Are You Acidic? Here's How to Find Out

Interviewer: Dr. Young, you talk about an alkaline diet and a lifestyle. You've committed a lot of work to that. How can a person tell which side of the spectrum they're on? I mean, if I feel okay, does that give me an indication of where my body's at, in terms of pH balance?

Dr. Robert O. Young: Well, one of the first stages of acidity is innervation, or I'm tired, or I wake up tired, or I don't seem to have that energy around 3 p.m. in the afternoon. And so, I'm kind of fighting through that. Or I have to have a cup of coffee, you know, to keep myself awake during the day. These are all signs that you're out of balance. Probably the biggest, noticeable, physical sign is overweight. The body retains fat in order to protect the organs that sustain life. So, the body, if it doesn't eliminate its own waste products from metabolism or diet, it pushes it out into the fatty tissues. So the fat becomes a collection agency for over acid from our diets and lifestyle. And so, obesity or excess weight that many of us carry is a result of the body out of alkaline balance.

Interviewer: Are there tests to get more specific and find out where we're at?

Dr. Robert O. Young: There are inexpensive tests that you can do on your own. You can go to a pharmacy and pick up some litmus paper, or what we call pH hydrion paper. You can test your saliva, which is an indicator of your alkaline reserves. Do I have enough alkaline reserves to neutralize the acids produced during exercise, or even breathing, or my heart beating, or the food I'm just about to partake of? Do I have enough in reserve to neutralize this? 

Ideally, the pH of the saliva should be at 7.2 or greater. On a scale from 0 to 14, 7 being the midpoint, anything above 7 is alkaline, anything below 7 is acid. And just like the Richter's scale, it's logarithmics. So it goes to the power of 10. So from 7 to 8, that's 10 times more alkaline than 7. And if it goes from 7 to 6, that's 10 times more acidic. So it's exponential. If it goes from 8 to 9, that's a hundred times. So our body is alkaline balanced at 7.365 to 7.4. Much like the ocean is alkaline balanced at a pH of 8.3. We know that what would happen to the marine life in the ocean if the pH goes acidic? All life would die, would cease to exist. And so, that's what happens to the human body. The human body gradually dies from a state of over acid. Acid is what eventually kills us all. Our body's inability to remove our own waste products. 

Now, the second test, which is critically important is testing the urine. The urine is a direct test to test the acid of the tissues and organs of the body. So if you're testing below 7.2, then you're in trouble. 

Interviewer: Okay.

Dr. Robert O. Young: Okay? And you do that the first thing in the morning. Now, why do we do this in the first in the morning? It's because the body has ebbs and tides, much like our ocean. And so, the lowest time or the most acidic time is the first thing in the morning. So you test your first urine. If that first urine isn't at least 7.2 or greater, then you may want to consider what you're eating, what you're drinking, and what you're thinking because all those impact the delicate pH balance of the fluids of the body.