Acidosis: how the body turns sour and why your joints ache because of it

WHERE ACID WASTE COMES FROM
The main suppliers are too much sugar and white flour, too much meat, and processed food. As they are digested, they leave acid residues behind. While there are few of them, the body copes: it neutralises them and carries them out. But when there is more acid than the kidneys and lungs can remove, the body starts to defend itself — and it does so at your expense.

What the body pays with

To quench the acid, the body takes alkaline minerals out of its own reserves — calcium first of all. Hence a chain that people rarely connect: souring → minerals washed out → weakening bones, teeth, nails. An acid environment is a friend of inflammation: the joints answer with pain "for no reason", the skin with rashes, and the person as a whole with a tiredness that rest does not cure.

How to test it on yourself

Three weeks without the big three — sugar, white flour, processed food — with vegetables at every meal and enough water. Your joints, your skin and your morning freshness will answer more honestly than any argument. Many people remember for the first time in years that you can wake up feeling light.

What makes you alkaline

• Vegetables and greens are the foundation: the more living food on the plate, the calmer the inner environment.
• Fresh vegetable juices — the quick alkalising tool of my system.
• Lemon — despite its sour taste, in the body's chemistry it works as an alkali.
• Water when you are thirsty: the kidneys need something to flush the acid residues out with.
• Breathing: a full exhale is also acid leaving — carbonic acid.

A word of caution

Acidosis as I understand it is a condition of diet and way of life. Acute disturbances of the acid-base balance in diabetes and kidney disease are a medical situation: there it is the doctor who decides, not the diet.