Acidic vs. alkaline.
This may bring back memories (good or bad) of high school science class, but pH balance is something that may be affecting your health right now.
Your body can suffer if it becomes too acidic . Find out how this can happen to you, what symptoms you may be exhibiting, and what steps you should take to fix your body's pH level.
Make Your Body Work Podcast: Episode #094
WE RECOMMEND THE VIDEO: How to Start a Healthy Lifestyle in 2020: Fitness + Goal Setting Tips that Changed My Life!
Hi! :) These goal setting tips TRULY changed my life, I hope they change yours & you get healthy in 2020! :)This video is sponsored by Nike @NikeRunning ...
Episode Resources:
- Connect with Dr. Jaffe Online
- Get Your Copy of "The Alkaline Way" [Free Download]
- Is a Vegetarian Diet Your Best Choice? [MYBW Podcast #049]
- Use pH Testing Strips to Find Your Body's Acidity Level
- Learn More About pH Levels at Perque Integrative Health
- Better Lab Testing Now - A Great Source For Further Health Testing
Is My Body Too Acidic? [Full Text]
Dave: Hey, thanks so much for joining me in this episode of the 'Make Your Body Work' podcast. As you know, this show is all about helping you live a healthier and happier life. Today, we're talking about a cool topic. We're talking about pH balance.
I know that doesn't sound that cool. Maybe you think 'What is pH balance? What does that mean?' Or, 'That sounds nerdy, Dave. Why are we talking about this?' Basically, pH balance is where your body lies on the pH spectrum between being acidic or alkaline. I'm not going to go into details about why that matters so much, because as we get into today's interview, you're going to learn all about why it matters. This all came from a really simple question.
Laura wrote to me, and she said, "Hey, Dave, just wondering what you know about body's pH balance and how I can check mine out."
It was just a simple question, but as she asked that, I thought back to a couple years ago. I started to do some research for an article that I was writing about pH balance; and did a bunch of testing on myself and a bunch of the clients that I was working with. It was very, very eye-opening.
I thought, 'This is something, based on Laura's question, this is something that I know many of you listeners might be interested in.' Do you know? Is your body too acidic? Is it too alkaline? Why would it be in one of those two camps? What does that mean? What sort of symptoms would you be seeing to know that maybe you are too acidic? Most people, I'd say, tend to be too acidic, not too alkaline. How would you know? Why does it matter?
All these questions started to come up, and I connected with a really amazing expert in this field. He's a medical doctor trained in Western medicine, but has a really fascinating story about how he came to not only appreciate but really re-shift or refocus his career to incorporate a lot of Eastern medicine in his practice, and what he teaches to other medical professionals.
I'm going to let him explain what it is that he does, what all this pH balance stuff means, and then what the next steps could be for you, and testing, and then recalibrating your body. I'm really excited to introduce to you, Dr. Russell Jaffe.
Meet Dr. Russell Jaffe
Dave: Dr. Jaffe, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
Dr. Jaffe: Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you.
Dave: Yeah. I've got a lot of questions for you. I'm excited for our chat. Before we dive in, I was reading your bio on your website. It was really interesting. You talked about how you started out looking to basically disprove Eastern medicine. Here, I'll read what I wrote . or, what it said on your website here.
What started as a journey to disprove holistic forms of care became a rich educational experience that transformed Dr. Jaffe into a student. Can you tell us a little bit about that? First of all, why did you look to disprove Eastern medicine?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, like many academic physicians, I had 8,000 hours of training after college, and knew from nothing about acupuncture, about mindfulness, about intensive nutrition as an option, in many situations. I knew nothing about Ayurveda, or hikmat medicine, or Kanpo medicine, or traditional Chinese medicine that includes acupuncture. Out of ignorance, and I think I was common in my peer group, I'm an MD, PhD, et cetera.
It was a little hard for me to believe that if this stuff had value in 8,000 hours, nobody, none of the smart people . and they were very smart people who were teaching us, who are inspiring us, who are informing us, nobody mentioned this.
Remember, I was a student in the 60s , and came to government service in the 70s. Boston University provided me academic, biochemistry, general medical sciences, scientific method, as well as internal medicine training.
