Heart Disease

Your blood is your body's transport system. It carries both nutrients and oxygen to the tissues of your body. It also carries waste products away from the tissues and helps maintain body temperature. To do these things, your blood must circulate continuously. Your heart is the center of the circulation and it pumps over 5 quarts of blood every minute.

Acidification of the body starts in the blood. As mentioned before, the blood performs a balancing acts in order to maintain the blood pH within the safe range of 7.3 to 7.45. The blood has a buffer pool of sodium bicarbonate made to neutralize strong acid compounds coming out of the cells as waste products of metabolism. When this buffer level is too low, acidosis is developed.

Acidosis and high blood pressure

Dr. Kancho Kuninaka, one of the pioneers of the alkaline water treatment in Japan, states that virtually without exception, the patients with high blood pressure have an acidosis condition. He has many successful clinical cases where the acid free high pH alkaline water lowered blood pressure.

There are several plausible explanations for this phenomenon. Since the higher pH blood contains excess oxygen, the heart doesn't have to work as hard. Another factor may be that the viscosity of the higher pH blood is low so that the heart does not need to pump as hard. A further reason may be that the calcium ions in alkaline water may be dissolving plaque and cholesterol buildup in the artery walls, thus opening up the passage.

Doctors know that if you take several deep breaths right before the blood pressure measurement, you can get a lower reading. You have temporarily elevated the pH of the blood by breathing out more CO2 and by breathing in more O2. If you can lower your blood pressure by using this trick, your high blood pressure is caused by the first two reasons in the above paragraph and you should be able to lower your blood pressure within a few months of drinking the alkaline water.

Alkaline water therapies

The above example is the case where your blood pressure fluctuates between high and low. However, if your blood pressure is always high, chances are that your arteries are getting narrow (atherosclerosis) and it will take a long time, possibly a year or more, for that blood pressure to come down by means of alkaline water. It takes time to dissolve plaque and cholesterol buildup, but eventually it will work. This slow process has no side effects. It lowers the blood pressure by eliminating the very causes of the high blood pressure.

Pill therapies

The blood pressure pills are designed to fool your body by chemical means in order to force the blood pressure down. That is why every blood pressure pill has side effects. Unless you are lowering the acid level in the blood, which is the real cause of the high blood pressure, everything else is going to be more harmful and you have to take the pills for the rest of your life. Remember that the blood pressure is high because your body, the marvelously engineered survival machine, is trying to compensate for some deficiency in your body.

Blood pressure and smoking

A friend of mine in Tampa, Florida was telling me about her peculiar blood pressure problem. She was having to go to her doctor's office several times a week to measure her blood pressure. She was taking the blood pressure pills but wanted to cut them out, and her doctor wanted to make sure that it was all right to do so.

The peculiar part of her problem was that at the end of a hectic day at the office, she would be sure of the high pressure, but her blood pressure measured normal. But during the weekend when she had been relaxing at home, watching TV and reading books, her blood pressure measured alarmingly high, so high that the nurse had to call the doctor in.

As she was telling me this story, I made the observation that she smoked. So I told her that the fact that her blood pressure went up and down indicated to me that her problem may be caused by the oxygen level in her blood going up and down. Then I told her that her smoking will lower the oxygen level in her blood.

She looked at me with wide eyes and said: "You know, Sang? We are not allowed to smoke in our office!" Her definition of relaxing at home meant smoking and watching TV, etc. I told her that she didn't have a blood pressure problem but that she had a smoking problem. She said that she would have to work on that.

Blood pressure and sugar

For people with hypertension, doctors advise them not to eat too much fatty food, to cut out meat, to eliminate sugar, and to stop smoking. They should add "cut out soft drinks" to that list. The riddle is: What are the commonalties of all these things? The answer is that they all rob your body of oxygen. Smoking not only reduces the available oxygen from your body but the nicotine has the effect of narrowing capillary vessels. We know by now that all of the acidic foods and drinks lower your blood oxygen level. But what about sugar?

Sugar grabs oxygen with the highest priority. Mr. Gregory Grosbard of Miami, FL received a U.S. patent on improving plastic strength by using sugar. Each time plastic material goes through a heat cycle it loses strength, because oxygen in the atmosphere goes into the material under heat, creating oxygen "holes". As Mr. Grosbard mixed a small amount of sugar into the plastic material during the heat cycle, the sugar grabbed the oxygen first, making the plastic stronger.

Effects of soft drinks

Soft drinks, especially the cola type, are highly acidic. A dentist friend of mine told me that he can demonstrate the tooth decay process by submerging an extracted tooth into a glass of cola and watching it decay. In chapter 2, I calculated that in order to neutralize a glass of cola with a pH of 2.5, it would take 32 glasses of alkaline water with a pH of 10.

Soft drinks are slow killers. It would be an interesting experiment to test the effects of alkaline water and soft drinks on laboratory mice. If we had three groups of mice evenly grouped as to their age and health condition and we gave one group of mice only cola type drinks; the second, distilled water; and the third, alkaline water, what would be the outcome? We can all guess as to which group would live the longest and which group would end up with the shortest lives.

Lately we have been alarmed by the incidence of younger people being hit by the so-called adult diseases which used to converge mainly on the 40-plus age group. I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency of these incidents are paralleled by the success and the growth of many soft drink companies.

The acidity of some soft drinks is caused by carbon dioxide, which is not so bad because we can eventually breath it out. But some soft drinks are highly acidic even after the carbon dioxide is all fizzled out. Perhaps the consumer advocates group should demand the acidity of the drinks to be clearly indicated on the labels of these soft drinks.