The pH Miracle

Chapter 1

The New Biology of Health

A new day is dawning. A day of truly holistic health, vitality, and well-being. A time of energizing our very cells, maximizing the life force of our bodies. An era of naturally lean and strong physiques! An era of focusing on right food instead of wrong drugs. This book, based on the microscopic evaluation of blood leading to correct nutrition, will light this path for you. It will help you understand the revolutionary science I (Rob) call the New Biology, and explains practical ways to change your diet and unleash the full power of your body to heal itself.

In truth, the light came over the horizon more than a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the radical work of some great pioneering scientists has been overlooked by a mainstream medical model so deeply involved with its own myths that it was blind to larger truths. Until now. We are in a process of peeling off the blinders and looking at an entirely new model of human health while correcting the old model of disease. Working from decades of exhaustive research—my own as well as the work of those early (ignored) pioneers—we'll discover the basic pathways to illness and wellness. You'll get the science, of course, but also the practical applications that will allow you to put the science to work.

It's all about balance—pH balance. The universe operates by keeping opposites in balance, and the universe contained within your body is no exception. When imbalance occurs, we get the signs of disease (or dis-ease): low energy, fatigue, poor digestion, excess weight, foggy thinking, aches and pains, as well as major disorders. This book is about reclaiming balance: energy; mental clarity; smooth operation of all body systems; clear, bright eyes and skin; and a lean, trim body. By following the program in this book, all that can be yours within weeks.

All you have to do is take a look around you to see that most people with our modern lifestyles are suffering from imbalance. They are obese. Tired. Prematurely aging. Perhaps you are, too. Chances are at least one person you love is suffering from one of the top three killers in the United States—heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. When I asked the audience at one of my lectures how many of them had a family member with one of these big bad three, 80 to 90 percent raised their hands. The fact is, half of us will die from heart disease or diabetes. A third will die from cancer.

If you're like many people in our culture, at this point you're thinking, Well, you have to die of something. We've forgotten that it is natural to die—and to live—healthy! In fact, it is your birthright to live healthy, right up until the day you die. Making that vision a reality is the great gift of this program. And believe me, it has nothing to do with mapping the human genome, cutting-edge medical technologies, or even more powerful—and dangerous—pharmaceuticals. The good news is, the answer is much, much simpler than all that. And available right here and now. Today.

One of the most obvious clues is right there in the top three killers—cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. All are directly linked to diet. In fact, eight of the top ten causes of death in America today are—not to mention that diet is obviously the cause of the obesity of 60 percent of Americans. (I have no doubt that if and when we devote enough energy to studying the less common "diseases" and health challenges, we will prove that they are also related to your diet.) Eating the proper foods and getting the best nutrients, in balance, will help you avoid all that—along with the misery and poor quality of life that so often precede death, sometimes by decades. The simple secrets to finding the right combinations are what The pH Miracle is all about.

Even mainstream medicine agrees: "Foods contain nutrients essential for normal metabolic function, and when problems arise, they result from imbalances in nutrient intake and from harmful interaction with other factors. For… adult Americans who do not smoke and do not drink excessively, one personal choice seems to influence long-term health prospects more than any other—What We Eat" (from the 1988 "Surgeon General's Report on Health and Nutrition," emphasis added).

Since that landmark report from C. Everett Koop (and even before, depending on the circles you run in), Americans have been following one diet craze after another, not only in an attempt to drop the excess baggage most of us are carrying around but also as a way to find our way back to good health. Further, since that report, America's agribusiness industry and the advertising world have dramatically and disingenuously increased the false, distorted, misleading, and nonsensical information about the food sold in our grocery stores and served up in our fast-food restaurants. The result? We, as a country, are fatter than ever. And we're certainly no healthier.

