On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:39:59 -0600, Kenneth Anderson <[log in to unmask]>  
wrote:

> Suddenly there are no posts on “Paleo Diet offers the net-base balance
> needed,” which was proving to be an interesting if provocative post?  The
> questions have not been adequately answered regarding acid/alkaline diet
> philosophy. If Cordian is right, you folks could be damaging your health  
> as
> you age, and that's not something to censor.

I'm not one of those "folks", but the acid-alkaline information out there  
is
highly contradictory and some has been hijacked by militant vegans, and  
the lists of acid vs alkaline foods differ widely.  So it's really hard to  
separate fact from
fancy on this subject.  A couple of years ago I tried to find out what I  
could, but the results were pretty vague.

Certainly and obviously if eating a mainly-meat diet was damaging to  
health, we
wouldn't be here on the internet but would have died out tens of thousands  
of years ago.

What little I have been able to glean:
The acid-alkaline balance of the body is so important that the body has a  
number of different ways to keep it in balance.  One of the many is to  
buffer base (calcium mostly) in from your bones.  In the long run, you  
need your bones, so this is not good.

If your blood pH escapes the body's many controls and is off even a little  
in either direction, it quickly becomes a medical emergency.  Also  
obviously, we can pretty much rely on the body's techniques, since people  
eat everything from all-meat to all-fruit or even almost all-grain, and  
don't fall over with acid-base imbalance problems.

One of the less wild-eyed books I came across was Christopher Vasey, The  
Acid-Alkaline Diet, but I wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend it.  It does  
explain how an acidic food like lemon juice reports as alkaline to the  
kidneys, etc.

I decided it's pretty much a tempest in a teapot for most people; our  
bodies do just fine on reasonable food choices.

	Lynnet