Eating alkaline food helps to decrease inflammation

Want to make changes to your lifestyle to decrease inflammation and feel better?  Heard about the gut-brain connection and know that there’s a link between what you feed your belly and your brain health? Overwhelmed with all of the different diets out there? Keto, paleo, keto-paleo, autoimmune protocol, mediterranean, plant based, vegan, gluten free? This is how I felt at the beginning of my journey. Inflammation is a big component of autoimmune disease and I knew I had to make some changes.

Let’s break it down. Inflammation in the body makes us sick. In my case, the inflammation was in my brain and I was pretty darn scared. It was already affecting my thinking, memory, and energy levels. From my bed in the hospital, I made a commitment to do everything I possibly could to make my body the best possible environment for recovery. Choosing to focus on foods that were anti-inflammatory, seemed like an easy place to start.

There are several categories of foods that I knew caused inflammation so I started by eliminating those first.  I cut out gluten, sugar, dairy, black coffee, black tea and animal protein. What on earth did I eat? A whole lot of fresh vegetables! I drank a lot of water (also good at flushing our kidneys and removing toxins) and herbal tea. As I learned more about alkaline foods, I soon put a greater variety of foods back on my plate in order to fill my belly and help heal my brain. Our bodies and brains also need good fats and proteins to build and repair damaged tissue and healing my brain was a top priority.

I worked with a holistic health practitioner and learned the difference between alkaline and acidic foods. The concept behind an alkaline diet is to maintain a balance in the pH of foods that you eat. A healthy body is naturally slightly alkaline so by choosing to eat foods that are 80% alkaline (better for your body) and only 20% acid forming, the right balance can usually be achieved. When pH is too acidic, the body (and brain) cannot function optimally. An acidic pH can cause inflammation. 

Eating alkaline foods, on the other hand, helps to promote optimal healing. The more alkaline the food, the less likely it is to cause inflammation in the body.   Foods that are more acidic like sugary sodas, processed snacks, and alcohol, all increase inflammation in the body. Using a chart like this one helped me figure out what to eat. Basically, I tried to mostly eat foods from the left side of the chart - at least 80%.

I never did choose one particular diet to follow and instead I continue to choose an abundance of alkaline foods to eat each day, even 5 years on in my journey. I still try to avoid gluten, sugar, dairy and black tea as I’ve come to enjoy herbal and green tea.  I eat wild caught fish, chicken*, and free-range organic eggs regularly.  Recently I have been enjoying lamb, bison and grass fed beef on occasion. My fridge is always full of mostly alkaline fresh vegetables and fruits. 

Still feeling overwhelmed but wanting to make lifestyle changes and don’t know where to start? My advice to you is to start by picking one thing that you think you can remove from your diet. Then choose another acidic food to remove, and then another, until gradually you switch your diet to include more alkaline foods and less acidic foods.  It can be a steep learning curve to start thinking about foods in this new way and it can certainly be overwhelming! That’s why I’m encouraging you to try to make one small change at a time.  Step by step you might see that it helps you on your journey to health, like it did mine.

Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist or dietician so I recommend that you only make radical changes to diet with the support of a professional. 

*in Canada, chicken is free from antibiotics. In other countries, like the United States, choosing organic chicken is preferable if possible.