The problem is that while diet is the key not only to slimness but also to overall health and well-being, it has to be a diet that properly balances our body chemistry. But every one of the diets Americans have tried—including not just the "average American diet" but also such supposedly healthful regimens as low-fat diets, the food pyramid, the macrobiotic diet, the blood type diet, the metabolic type diet, high-protein and low-carbohydrate diets, the raw food diet, and vegetarianism—creates wildly imbalanced body chemistry. Even if one way of eating does get rid of extra pounds (usually temporarily) or lower cholesterol levels or lessen digestive troubles for some people, it does not fulfill the promise of simple good health. We're so used to our modern medical machinery, in fact, that good health seems anything but simple. I'm here to tell you: It is simple.

Forget cholesterol and carbohydrate counts. Forget calories and fat grams. Forget blood pressure, blood sugar, hormone levels, or any of the other markers of health you're used to at the doctor's office. It turns out that the single measurement most important to your health is the pH of your blood and tissues—how acidic or alkaline it is. Different areas of the body have different ideal pH levels, but blood-and-tissue pH is the most telling of all. Just as your body temperature is rigidly regulated, the blood and tissues must be kept in a very narrow pH range—mildly basic or alkaline. The body will go to great lengths to preserve that, including wreaking havoc on other tissues or systems.

The pH level of our internal fluids affects every cell in our bodies. The entire metabolic process depends on an alkaline environment. Chronic overacidity corrodes body tissue, and if left unchecked will interrupt all cellular activities and functions, from the beating of your heart to the neural firing of your brain. In other words, overacidity interferes with life itself. It is (as we'll see in more detail in the next chapter) at the root of all sickness, dis-ease, and disease.

If that's not enough to get you interested in balancing your body pH naturally, nondestructively, keep this in mind: Overacidity is also what's keeping you fat. (More about that later.)

The goal, then—and what this program allows you to do—is to create the proper alkaline balance within your body. The way to do that is by eating the proper balance of alkaline and acid foods. That means 80 percent of your diet must be alkalizing foods such as green vegetables. (This percentage will go down somewhat once you've successfully rebalanced yourself. And if you're very sick, the percentage should go up for some period of time.) That leaves much smaller portions of acid foods (such as meat and grains) on our plates. In addition, carefully chosen, high-quality alkalizing supplements will help you achieve and maintain pH balance. You'll learn more about all this in detail in later chapters. You'll also need to exercise properly (see chapter 13) and adopt other alkaline lifestyle practices, like learning to manage stress (see chapter 14).

That's it. That's all there is to it. Get at least three-quarters of your plate covered with alkalizing food, use the alkalizing supplements as explained in this book, and you'll be good to go.

The following chapters explore the details of why, and the remainder of the book shows you specifically what and how. You'll get the benefit of my own exhaustive research and the work of the great minds that have gone this road before me, and you'll also get Shelley's real-life, practical expertise in how to make all this happen for you.

Bottom line: This program will bring you increased quality and quantity of life. I guarantee you'll see immediate improvement. Your energy will increase, you'll find new mental clarity and powers of concentration, you'll build strength and stamina, and you'll lose excess body fat while increasing muscle mass. You'll have bright eyes and clear skin. You'll look better. You'll improve your athletic performance. Your entire body will function more efficiently. Whatever health challenges you've been facing will improve and most likely evaporate altogether. In short, you'll regain all the effortless, sustainable energy and wellness you thought was lost with your childhood. With the healing, wholeness, and rejuvenation that this program brings, you'll experience, possibly for the first time in your life, vibrant, energetic personal health.

Over and over again, we've witnessed joy, relief, and renewed peace of mind in those who have turned a serious or chronic illness around, those who lost weight that they had been battling for years, those whose cholesterol levels dropped, blood sugars normalized, blood pressure improved, skin cleared up, itching stopped, energy returned. I've seen people who no longer required insulin injections for their diabetes. People whose aches and pains disappeared. Even people who had been diagnosed with cancer whose tumors vanished and who were pronounced cancer-free. We hear frequently from people who haven't been able to work for months or years who are returning to work, people whose allergies are letting up, people whose infections clear. People who are well, whole, and energetic again. People like Sharon and her husband. We'll let her tell their story:

Besides the huge volume of tales like this one—which I'll share more of throughout the book—I've seen the scientific proof of such transformations with my own eyes, though nothing is more persuasive than the radical changes in people's everyday lives. I've observed many thousands of blood samples, including pH levels, from people all over the world, and seen the transformation that occurs—right down to the individual cells—when people change the way they eat, the way they drink, and the way they think.

