Learning Healthy Eating
Foods in an Alkaline Diet archive includes articles explaining how foods contribute to your alkaline diet.
Here you can learn to understand how alkaline diets work. This helps you choose the right foods for your personal alkaline diet.
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Are eggs acidic or alkaline explains how eggs are effective in an alkaline diet.
One of the most common questions I get asked is Are eggs acidic or alkaline?
There’s a very simple answer: Yes, of course eggs are acidic!
But that begs many more questions:
Do you want to know what foods you can eat on an alkaline diet?
Does that mean you want a list of alkaline foods, an alkaline diet plan, some recipes, or some general guidance about what types of food are alkaline?
I explain the different aspects of alkaline diet foods below. Before I explain those aspects, I need to be clear about what we mean by alkaline diet foods.
I heard an actress talking about her alkaline diet recently. I was instantly reminded of the dangers of misunderstanding an Alkaline Food Diet. The actress hesitated when offered a taste of a fish based meal. She worried aloud that she wasn’t sure if she should accept it as she was following an alkaline diet.
The meal in question was a healthy meal prepared by a top chef. The acidic fish was well balanced with alkaline vegetables. There was no problem with the meal – but there was a big problem with understanding the concept of alkaline diets.
Why is an alkaline food diet wrong?
Every day I get asked how to get an alkaline food diet, and every day I have to tell people to stop looking. An acid alkaline diet is a great thing. When you get the right balance between acid-forming and alkaline-forming food and drink, you have one of the healthiest diets on the planet.
Of course, you still have to balance protein, carbs, and fats. You still have to ensure that you get sufficient vitamins and minerals. But those things become much easier within the framework of a balanced acid alkaline diet.
Trying to achieve an alkaline food diet is not balanced. Let’s hope you include all beverages in your diet plans. OK, we are used to using the word food to include food and drink. Hopefully, you can agree that all food and drink, plus any dietary supplements, need to be accounted for. But that is implied by the word diet, so why not simply ask for an alkaline diet?
Strictly speaking, your total food intake should be alkaline, but it must be a balance of acid and alkaline foods and drinks. Around one-quarter to one-third acid-formers is about right. If you avoid acid forming foods entirely, you risk missing some essential nutrients.
PRAL Nutrients are those substances in food and drink that are used in the Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL) calculation.
The PRAL score is the best indicator of how we can improve an alkaline diet. Though PRAL scores are calculated as absolute numbers, in practice, they should only be used as a general guide. Seasonal variations, different varieties, and cooking methods will all affect the PRAL score. Despite this variation, the numbers are useful in making better food choices. Ultimately, the proof of your alkaline diet comes when you test the pH of urine. The alkaline food lists will help point you in the direction of foods with lower PRAL scores if you need to raise the pH of your urine. There is more information on PRAL pH Balance Calculation.
The key to alkaline diets is that 20-30% of foods should be acidic, with the rest being alkaline or neutral. Overall, your total pH balance diet score should be alkaline. There is no target for PRAL. The target pH of urine in healthy individuals is 6.5 to 7 in the morning, rising to 7.5 through the day. The target should be higher if you are fighting ill health, though there are complications to this that I will consider when I explain various diseases in future articles.
There is a simple calculation for acid and alkaline foods that can measure your pH balance diet score. However, like many things that are simple, there is more to the pH balance calculation than meets the eye.
Let’s start with some background.
People calculate PRAL alkalinity scores to estimate their pH balance. But pH balance means different things to different people. At Foodary, I assume it to mean:
pH balance is the overall balance between acid and alkali (base) in the human body, as measured by the alkalinity of urine.
The important points are:
Read morePRAL Alkalinity Calculation for Acid-Alkaline Foods
Alkaline food lists are nutrition statements for key foods from the USDA database. I’ve called the new tables lists to distinguish them from earlier versions that I called Acid-Alkaline Food Charts. The data is from the same source, the USDA nutrition database, but I’ve reduced the number of items and increased the amount of nutritional information.
Eventually, the data will form the heart of an interactive healthy recipes system. I’ve introduced these new changes to encourage debate about what are the most important aspects of eating for health.
The old charts listed calories and PRAL (a measure of the acid or alkaline effects of food). The charts showed values for 100g servings of every food and drink item in the USDA database. This caused confusion on 2 fronts:
Reducing the list to less than 600 key foods will inevitably exclude some foods that many people need to analyze. As I identify those, I will add extra items to the lists. You can request your own items on the eating for health forum, or the Foodary Facebook page.