Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (11 page)

Ever hear the expression
Something’s got to give? Well, that something is gorgeous you! Your loyal and dedicated body will do anything it needs to do in order to keep you alive. It doesn’t just “find” balance; it works dang hard to create it. If you’ve ever had a high fever, then you’ve experienced the desperation your body undergoes as it scrambles to regain control. A temperature of 98.6 degrees F is healthy, but 105—get your ass to the emergency room! On paper this doesn’t seem like such a big number jump, but boy do those additional digits wreak havoc. Nausea, vomiting, chills, headaches, pain—these are just some of the symptoms felt as your body works to regulate your system.

Now imagine a similar cascade constantly taking place as your body tries to maintain proper pH. The Standard American Diet makes it very difficult to maintain a balanced pH. You eat the fiberless fried tushie with a side of coagulated mucus-creating moo juice (cheese), wash it down with a caffeine/booze fest, followed by a hunk of pancreas-smacking Sugar Snaps. You might love it going down, but your poor God pod is left to deal with the cleanup. One of the ways your body regains balance is by robbing from your precious mineral and enzyme reserves.

Your body needs super-sexy minerals in order to function properly. Since you can’t make them, you gotta get minerals from your chow (preferably organic). In addition to the main minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, and sodium, you need trace amounts of manganese, selenium, zinc, iodine, chromium, and copper. Your body uses these minerals to make proteins, enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, and everything else needed to tango.

So how do minerals affect pH? Foods rich in alkaline minerals, such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium, create alkalinity in the body, while foods containing acidic minerals, such as phosphorus and sulfur, lower the pH. A healthy diet stocks your body with plenty of alkaline minerals, while an overly acidic diet eventually maxes out the reserves. This forces your body to pull its own minerals to neutralize acids in order to keep your blood pH on the alkaline side.

One of the ways it does this is by mining alkaline minerals from your bones, teeth, tissues, and organs. When an alkaline and an acidic element hook up, they form a neutral salt. This salt no longer influences your pH (wow, chemistry is so titillating!). Think of this fabulous buffer system as your emergency stash of inner Tums. It’s okay to use them occasionally, but not as a daily crutch. And if you don’t replace your inner Tums with minerals from your chow, then the cabinet will be empty the next time you need it!

The major consequence of losing minerals from the body, especially teeth and bones, is osteoporosis and loss of bone density. One way that loss occurs—ironically—is by drinking too much milk. A high-protein, animal-based diet is extremely acidic. To compensate for that overload of acid, your body mines calcium from your bones and teeth to neutralize the acids created by the loads of milk you swill.

When the acid overload gets too high for your blood, your body dumps the acid out of your bloodstream and into your tissues. Next, your lymphatic system (the cleaning ladies of the body) tries to neutralize the acid and get rid of the waste. But the only way it can do that is to dump the acids back into your bloodstream. Can you spot the destructive cycle a mile away? And if your lymph system is already stuffed with acids, they start to build up in the tissues as well.

Up to 95 percent
of your body’s activity is dependent on minerals, and one of their most important tasks is to help produce enzymes. Enzymes are little protein catalysts that ignite a gazillion complex and specific chemical reactions in the cells of every living plant or animal. There are thousands of different enzymes in your body, and they help with everything from digesting dinner to brain function to healing and detoxification. They’re like the ultimate BFF, if you ask me.

You make two main types of enzymes: digestive and metabolic. Digestive enzymes break your food down into simpler, smaller bits that are easier for your body to absorb. The second you put grub in your mouth, digestion begins. It’s a lovely step-by-step process involving your saliva, stomach, duodenum, pancreas, and small intestine.

Each of these fantastic organs secretes different enzymes at various stages along the way. Amylase in your saliva breaks down starch into sugar. In your stomach, enzymes like pepsin break down proteins. Lipase, an enzyme made in your pancreas and released into your small intestine, breaks down fats. If you lack adequate enzyme levels at any stage, food slips by and indigestion occurs. Add overeating and constant between-meal snacking and your body will have a hard time keeping up.

Here’s another important factoid: Enzymes are both pH- and heat-sensitive. Cooking food above 118 degrees destroys enzymes. This doesn’t mean
that you can’t eat cooked foods; it means that you shouldn’t exclusively eat cooked foods. Highly refined and processed foods suck the most; they’re completely devoid of enzymes (pasteurized stuff, too). Consequently, your body needs to make more digestive enzymes to get the job done.

But there’s only so much energy to go around, so the more time your body spends making digestive enzymes, the less time it has to create metabolic enzymes. What are they? Metabolic enzymes basically run your body. They make every biochemical reaction in your 100 trillion cells possible. Metabolic enzymes build blood, tissues, and organs; repair your beautiful body; and help your cells produce energy and carry away waste. Obviously, these righteous little dudes are really important.