HOW WE CAME TO EAT THIS WAY

All this healing occurs because people are willing to take responsibility for their own health and make the necessary changes. That was a mission Shelley and I were on for ourselves starting more than thirty years ago. But it took quite a while to realize that what seemed to be optimal in popular thought was still leaving us tired, seemingly prone to every passing cold, and just not able to get the very best out of life. Eventually, through trial and error—experimenting on ourselves—we developed the pH Miracle diet and lifestyle program, and found, finally, the way to get fully, permanently, holistically healthy—physically prepared to live life to its fullest.

We had always been active and on the lookout for ways to improve our health. By 1980, we were on what we thought was an ideal strictly vegetarian regime—mostly complex carbohydrates, along with some simple carbs (sugars), proteins, and fats. We were conforming to what seemed to be the best possible nutrition for our bodies, and we raised our children this way.

We ate the best of all foods sold in our favorite health food stores. Yet still we felt that afternoon fatigue. Our athletic endurance seemed to have plateaued, and we weren't getting any further improvements. We didn't have the strength and stamina we wanted. We were slowly but surely getting one common sign of aging after another. And it all seemed to be getting worse as we grew older.

What we didn't know then was what havoc all this was wreaking on our body chemistry, how it dangerously acidified our bodies, inviting all the disastrous consequences explained in upcoming chapters. Thank goodness the whole family had stayed generally healthy, but with what we know now we can see we were lucky. We were setting ourselves up for a lot of potential trouble.

It took a long time to realize what was going on—and what we could do about it. When we did figure it all out, what a dramatic difference! For one thing, though neither of us was overweight to begin with, we both shed pounds. I lost about twenty pounds—and four inches around my waist. Shelley dropped about fifteen pounds, and is now the same size she was in high school (nine). More important, we felt much better. Not only that, but I also could see astounding changes in our blood, including the pH levels. One good thing about the roughly fourteen-year journey we went through in developing this program was that it gave me time to come to some new (to me) laboratory techniques with which I could chart our progress (which I'll describe more fully later in the book).

Since we were essentially healthy to start out with, I was eager to test the effects of the dietary changes we were making on people facing serious health challenges such as diabetes, cancer, obesity, heart disease, lupus, gout, MS, Parkinson's, and arthritis. Sure enough, in my studies I could see the same sweeping improvements in their blood and the pH of their saliva and urine. They all reported feeling better and losing weight. And in many cases, even the dire conditions healed or disappeared! Witnessing these amazing results, I knew we'd stumbled upon more than a way of eating that just happened to be right for us and our family. We'd found something we wanted to share.

We've been fully on the pH Miracle diet and lifestyle program for more than ten years now, and there's no doubt in our minds: We'll never go back. We've gained too much we'd never want to give up. Even as we get older, we keep feeling better. And we know we're protecting ourselves from the ravages of the diseases that claim so many of our fellow Americans. We've found a way to ensure that we'll be there for each other, for our work, and most of all for our children, over the long haul. And we'll be able to truly enjoy every minute of it.

Good health should be second nature to us, but for many people it seems very difficult to maintain. The pH Miracle plan changes that forever. It will empower you to regain what is rightfully yours, encourage you to take responsibility for your own well-being, and restore the great gift of wellness to you.

I know that there are lots of formulas out there for getting well. And many of them have good track records and positive reputations. Often, that's because they deal partially (perhaps unknowingly) with what you're going to learn here. Also, you can get a lot better without getting completely well, so you might think the job is done without ever reaping the greatest rewards. Once you experience the full, vibrant wellness that comes with this basic change to your diet and lifestyle, however, you'll know just how tremendous the difference can be. So we invite you to begin this journey and experience the results for yourself. Awaken to the light of a new day!