Then, I specialized in blood clotting, and I did some original work on how collagen activates platelets, fairly fundamental work, develop fundamental tools that were more able to predict who was at risk, and for what in regard to blood clotting and it's relation to cardiovascular diseases, among other things.
Then, the last 30 years, I've devoted myself to understanding the immune system , and had the great, good fortune to go, as a skeptic, finding very highly qualified people who were very generous; as long as I was serious.
I started sitting at their feet as a student, found a great comparative information that I find useful on a daily basis, in what we bring together at PERQUE Integrative Health, and Eliza/ACT bio technologies, and at Better Lab Tests Now, and Health Studies Collegium Foundation.
I've translated this eclectic cross disciplinary cross training approach that I've had into fairly simple categories, like it's about what we eat and drink, think, and do. We need to be more alkaline. We can talk about what that means, if you wish.
Being healthy is about what you eat, drink, think and do
I am very willing and eager for folks to understand that I came as a skeptic, but what I found was enormous wisdom and information of which I was ignorant , just because I was ignorant. If the lights are out, it's hard to see. If you don't know anything about traditional Chinese medicine, or Ayurveda, or any of these other disciplines, it's fairly easy to dismiss them out of ignorance; which I did.
Then, I had the good fortune of finding people who, if you will, corrected my ignorance. Then, I had the greater good fortune to often become their doctor. I started as their accolade student, et cetera, and then matriculated to becoming their personal physician. That was an even more interesting phase.
Dr. Jaffe’s Epiphany
Dave: Do you remember when your eyes were opened? You talked about being in the dark, that light switch came on, and you said, "You know what? Maybe there's something to this Eastern medicine."
Dr. Jaffe: There were several moments of epiphany. There were several moments of insight, if you will. One was the fellow who I became an apprentice of, his name was [foreign name 00:06:49]. He arrived in Washington, D.C., as a daoist priest in the early 1970s. Acupuncturist extraordinaire.
He set up a clinic on MacArthur Boulevard. I heard about results that he got that we couldn't achieve at the National Institutes of Health. I went to debunk him. I became his student. It was a traditional seven-year apprenticeship.
We translated the [foreign language 00:07:12], one of the three classics of Chinese medicine. That was one of the epiphanies was his ability to take pulses at the wrist, put needles into people, needle them, wound them, if you will, in a minimal way, and change their experience, change their physiology.
I would do lab tests, because I was a clinical pathologist. First a resident, and then I ran the clinical labs at NIH in various ways, for the clinical center, and collaborated with other institutes. That was my day job. Evenings and weekends, I was immersing myself in other cultures, other approaches to health and healing, other philosophies. I found a lot of value in it .
Dave: Yeah, it's interesting because not . I don't have the same story, but sort of a similar perspective. I remember I've gone through a litany of sports-related injuries over my years, and have seen naturopathic doctors, acupuncturists. Some of the treatments that I've had, when they first started, I remember laughing.
Actually, I can remember a specific time actually laughing out loud as this naturopathic doctor started to perform kind of what I saw as these 'woo-woo' techniques. The results were there. It's pretty hard to argue when you start to see the results.
Dr. Jaffe: Experience trumps philosophy.
Dr. Jaffe: Absolutely. You're right. That's what I saw in [foreign name 00:08:43], in [Rammurti Mishra 00:08:45], the guy who wrote 'Textbook of Yoga Psychology.' He was a cross-trained MD/PhD, and [foreign name 00:08:50], a Cambodian monk who was my principle mindfulness mentor; and others like them who are incredibly gracious as long as we were serious.
If we were just there for a photo opportunity, they didn't have time. If we wanted to dip into the wisdom traditions that they embodied, they were generally amazingly accessible and gracious.
Dave: Coming out of that experience, that whole learning experience and having your eyes opened, where would you say that your practice lies now, in terms of weighted towards what we would know in North America as like Western medicine versus some of these Eastern medicine techniques. Do you practice both? Do you lean more heavily in one direction?
Achieving Neuro-Hormonal Balance
Dr. Jaffe: Well, first and for full disclosure, I have never had a private practice. I have always taught other doctors. I've always done original research. I've, for 30 plus years, had a clinical immunology lab; for 30 years, I've had a nutrition for professionals company.
