Friday, February 6, 2009

Alkaline Water & Alkalizing (Soothing) Greens

It's gloomy outside. Don't get me wrong, I like gloomy, overcast days. I grew up in Santa Monica where the fog rolled in predictably in the afternoon and sometimes earlier.

I'm playing the perfect piece to match the dim lighting, wet pavement, and dirty snow piled up outside my office: As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (a Pat Metheney/Lyle Mays jazz collaboration).

Lately, I have been doing some research into water purifiers that also ionize water and separate purified water into two streams: alkaline (for drinking and cooking) and acid (for cleaning and plants). The sleek undersink design of the Jupiter Delphi unit is impressive but also comes with an ouch price tag too. I saw that a Jupiter unit didn't get such hot reviews at one ionizer review site, which preferred the Tyent USA machine.

When I first heard about alkaline water, it seemed, well, irrelevant. I drink mostly water, preferably cool and not cold by the way. Taste and smell are my first priorities when it comes to water. You could call me a fussy water drinker, as I have the most ridiculously strong sense of smell, and even faint scents of chlorine or sulfur --undetectable to most folks --make my nose twitch and brow furrow.

Alkalinity in water sounded oh so foo foo back in the day before I cared about acid/alkaline balance. After my 3 weeks at the Hippocrates Health Institute, however, alkalinity has become a new fascination.

Many of you know that most of the body's systems run on a slightly alkaline basis, save those acid-rich stomach juices used for digestion. And when we're not eating enough alkalizing foods, our body will readily steal alkalizing minerals from our bones to counteract overly-acid diets.

So, alkaline water seems like a pretty simple and valuable way to balance out too much acid. If I decide on a water ionizer device, I'll let everyone know.

Meanwhile, on the subject of alkalinity, while our new Soothing Greens product has a full 10 grams of brown rice protein and 2 grams of larch arabinogalactin (a powerful immunomodulator), according to our favorite biochemist, Dr. Dinesh Patel, both of these ingredients are neutral in PH.

As a greens product, no surprise, the rest of the formula is alkalizing (with 2 grams each of alfalfa and barley greens, 2 grams of spirulina, 2 grams of banana, 1 gram of stevia, and 4 grams of slippery elm for a total of 13 grams of alkalizing ingredients).

To get the same amount of alkalizing ingredients in capsules would require up to 26 capsules given the fluffy nature of botanicals, and you wouldn't be getting the rice protein or the larch either.

By now, my music has switched to The Pretenders, a very different vibe with Middle of the Road. The gloom has lifted outside and the birds are sounding chipper outside. Time to sign off for now.

Meanwhile, if you have an opinion about water purifiers/ionizers and are NOT a vendor or distributor or selling something, please take a moment to comment on this blog entry. I'm sure many of my readers would like to know more. :-)

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