Healthy nutrition for athletes must incorporate alkaline foods when peak performance is desired. The alkaline forming or acid characteristics of foods become a factor when the body burns them for fuel. Upon metabolization, they create an alkaline or acid ash. That is why anything that goes in the mouth influences the acid/alkaline balance throughout the body, commonly referred to as pH balance. In order to maintain a stable pH balance, dieticians suggest a ratio of 80% alkaline foods to only 20% acid foods. Most people are living with this 80/20 alkaline/acid ratio upside down. This can have an effect on many aspects of fitness and needs to be considered when seeking nutrition for athletes.
The body is so efficiently programmed that it will not enable the blood pH balance to deviate much from 7.4. It will do whatever is essential to alkalize the acid in the bloodstream, even if that means pulling calcium from healthy bones. Without a sufficient quantity of alkaline foods in the diet to help manage that delicate blood pH balance, the body has to pull calcium from bones in order to neutralize additional acid in the bloodstream. You can easily envision how that causes bone weakness, and that’s the last thing anyone wants when buying the best nutrition for athletes.
Here is my firsthand account of how alkaline foods created positive results for me. A large amount of the cartilage in my right knee was removed at age 18, following a back yard football injury. So now my right knee is pretty much bone on bone. Before making substantial changes to my diet a Doctor told me I had the knee of a seventy-eight year-old man, but I was only 39 at the time. He said I would need a knee replacement in a few years. Well, it’s been more than 10 years and I just completed a 3 hour, 23-mile mountain bike ride over grueling terrain in the Arizona desert, and my right knee feels as strong as my other knee, without needing surgery or drugs. I am even able to snow ski on bumps all day long when I get the chance. Other younger men can’t grasp how this is achievable. I can only say the difference is that I appreciate the need for alkaline foods in a diet that supplies the highest quality nutrition for athletes.
As I learned more about eliminating many acid foods from my diet, as soon as I became aware of the need for more alkaline foods, I started to identify more ways to get them. It’s like what happens if you buy a blue car, suddenly you start to see blue cars all over. So, now that you are conscious of this demand for alkaline foods when searching for the highest quality nutrition for athletes, you’ll begin to see them as well.
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