There’s one more important enzyme group to mention: food enzymes. For optimum health, we need to get additional enzymes from our food—especially as we age, because our bodies slow down enzyme production. Dang! Luckily, plant foods can supply the backup enzymes needed to keep us smart and sassy. Your body is a bank account, and food enzymes are the currency. Imagine making deposits instead of constant withdrawals. The more deposits you make, the more equity and interest you build.

By eating a vegetarian or vegan diet, with an emphasis on raw and living foods—which are loaded with their own enzymes—you give your body a break from the wear and tear of dining on too much cooked and acidic foods. The research of Dr. Edward Howell (often referred to as the father of enzymes) says, “Living organisms will secrete no more enzymes than are needed for digestion of a particular food.” So when the foods you eat come to the party with the right amount of food enzymes, they don’t drain the host. Instead, the enzymes in the food itself help the digestive process; as a result, you use less of your own digestive enzymes.

Tom Grundy

If you’re a curious dot connector, you may be wondering how pH-sensitive enzymes survive the tummy and its hydrochloric acid. This stumped me for years. Finally I came across a few respected sources that cleared this question up, including Dr. Gabriel Cousens, author of
Conscious Eating
. He offers evidence that there are actually two different sections of the stomach, the upper (cardiac section) and the lower (pyloric section). The upper section has a pH of about 5 to 6, which is important because food enzymes are still active in this range. Good news—grub stays in the upper section for up to sixty minutes, where food enzymes and enzymes from your saliva go to town. Once they hit the lower, more acidic section of the stomach, hydrochloric acid and pepsins take charge, especially on proteins, and food enzymes are only temporarily inactivated. Where does your chow go next? The alkaline small intestine—where food enzymes become active again in order to complete their
work. Food enzymes have another wonderful purpose: They allow your pancreas to take a break from secreting digestive enzymes. When this happens, your good old pancreas releases more metabolic enzymes for detoxification, renewal, repair, and general overall maintenance.

For all you pet lovers out there, food enzymes are an important thing to consider. Ever wonder why animals in the wild don’t get the same chronic (human) diseases as our domesticated pets experience? The answer may lie in the power of enzymes. When animals are fed cooked, processed foods (sometimes filled with dangerous poisons from China), their bodies break down and they get sick.

In the early 1930s Dr. Francis Pottenger began a ten-year study involving more than 900 cats. He broke the cats into two groups. The first group was fed raw meat and raw (unpasteurized) milk. The second group was fed cooked meat and pasteurized milk. The cats on the raw diet remained disease-free and thrived. Over time, the cats on a 100 percent cooked food diet developed degenerative diseases, reproductive issues, and other health problems. Viva raw foods and enzymes for me, you, and Scooby-Doo.

As you’ve probably guessed
by now, whole and unprocessed raw and living foods add a huge amount of plant-based currency to your account. These foods are the fountain of youth. Leafy greens, wheatgrass, veggies, sprouts, certain fruits, nuts and seeds, grains, seaweeds, green juices, and smoothies flood our bodies with chlorophyll, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, fiber, and oxygen. Happy, healthy cells love oxygen. They thrive on an alkaline, oxygen-rich, plant-based diet. Unhealthy cells (like cancer cells) or viruses, bacteria and other nasty microorganisms hate oxygen. They prefer an acidic diet high in animal products, processed and refined foods, and synthetic chemicals.

Ever hear of Dr. Otto Warburg? Well, he’s sexy! And even though Warburg’s been dead for decades, I still have a crush on him. In 1931 he won the Nobel Prize for his pivotal studies on the metabolism of cancer cells. His key revelation was that “Cancer has only one prime cause. It is the replacement of normal oxygen respiration of the body’s cells by an anaerobic (oxygen deficient) cell respiration.” In layman’s terms, cancer cells are anaerobic, they thrive in an oxygen-depleted environment. Conversely, they cannot live in the oxygen-rich environment enjoyed by normal cells.

When we eat a plant-based diet, with an emphasis on raw foods, we assist our bodies in maintaining an alkaline (aerobic) environment. The more oxygen we get in our food, the more health we experience. Excessively acidic food creates an unhealthy cellular environment, which increases the chance of mutations. Raw and living foods (foods that are still growing, like sprouts) are the most alkaline, oxygenrich foods we can eat. They’re my prescription for optimum health. Because they haven’t been cooked,
they still contain their life force. The fabulous fiber in raw food (or any fiber-rich food) also acts like an intestinal scrub brush, sweeping away debris. This allows your tubes to remain clear and ready to absorb nutrients from other healthy food. Your body loves all this life force, and so does your immune system!