The pH Diet and Your Fertility

Chemistry 101

All you need to know about pH to start reaping the health benefits of a more balanced body chemistry, is that it is a measure of acidity (think vinegar) or alkalinity (think baking soda) from 0 to 14. Zero is the most intense level of acidity possible and 14 is the highest level of alkalinity possible, with neutral being in the middle.

Your body maintains much tighter reins than that range and will work diligently to balance your blood at a just slightly alkaline rate of 7.36. However, our highly acid-forming diet (meat, dairy products, sugar and other sweets, wheat and white-flour baked goods and pastas, coffee, tea, trans fats, and food additives found in most packaged and prepared foods) and our high stress lifestyles can take their toll on our body's pH balancing mechanisms, leading to acidity.

To be clear, it's not the acidity of the food itself that matters, but rather the effect of the food on your body chemistry. Food may test acid or alkaline in a laboratory setting, but that has no direct impact on whether it will have an acidifying or alkalizing effect on your body when metabolized. Lemons are a great example. They test highly acidic, but once inside your body they will help to alkalize it.

Microorganisms like yeast, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and others thrive in an acidic environment. Some of these nasty critters interfere with enzyme and coenzyme production in the body, including ones that are essential to hormone health, as well as many other health concerns. If a particular coenzyme is depleted, hormones that are critical to fertility and reproduction (in both men and women) can become imbalanced. Additionally, many of the microorganisms that begin to thrive in an acidic body can feed on hormones, causing deficiencies.