Why our bodies are unnaturally full of acids

Weak Acids

Weak acids are found in fruits and vegetables as well as whey protein and yogurt, honey, and some other foods. They can make you tired, cranky, etc. and make your skin dry. This is not natural and is largely a result of the industrialized way that we harvest crops.

Crops lose their acids as they ripen on the vine, but if you pick them before they are ripe they won't lose those acids as they ripen off the vine. In industrialized farming, crops (like apples) are harvested before they are ripe, then ripen off the vine while in storage (refrigerated train cars, warehouses, etc.) waiting to be sold. So when you eat it, it looks ripe but still has all the acids it did when it was picked unripe.

Solution? Either search high and low for crops picked recently or for a farm where you can "pick your own", or eat the few fruits that are always low in acids like bananas, dates, and pears (there are many lists online of food acid content).

Strong Acids
Strong acids are created by our digestive systems. If you eat a steak or a bunch of fatty foods (keeping in mind that fats are not bad) your body creates acids to break the food down. Some people process this acid efficiently (especially when they drink plenty of water), but many people are slow in processing strong acids and get acidosis, which can make you really tired, give you an ulcer, etc. Just ask last year's NBA MVP Derrick Rose, who went to the hospital with 2 ulcers the same year due to a love of spicy food and candy.

From ESPN Chicago:
"'Everybody's got their poison, and mine is sugar... I'll be having binges where I'll just eat tons and tons of candy,' he said. 'I could go without eating candy for like two weeks, but right when I [have] the first taste of candy in a day, I'll go through like two pounds of candy. For real, like two pounds.'

A sugar high isn't a problem for a grizzled candy veteran like Rose.

'I'm so used to it,' he said. 'I could eat a whole bunch of candy and then go to sleep. Most people would be up, [saying] 'I can't go sleep.' I'd go right to sleep, man. That's how bad it is. I wish I could [stop].'

While Skittles and Gummy Bears are some of his favorites, Rose is an equal opportunity candy-a-holic. Everything but chocolate, that is."

Funny, chocolate is the only candy I do eat... anyway.

Weak vs. Strong Acids
These fruit and vegetable acids are weak acids, which the body must get rid of through oxidation (i.e. breathing). They are in the fruit itself, unlike strong acids (digestive acids) which are produced by us to break down foods and must be expelled through water i.e. sweat and urine.

Some people have difficulty expelling acids
The process of getting rid of acids is very fast for some people and very slow for others. So what happens for those who get rid of them slowly? The acids build up in the bloodstream and the are stored off in the tissues. Not good. As a countermeasure, the body releases alkaline minerals from the muscles to neutralize the acids--calcium and magnesium. So many people with acidosis end up with lowered minerals as well as losing muscle mass.

How to get rid of acids
Getting rid of acids is not hard once you know what to do; the bigger problem is to stop eating foods that bring/create them.

A quick way to get rid of acids is to neutralize them by taking common alkaline minerals. (Alkaline is the opposite of acidic.) The easiest are Calcium and Magnesium. You may actually feeler lighter in 20 minutes after a handful of magnesium tablets make their way into your bloodstream; they are neutralizing those acids (both strong and weak acids)in your tissues so that they literally disappear.

You can also speed up the process of getting rid of weak acids by doing aerobic exercise, the increase in respiration/oxygen intake will speed up the body's natural oxidation process.

For strong acids, you can help the body by drinking more water, which is needed for the kidneys to process these acids.

Christopher Vasey wrote one of the best books on Acids
The Acid-Alkaline Diet for Optimum Health: Restore Your Health by Creating pH Balance in Your Diet

Why Jeremy Lin is good

Jeremy Lin is good for a lot of reasons including natural explosiveness, coordination, and spatial ability, but in terms of skills he is good at the stuff they teach kids in camp. He has fundamental skills and abilities that, surprisingly, a lot of NBA players don't:

-court vision: he sees teammates, understands spacing, understands where he is relative to them on the court, understands how to draw and move the defense using the dribble and the pass

-jab step: with the jab step he keeps defenders off balance and can get off 3 pointers and/or get into the lane

-passing: he is a great passer, and all of a sudden the whole Knicks team is passing well

This is the stuff they teach you in basketball camp, the stuff they say to practice that 1 guy in 100 (including a guy named Jordan) actually follows through on and that is absent in many NBA players.

Incidentally, this is why the US national team lost so many games to foreign teams in the past few decades including the Olympics. Teams like Argentina, Spain, Italy stick to the basics. All they do is pick and roll, all they play is team basketball.

Whole Paycheck?

Maybe you've heard the joke "Whole Paycheck" referring to Whole Foods. It can be expensive. However, the truth is that in many ways Whole Foods is cheaper than a regular grocery store like Safeway.

In the Undercover Economist Tim Harford explains that Whole Foods costs more only when you buy higher-end and/or more unusual items that you simply would not find at Safeway. So it's not that Safeway is cheaper, it's that it sells mostly high-volume, mass-produced, and/or lower-quality stuff.

Harford points out that a bottle of mineral water costs less at Whole Foods than at Safeway. It's because at Whole Foods mineral water is part of "the basics" whereas at Safeway most customers would find mineral water a luxury.

Take the goat milk that I buy every week (sometimes every day). It costs $3.79 a quart. That's over $15 a gallon, which is a ton. But it's not that expensive because it's at Whole Foods, it's expensive because it's unusual. You can't find goat milk at Safeway at all.