We're doing our best to provide the evidence and the confirmation, and the synthesis of what I learned from other traditions. Now, in terms of what I teach and what I guide, it is mostly about what you eat and drink, think, and do. It is about having a diet that you can digest, assimilate, and eliminate without immune burden .
It's about being in neuro-hormonal balance. It's about having a microbiome, which means your digestive track and a metabolome, which means your cellular metabolism, that are in communion. They're in constant communication and harmonious communication.
What that translates into is that a best of both approach is one I recommend. However, physiology before pharmacology, nature, nurture, and wholeness are my guides. I find that when you shift from a mechanistic reductionist view of the body to a physiologic, respectful systems biology approach, your whole view of what is possible shifts.
I am now an advocate for personalized, proactive, primary prevention that is also predictive of long term health and wellbeing . By that, I mean eight tests that call of epigenetics . They cover all of what you can influence with habits of daily living. These eight tests tell you whether you have a 99 plus percent chance of living ten or more years, or a nine percent chance. It's a choice. Mostly, it's a choice.
Dave: You talked about proactivity in your list, very good alliteration; all those Ps, easy to remember.
Dr. Jaffe: Five Ps, P to fifth. Right, five Ps and you're done. That's the onomatopoeia for those of you who are into that stuff.
Dave: In terms of being proactive.
Dave: What do you teach? What are the core principles for someone who just says, "I want to maximize my health." What do they need to start doing?
Start With a Few Self Assessments
Dr. Jaffe: Well, where we suggest is start with a few assessments that might cost you a dollar a day that you can do to find out whether, in general, things are okay or not. Specifically, for example, transit time . How long does it take from consuming to eliminating? Hydration , are you getting enough water and fluids so that your body is not a little dry?
If it is, more water would be good. Or, beverages based on water. Then, the next piece is that you be aware of the quality of the sources of what you put into your body, the foods and beverages. You balance it out based on things like your first morning urine pH .
Now we're getting into something a little technical, but there's a strip that changes color. If you're green, that's good. If you're yellow, that's bad. If you're blue, that's not good . You want to be in the green middle zone, six and a half to seven and a half.
It’s not just the types of food you eat that determines your health, but also the quality of those foods
If you're lower than that, chances are very high that your cells are hungry for magnesium, the forgotten electrolyte, the nature's calcium channel blocker, the balance to calcium in the body. Chances are, the cells are hungry for magnesium, that they're too acidic, that that extra acid in the urine is reflective of the cells that the urine equilibrated with during the six hours of rest.
That's the one time of day, usually in the morning, after six or more hours of rest. That urine is a non-invasive measure of cellular acidemia, which is having to do with the cells, not just the blood.
It's about a dollar a day to test. We recommend testing, if possible, on a daily basis. These self-assessments are the start. Then, you move onto the eight predictive biomarkers. You cover all of lifestyle and epigenetics. 92% of lifetime health is epigenetic, only 8% is due to your parents or your grandparents in your genes.
Dave: Okay, so this actually transitions very well into Laura's question, because you started talking about testing your pH levels.
Dave: She asked the question very straight up. Obviously she's read something about pH balance, and she says, "How can I check mine out?" Can you start off by, first of all, telling why does pH balance matter? You talked about being acidic, your urine showing up acidic. Why does that even matter?
Why Does pH Balance Matter?
Dr. Jaffe: Yes. It's a bit technical, but I can explain, I think, briefly as follows. There's the technical term is the proton gradient. Let's go down to the level of the cells. Let's go inside the cell, and let's find the battery called the mitochondria.
Some people call them midichlorians, but the mitochondria are the cell batteries. They give us ATP, adenosinetriphosphatase. That is the work molecule that allows the cell to do it's biological activity, and along with each of these ATP molecules comes a proton. The proton is acid .
If you have enough magnesium, and potassium; but if you have enough magnesium, then you can eject . Then you can remove that proton into the blood, and get it out of the body through urine, sweat, and stool. We're looking just at the urine because that is predictive and proactive in regard to what's going on inside the cells, because the bladder cells are in contact with the urine for the six hours of rest.
The next urine that comes out is a meaningful representation of whether you do or don't need magnesium at a cellular level. Now, magnesium, as I said, is nature's calcium channel blocker. It's availability in the diet has declined by 50% in the last 50 years. Need for magnesium as a protective essential mineral has doubled in the last 50 years.
