the difference between good and bad salt. By ‘good’ salt I mean pure, alkaline mineral salts and by ‘bad’ salt I mean table salt, mass produced salt and the salt used in refined foods and fast foods. Dr Young explains it best:

Most common table salt is made up of chemicals that pollute your body and wreak havoc on your health. Your table salt is actually 97.5% sodium chloride and 2.5% chemicals such as moisture absorbents, and iodine. Dried at over 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, the excessive heat alters the natural chemical structure of the salt causing the potential for a myriad of health challenges in your body. Source: Dr Young Blog Post on Mineral Salts

In short, table salt (normal, everyday salt) not only contains harmful chemicals, but it has been treated and heated in such a way that makes it harmful to the body. Very harmful. In the same way that mass produced margarines, sunflower and vegetable oils (etc) become toxic to the body once they are exposed to light, air and heat, the same happens with salt. All of the life is stripped out of it and it becomes toxic. This is why we have been told for so many years to avoid all salts.

Nowadays there are healthy salts available to us, such as Himalayan Salt, and Dr Young’s pHlavor Salts that have healthy, life giving effects on the body. And what is more, the body actually needs alkaline mineral salts to function properly, so it is beneficial to us to help our body along by giving it some!

pHlavor: The Best Bits

Now, in my personal opinion there are many benefits to using pHlavor Salts, with the stopping of cravings being the main one! BUT there are obviously other benefits. As Dr Young explained, salts is vital to the proper functioning of the human body in the same way that essential fatty acids are. Here is a little synopsis of the best salt facts and benefits of using pHlavor:

• it is vital to the extraction of excess acidity from the cells in the body, particularly the brain cells.
• it is vital for balancing the acidic sugar levels in the blood; a needed element in diabetics
• it is vital for the clearance of the lungs of mucous plugs and sticky phlegm, particularly in asthma and cystic fibrosis.
• it is vital for clearing up catarrh and congestion of the sinuses
• it is a strong natural antihistamine.
• it is essential for the prevention of muscle cramps
• it is absolutely vital to making the structure of bones firm. Osteoporosis, in a major way, is a result of salt and water shortage in the body. Twenty-seven percent of the body’s salt is in the bones. Osteoporosis results when the body needs more salt and takes it from the body. Bones are twenty-two percent water. Is it not obvious what happens to the bones when we’re deficient in salt or water or both.

So in summary, it rapidly alkalises your body, it removed cravings for sugars, sweets and cigarettes and it gives you an instant energy boost! And it is really cheap!

Click here to buy pHlavor Salts now

Further Resources:

30 Reasons to use pHlavor @ pH Miracle
Salt That Heals, Salt That Kills
Salt is Life! @ pH Miracle
Prevent Disease with Salts @ pH Miracle

Final Note: while this is covered in depth in our disclaimer information, I always feel like it is best to highlight that if you have any medically diagnosed condition you should consult with your health practitioner before making any changes to your diet. Especially if you are currently taking any kind of medication. While we’re obviously here to help you as much as possible it is your own responsibility to check the compatibility of your medication with your lifestyle choices including diet, exercise and supplementation.

About Ross Bridgeford

Ross is known as THE Alkaline Diet Expert...especially when it comes to implementation and making the alkaline diet REAL in your life. He has been living, learning, teaching, coaching and loving the alkaline lifestyle since 2004 and has written over 600 articles, alkaline recipes, videos and guides on how to live alkaline and stay alkaline for life. Ross loves life in Brisbane, Australia (although is a proud Englishman) and is healthily-obsessed with nutrition, fitness and Tottenham Hotspur F.C.

Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | YouTube

From Energise Alkaline Diet & Natural Health Blog - health news, alkaline diet resources & tips to make you happy! do something nice today...