Or take the salad bar. Safeway sells bare bones salad, none of it organic. Whole Foods salad bar sells much more variety including organic and it is better prepared. So the price per pound may be higher but you get something more.

It works the other way, too, however. Whole foods sometimes does not offer just plain old cheap stuff. They don't sell cheap paper towels, they are all recycled and specially made, etc. So if you don't really care about how eco-friendly your paper towels are and just want Bounty, you are going to pay more by going to Whole Foods.

So the bottom line is
-Whole foods is cheaper, not more expensive, than Safeway on identical items
-It is up to you to spend your money or not on individual higher-end or unusual items that Whole Foods carries that you cannot find elsewhere.

Why fructose is toxic

Adding to a previous post on fructose, here is a site that spells out what happens to fructose in the body.

To be clear, fructose is not just "fruit sugar" -- it is only a tiny part of the sugar in fruits. Artificial products like agave syrup and high fructose corn syrup that isolate fructose in unnaturally huge amounts are toxic and are responsible for many health conditions from gout to diabetes.

What's Wrong With Fructose?
http://www.treelight.com/health/nutrition/Fructose.html

How and where your carbs are stored is key to knowing what to eat

Carbs are stored as either fat or glycogen (stored sugar). The key is that there are two types of glycogen that go in two very different-sized "storage bins" in the body, each with a different primary purpose:

Storage Bin 1: The liver - holds about 100 grams of carbs which are used to keep general circulating blood sugar up to the brain and muscles during the day

Storage Bin 2: The skeletal muscles - hold about 200-600 grams of carbs depending on how much muscle you have; these carbs are used primarily for the muscles themselves, but can be "dumped" into the bloodstream when the liver runs out if necessary. It is key that there is a very wide variation in how easily people "let go" of the sugar in their muscles, which is reflected in how easily some people hold on to muscle mass while others lose it fast.

Secondly, it is key that the fructose you eat (from fruit and sweets) can only be stored in the liver--remembering that liver stores are relatively small. Therefore you can easily go over your storage capacity when you eat too much fructose, and the excess automatically turns to fat. The point: fructose is easy to overeat. Little bits throughout the day are better than gobs all at once.

Thirdly, those trying to build muscle mass will get no use out of fructose in terms of replacing the sugar in their muscles after working out, as fructose will never end up in muscles. Instead, they need to eat starches like root vegetables, beans, potatoes, and grains (though grains have many downsides). Again, these cannot be eaten all at once, better in small bits throughout the day so as to avoid jacking blood sugar up, which spikes insulin and leads to more carbs stored as fat.

Finally, always eat some protein with carbs to keep your blood sugar from dropping through glucagon.

Vitamin D crucial in winter

Just about everybody is deficient in Vitamin D in winter, and many are severely deficient. Muscle weakness,

In summer when the sun is intense enough, we make this "sunshine vitamin" out of circulating cholesterol when the sun's rays hit our skin and eyes, but the intensity of winter sun is not strong enough to do the conversion. This is because the extremely indirect angle of the sun in winter diffuses solar energy such a wide area that any given point on earth receives only a fraction of summer sun intensity.

-Vitamin D has to build up in the body, it doesn't happen all at once. But you can definitely feel the effects as your stores increase. Having said that, you can't just chug it because the body can only absorb so much at a time. The best approach is to buy the highest possible dosage and take 1 in morning and 1 at night, maybe even one more in afternoon until you feel it build up.

-The FDA had long kept the maximum Vitamin D allowed in supplements very low. They finally changed this a few years ago, so now you can get the dosage you really need.

-"My vitamin pill says it has 100% of Vitamin D." Not even close to enough. We absorb a fraction of the vitamin supplements we take.

"Sugar is sugar" commercial is blatantly false in multiple ways

There are literally dozens of types of sugar which are all different and have different effects in the body. "Sugar is sugar" is completely false.
The Corn Refiners Association popular commerical "Sugar is Sugar" tries to claim that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is just like cane sugar (regular table sugar).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyj2N-AspqU

A Princeton University study showed again what everybody knew from experience, that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - which is the main ingredient in most sodas and lots of junk food - is more fattening than regular table sugar.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

A 2009 study featured in Time magazine had a similar finding:

All Sugars Aren't the Same: Glucose Is Better, Study Says
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1892841,00.html

On top of this, the commercial presents HFCS as "corn sugar", a seemingly natural product, which it is not by a longshot. Dextrose (a form of glucose), not HFCS, is the natural sugar found in corn and it is not a health problem, in fact it is what bodybuilders take post-workout because it is sugar in simplest form. HFCS, on the other hand, is an artificial substance created by putting corn starch through a series of three industrial enzymatic processes.

HFCS has also been implicated as the primary source of AGEs (Advaced Glycation End Products) which are now known to cause cardiovascular problems (esp. endothelial dysfunction) as well as Alzheimer's.

Moreover, even a basic understanding of sugars and how humans process them tells you that "sugar is sugar" is false. There are many types of sugars which are processed very differently by the body. Some are processed in the liver, some in the intestines, some do not need processing at all. Moreover, different sugars require different enzymes to break them down, ex. starches require amylase enzymes, sucrose needs sucrase, etc. and different people have more or less of these enzymes which results in differing abilities among people to break down different types of sugars.

For example, all of these are chemically different categories of sugars:
Monosaccharides - glucose/dextrose, fructose, galactose, xylose and ribose
Disaccharides - sucrose and lactose
Polysaccharides - starches (from bread to potatoes to rice etc.) and glycogen (stored sugar in muscle and liver)