 Now just a few slides ago we spoke a little bit about pH. We said that pH is a measure of acidity or alkalinity. And you see here we've got this scale going from 0 up to 14. The lower down we go towards 0 the more acidic a substance is. Whereas the higher we go towards 14 the more alkaline a substance will be. Right in the middle is 7 and 7 is neutral meaning it's neither acidic or alkaline. Now many of you have probably done a little bit of research and probably have heard a little bit about an alkaline diet or acidic foods etc. And it's really important that all of you understand what this means, how we can test this, how we can also influence this positively. There's a lot of people that very strongly believe that acidity is the root of many illnesses that we see in the body. Because ultimately most disease processes will thrive in an acidic environment. And we're really talking here about the cells in all of our tissues that are bathed in fluid. If those fluids bathing our cells are very acidic and even the fluid within our cells are very acidic then that can start to favour and encourage a disease process. What's interesting is when we think about what actually makes an acidic environment internally because there are certainly many dietary factors that do this. If we think for example about processed foods, certainly refined sugars, red meats, particularly red meats that are not grass-fed, not organic, we know that the actual components of red meat generally will have more of an acidic effect on the body. Dairy is probably one of the single worst culprits. Dairy when it enters the body becomes acidic. So whilst it might have an alkaline pH externally, it is converted into an acidic compound internally. Now we'll talk more about this in our skeletal system lecture but this is a really important point because many people are told to ingest as much dairy as they can to help when people have brittle bones, also known as osteoporosis. But in fact dairy has a negative effect on your bone density and dairy can actually take out the minerals from your bone and it can also have a very detrimental effect therefore on the actual strength of bone itself. Sweeteners, particularly the more harmful artificial sweeteners of things like aspartame, also known as aspartame, and also things like eggs, so mostly animal based products. But we also have things like drugs, antibiotics, also the ingredients of vaccines. Vaccines are very acidic and actually the ingredients of them can also be incredibly harmful internally in our bodies. Vaccines include ingredients such as mercury in some cases, particularly the flu vaccine and also vaccines broadly will contain aluminium which is a very, very harmful heavy metal. And that goes well beyond just changing the body pH because aluminium is particularly harmful to the brain where it can deposit and it can cause a whole host of disease processes to take place. There are lots of connections between aluminium toxicity and even diseases such as Alzheimer's which is a type of dementia. So we've got to consider here the environment that we're creating internally with diet and with those medications. But we can also think more broadly about things such as a lack of exercise. We can also think about somebody that's very stressed because if somebody's very stressed their muscles tighten up and when your muscles are chronically used they become achy and fatigued because your muscles start to produce lots of lactic acid. Lactic acid is what makes your pH become more acidic rather than more alkaline. So through that prolonged stress you're actually creating acidity in your tissues. We can also think about things like pollution, pesticides and herbicides as well. What we want to be promoting instead is alkalinity. With alkalinity we want to be encouraging fruits and vegetables, we want to be encouraging nuts, seeds and also legumes. What's interesting is to actually measure your output of pH in the body. Now what we can't really do is go in and open a section in the arm and put a little piece of pH paper in there or litmus paper to see what the pH is. It doesn't really work like that and it also doesn't really work with the blood because the blood wants to keep its own range of pH between 7.35 and 7.45. If we go too low or too high outside of those ranges that can be very very harmful for cells in the body. So the blood will always prioritize itself and ensuring that it is always within those ranges of 7.35 to 7.45 meaning it's always slightly alkaline. If some somebody has all of these factors here or even a few of those acidic factors there you wouldn't notice that by measuring somebody's blood because the blood will always adjust to get itself back to normal. But what we do notice is that the outputs from the body will represent what is in excess in the body internally. In particular here we can think about urine and also saliva. Now first thing in the morning if you were to urinate onto a litmus strip which you can get very easily online you can measure your pH. You can also do this with simple simply by using your saliva so spitting onto the litmus strip first thing in the morning and looking to see where your pH will fall. Now the lower your pH is down towards those ranges that are acidic you know that's telling you that your body is harboring more of an acidic environment. What we know particularly with cancer patients is that acidity is certainly a key factor in the optimal cancer environment. Whenever I treat cancer patients I always ask them to do one of those tests or both of those tests so that I can gauge a little bit more about whether their body is really harboring an acidic or an alkaline environment because we know therefore as to whether that environment is promoting the disease or in fact whether it's inhibiting it. We can create that alkalinity very easily and like I said with those various factors before and by eliminating those acidic factors there we can really really promote health. If the body does not quite manage to get the the actual minerals and other nutrients to maintain the pH it starts to steal that from structures such as bones and also from teeth. So we've also got to make sure that we get all of those key minerals in particular from our food so that we don't start pulling them out of key big areas in the body such as the skeletal system. You will also just see there that we have a picture of the digestive system and you'll note that the stomach has a very low pH compared to the other areas of this system and that's really there to make sure that that acid can break down that food but as you'll see there are other areas where in fact we don't want acidity and we want to neutralize that instead.