As my grandmother used to say, "The rents are going up and the ceilings are coming down."
Dave: Interesting. What would happen then if someone is low in magnesium? What's the repercussion?
Consequences of Low Magnesium
Dr. Jaffe: The consequence is you shift from elective protective mode, where you're protected from the toxins and stress of high tech living, into survival mode where you're not. Your 'get-up-and-go' has gotten up and went, and you can't find it anymore. This is where fibromyalgia, muscle pain, chronic fatigue, immune dysfunction syndrome, and a variety of other situations present themselves clinically.
By the way, things that used to be so rare that have become epidemic during my medical lifetime . Things like NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In my day, there was alcoholic fatty liver disease, and that turned out to be nutrient deficiency because when you're blind drunk, you tend not to eat.
Now we have people who have consumed mostly high fructose corn syrup, in one form or another, the unhealthy form of fructose sugar; the consequence is a lot of fatty liver.
My colleague at University of Colorado-Denver, Richard Johnson, has done some of the fundamental work. He has several books called ' The Fat Switch ' where he points out that processed sugar, and especially the high fructose corn syrup, is a gateway to fatty liver and problems of detoxification.
We want to preserve your liver. We want to promote it's health and wellbeing. We want to do that in part by making sure that the healthy alkaline side is represented and maintained inside the cell. Life exists poised on the edge, just above neutrality, on a scale from zero to 14, where seven is in the middle.
You want to be on the alkaline side of seven. The system is so poised. The system is so elegant that a change in even a few hundredths of a pH unit can be the difference between 90% protein efficiency that passes quality control, builds you up and protects you, versus 10% passing quality control and 90% having defects that have to be recycled.
That means your energy goes down, your vitality goes down, restorative sleep goes away. You get up not feeling so good, but you've been in bed. There's no quote, 'disease,' but you're not really well. That's the consequence of a loss of the proton gradient, and where the cell is too acid. That reflects itself in that first morning urine pH, the one after rest .
Dave: Okay, now you've really got my wheels turning here. A couple of years ago, I was hosting . It was a fitness class, and we were talking about pH. I had purchased a bunch of pH testing strips. Over the course, I think it was maybe an eight-week class, we were refining our diets and kept on using these strips to test our pH levels.
How to Prevent High Acidity
Because it's so precise, though, how is it possible that one of those pH strips actually tells the story? I just can't imagine that such a small percentage difference would actually show up on one of those strips. Does it?
Dr. Jaffe: Very good question. Yes, it does; but specifically when I said six hours of rest so the urine equilibrates with the cells. Then you use this high contrast pH five and a half to eight, where yellow is too acid, green is just right, and blue is the other side. You're losing muscle mass, and basically ammonia and catabolic illness is the other side.
The goldilocks analogy is correct. You want to be in the middle. You want to be just right. You don't want too much. You don't want too little. You do want to be alkaloid. You do want to have what's called the proton gradient. By the way, they gave a guy named [Mitchell 00:19:54] the Nobel Prize for figuring this stuff out. It is a little bit complex, but it's really elegant.
I think people can understand it; at least my analogy. They can understand that when you're reserved and resilient, when you've got enough of the good stuff, and you can get the bad stuff out, when you have enough of the essential good stuff and you can get the toxic materials out, your quality of life is better.
Health is relatively simple: Get rid of the "bad stuff" and get more of the "good stuff"
On the other hand, when you hunker down and you shift from elective protective mode, which is what you want, into the more acid side of the cell function, and now you're in survival mode. Now you're at risk. You're at risk of toxic metals, and oxidative stress, and hormone disruption, and all sorts of problems that are generally overlooked.
Most doctors focus on the symptoms and how to get relief of the symptoms. That's what's called quaternary care. I'm talking about primary, proactive prevention. I won't go through all the Ps again, but understand what I'm talking about.
Most people spend time trying to fix their symptoms while they should be focusing on prevention
Dave: Yeah. To get super practical then, I'm thinking for the listening audience, I'm sure everyone understand, 'Okay, I don't want to be too acidic.' That's our take-away so far.
Dave: I can go ahead and I can, in the morning, pee on a strip and see what color it turns out. Hopefully it's yellow. If it's not, then I need to make some sort of changes.
What Should You Do When Your Body Is Too Acidic?
Dave: What is that next step? I pee on a strip and "Oh, it's green." What do I do?
Dr. Jaffe: Okay, well now you look at what you eat and drink . Are the foods you're eating alkaline forming? By the way, we're offering a free downloadable copy of 'Joy in Living The Alkaline Way,' which includes a chart that shows you the full metabolic effects of foods on body chemistry. The next generation after what most people have in the database, but we did this because it was needed. It's been accepted now over the last several decades.
You can eat a diet that is more acid forming, or more alkaline forming. Guess what? The more alkaline forming is more mineral rich. It's lots of fruits of vegetables. It's lots of herbs, and seeds, and spices. It's lots of fermented foods, proactive things that have probiotics in them .
It does mean having supplements that include probiotics, probably vitamin D. Most of us spend 92 or 3% of our time indoors. When we go outside, only a small fraction of our skin is available, so yes, you can get vitamin D from sunlight, if you're a lifeguard on Tel Aviv Beach, or something like that.
Dave: Not in Vancouver, British Columbia, where we get rain six out of seven days.
Dr. Jaffe: By the way, doctor, my colleague had shown that a lot of people don't absorb vitamin D from their intestines. They benefit from drops under the tongue. We have this as 500 IU per drop, available in Canada, America, North America . Actually, wherever. That's one of the things you do.
You get probiotics, like DigestiGuard. You get vitamin D3, like the drops, D3 Perque D3 CellGuard. You look at how much ascorbate that you need, and you can find out how much antioxidant vitamin C ascorbate you need. You want 100% fully buffered, fully reduced.
We have downloadable and in that, 'Joy in Living the Alkaline Way,' how to do a C cleanse. It is just what the word says. You use ascorbate to cleanse. That's a good thing. You can usually lose three to five pounds over a few days if you do it correctly, because it's the water.
Most people have too much water. If you do a C cleanse correctly, you'll lose a few pounds. Your definition of your face will get better. There are people, models in various places that tell us, they won't go out on a photo shoot without doing a C cleanse; because they're just that much more radiant and beautiful.
People, in case you wonder about how much, because it can take a lot of ascorbate when you have a lot of oxidative stress today . There are people, some of whom are available for discussion, who have done this many, many years. One of them called me up recently and said his main problem at the age of 74 is that his friends are getting older… and I prescribed younger friends.
Dave: I love that. Okay, a couple things. First of all, before we continue, for the audience, if you're interested in the alkaline way download, Dr. Jaffe is giving a link. That will be in the show notes. If you go to MakeYourBodyWork.com/94, you can get that download and see everything that he's speaking about.
Dr. Jaffe, when I first started taking a look at alkaline diets, I remember thinking, 'Well, obviously foods that are going to cause me to become acidic are acidic foods.' I thought, 'Okay, I need to . Oh, it'll probably tell me to stay away from citrus foods.' That's not at all the case. Can you tell the audi- [crosstalk 00:24:39]
Dr. Jaffe: No, let me jump .
Dave: Yeah, tell the audience .
Food Chemistry vs. Body Chemistry
Dr. Jaffe: That's a really important question. There's the food chemistry in the test tube, and then there's the food chemistry in you . You've picked the most important example. If you put a pH meter, or if you use a pH strip to measure the pH of orange juice, or grapefruit juice, or lemon juice, or lime juice.
It is acidic in the test tube, but the acids are known as Krebs energy. Salts, citric malate, succinate, fumarate, in general, those are the four. They produce bicarbonate inside that mitochondrial battery of the cell. They produce twice as much bicarbonate as there is acid. They are alkalinizing in the body, but acid in the test tube, or in the glass. That's very important.
Dave: That's a perfect explanation, because it seems counterintuitive. My next question is, for the listeners, what foods are acidic in the body, even though we might not associate them with being acidic in the test tube, as you suggested?
Dr. Jaffe: Right, right. Please do download this 'Joy of Living the Alkaline Way,' because it's got the details. You can even make up shopping lists based on it.
The headline is the following, the super foods, the fruits and vegetables, the herbs, spices, and sprouts, the nuts and seeds, the lentils and pulses, the beans, the simple low on the food chain whole foods, . preferably bio dynamic or at least organic, because commercial to me means contaminated. I don't know how much, but I don't want contaminated.
I do want better. Better to me means a home garden, a community-supported agriculture, CSA participation, organic, or bio dynamic.
Here in Vienna, Virginia, where I live, we have a six year old permaculture bio dynamic food forest. We have 250 edible plants in about a quarter of an acre. We just planted in another 18 or so bearing fruit trees.
Over time, we will be eating more and more out of our garden, out of our front yard edible landscaping, and less-and-less out of Whole Foods, or markets where you can get better quality. I think it's worth paying a premium for organic or bio dynamic. If folks want to know about bio dynamic, [inaudible 00:27:05] building on [inaudible 00:27:07], building on Hippocrates, if you go all the way back.
Dave: One of the things that I remember being very surprised at when I was looking at foods that caused my body to become acidic was that meat was so prevalent in all the lists that I read.
Dave: This was before . I'm primarily vegetarian now, but this was before I started cutting out meat. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why does meat cause our body to become acidic?
How Digestible Is Your Food?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, first of all, I'm going to quote Thomas Jefferson. He said, "Let meat be a condiment, not a staple, of your diet." If you have basically the amount of flesh or meat that fits in the palm of your hand, and then you have a bunch of vegetables and fruit for dessert, and lentils, and herbs, with it, I'm not sure that's a problem at all.
The problem is we eat foods that are hard to digest , that are high on the food chain, and that if you get them from general or commercial sources, are going to be contaminated to, from my point of view, a significant extent.
I use the word 'significant' to mean 'statistical' here. It's meaningful because it robs you of the good stuff, and we generally need more of the good stuff than we are getting. It's a team approach.
Nutrients are not medications. When you have all of the vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and more, by the way. When you have all of the essential co-factors, and a balance of essential fats, when you have digestion that inhibits the bad bugs . By the way, enough of the good probiotic organisms and prebiotic fiber, and recycled glutamine protects you when you get exposed, because we're going to get exposed, to harmful bacteria from time to time.
Over the last 30 years, as I've been living this way, many people on international delegations that I've been on have gotten . wherever we were, it could have been Montezuma's Revenge, it could have been something else, but the equivalent is they got sick and I didn't; and we ate the same food.
Why didn't I get sick? Well, because I ate enough of the good stuff to cancel out the bad stuff. My children will tell you. My daughter says she's been to 62 countries; and except when she ran out of some of her supplements, she's generally been very healthy, even in high stress environments.
There's accumulating information. There's lots of anecdotal information. There's lots of even peer reviewed information. We've had the privilege of contributing to that. We need to rethink. We need to rediscover primary proactive prevention.
We need to fall in love with the enchantment with everyday life, because if you eat low on the food chain, and more importantly, if you eat foods you can digest, assimilate and eliminate without immune burden . and now we get to the lymphocyte response assay, one of the eight predictive biomarkers, says where have you lost tolerance in regard to certain foods?
It might be a generally good food, but for you, it might be a disaster because your immune system sees it as a foreign invader and is going to fight with it if it gets into the body.
The best foods are the ones you can digest, assimilate and eliminate without burden to your immune system
Becoming More Alkaline and Less Acidic: How Does It Feel?
Dave: Dr. Jaffe, I just want to say, I love your enthusiasm. I can just tell that you're so fired up about this topic. I want to give like a final thought for the listeners. If they were to do a pH test. They pee on the strip, say they do it for a week straight and consistently get the same color. I'm green, green, green, green, green.
Then I start to make changes, maybe as the ones that you suggested in 'The Alkaline Way' download, start changing my diet so that my body becomes more alkaline, less acidic. What will I see? Why would they want to do this? What would be the first benefits they would see of going to that work?
Dr. Jaffe: I'm glad you asked it in that way. What's the bottom line? What's the feel the difference result here?
Dr. Jaffe: The difference is your vitality begins to come back, your endurance begins to come back. I'm at an age where many of my colleagues are retiring and I think I'm just getting started. Many of my teachers, one of them said it took him 40 years to get sick, 40 years to get well, and then he could get started.
I asked him, "Isn't 80 a little bit late to get started?"
He smiled and he said, "Have you not heard of Moses?"
If you read the Bible, Moses was 80 when he back and said, "Let my people go." The takeaway is that the simple self-assessments, things like what we have synthesized in 'The Joy of Living the Alkaline Way' guide, what we have available in personal assessments as well as lab predictive tests change the whole equation.
Now it is all about you. Now it is about the 92% of your life that you can influence with your habits of daily living. We can coach you so that you can have a diet you can digest, assimilate, and eliminate without immune burden . That you achieve normal hormonal balance, and therefore, your joy of living, your optimism, your productivity; every aspect of your life is a product of your cellular function. We want to get the good stuff in and the bad stuff out, as you need it for each individual. We think the time to do that is today.
Make Your Body Work Takeaway
Dave: I agree. Start now. Why wait? That brings us to the conclusion of the show. I like to leave listeners with what's called a 'Make Your Body Work Takeaway.' Dr. Jaffe, you gave us a ton of information today. What would you say to someone like Laura who's thinking, 'Okay, maybe I should check this whole pH balance thing out.' What's the first step? What do they need to do today?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, the first step is to get these high contrast hydrion pH papers, five and a half to eight. Then, contact us or look at what we have online because it's not once and done. It is about the symphony of life, and a very fundamental aspect of it is your cellular acid/alkaline balance, which relates directly to the essential minerals, like magnesium .
We have novel ways of getting the magnesium in, and then chaperoning the delivery to the cells so that folks like Laura can find out if they need more alkaline minerals, and they probably do, and exactly how much they need, based on a daily regular log where you check the urine pH after rest.
You see how that correlates with how you feel and function. Having done this now for decades, I promise you that when you're in that healthy green zone, you will feel and function better.
When you're in the yellow acid zone, you will progressively feel worse. We want you to feel better and function better. We do think that now's the time to embrace this kind of predictive and personalized approach.
Connect with Dr. Russell Jaffe
Dave: Well, for the listeners again, if you go to MakeYourBodyWork.com/94, I'll have a link where you can get some pH strips and begin this testing. Dr. Jaffe, I also want to allow them an easy opportunity to connect with you, if they do have questions or want to follow up. Where is the best place for them to connect with you?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, they can connect with me any way they want on social media. Put in my name, Dr. Russell Jaffe. Put in Perque, P-E-R-Q-U-E, like 'Perque Integrative Health.' Put in Eliza/ACT, if you want to do the lab testing, but most importantly, for those who are consumers, there's BetterLabTestsNow.com, that's a website.
It's a portal that allows consumers to get access to these kinds of functional, integrative, wholistic predictive tests. Not the conventional tests, but the ones that you can use to monitor how much risk or resilience you have. We want you to be in the category of 'I'm going to live ten plus years, 99% of the population,' and not one-tenth of that.
Dave: Awesome. Well Dr. Jaffe, thanks again for being on the show; again, for sharing your enthusiasm, and just so much wisdom. This is an area admittedly I am not an expert, so I learned a ton. I know all the listeners did as well. Thank you for being with us today.
Dr. Jaffe: Well thanks for being such an elegant host, because I did get to cover a lot of material. I want you to know, I didn't learn this in 20 minutes. Please stay in touch with us because it can save your life, or the life of those you love. Now is the time.
Dave: Thanks again, Dr. Jaffe, for being on the show and sharing so much information about pH balance and giving us an idea of what it means, and where we can start. That's the most important thing.
For anyone who listened to this episode, you'll know that I always say it's all about taking action. The action is test yourself out. If you go to MakeYourBodyWork.com/94, I'll put a link to some pH strips that . They're inexpensive. They'll do the trick. They're easy to administer. I'm not making any money off selling these things. They're not from my website, but it's just an easy way to get your hands on some pH strips, and then test it out and see, is your body leaning too acidic, as we talked about today? Then, maybe you'll get Dr. Jaffe's download and start to take steps that will correct that problem, and see what happens in your life.
See how you feel better. See how your body changes. See how you think better. See if you get that vitality back that Dr. Jaffe talked about. It all starts, though, with a test. See if this something that applies to you.