Alkaline forming food –- Effect of Phytic Acid

We come across people talking about acid-forming and alkaline forming food. Many doctors do recommend an alkaline forming food for a quick recovery from Psoriasis. They recommend 80% of the food that we consume to be alkaline-forming.

I have been experimenting on this for a while and found some important things that I would be sharing with you now. By my experience, yes, alkaline-forming food definitely helps in keep Psoriasis, Joint-stiffness and Arthritis at bay. So its worth investing time on educating ourselves about this.

Our blood becomes alkaline when our body has all essential nutrients (esp. minerals). We all know that we need minerals like Calcium, Magnesium, Iron etc. These minerals are found in the following:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Grains

Fruits: To keep it a bit simple, we can treat all the fruits as alkaline-forming (even though some fruits, like Banana, can be slightly acid-forming). Lemon, Water-melon, Papaya and Mango are considered to be MOST alkaline-forming. But we need to be a little bit careful about Lemon as some people are allergic to citrus fruits. Water-melon can be really helpful if its not contaminated with chemicals. This is especially true in India where uneducated farmers (trying to sell unripe and cheap quality products) inject colored-chemicals into the fruits, like water-melons. Also most of the Mangoes, Papayas and other fruits available in Indian market are artificially-ripened using Calcium Carbide (commonly known as Carbide) which not only makes the fruits acid-forming but also can result in cancers.

Vegetables: Again, to make things easy, we can consider all the vegetables to be alkaline-forming. Unfortunately, as with fruits, Vegetables are also contaminated with chemicals like pesticides, which can be very harmful to us. So we need to wash all the vegetables with warm/hot water before we consume them.

Grains: This brings to the topic that I want to share with you. Grains form a major part of our meals, be it be rice (South Indians) or wheat (North Indians) or something else. White rice has no nutrient in it and hence I talked, in a previous post, about consuming it in minimal quantities. I suggested you alternatives like Wheat, Millet, Jawar among other grains.

For vegetarians, most of the minerals should come from grains. Wheat, Millet, Barley, Jawar, Oats and other grains all have essential minerals in them. In spite of the high mineral content of grains, they are still acid-forming. Why ??????

Grains contain something called Phytic Acid in their bran. Phytic acid binds to the minerals that we need. Due to this binding, our intestines won’t be able to absorb these essential minerals and they are excreted along with waste material. This is especially true with Wheat which has high phytic acid content. Millet has less phytic acid content and hence we can get some of the minerals from it.

What can be do to absorb most of the the minerals present in the grains so that we can develop more alkaline blood ??? How people in olden days used to be healthy in spite of being ignorant about the presence of phytic acid in the grains ???

Well, our people in olden days used to soak the grains in water for at least 12 hours, dry the grains in sunlight before going for the grinding. Soaking the grains in water for at least 12 hours destroys most of the phytic acid and allows our intestines absorb the minerals present in the grains. All of the phytic acid is destroyed only when the grains start to sprout.

So, to get a more alkaline blood, first and foremost thing to do is to STOP buying ready made atta from the grocery stores. (Branded atta is made after removing bran from the grains, which has most of the nutrients.) Go and buy good quality grains from the market. Soak the grains in water for atleast 12 hours. After draining the water, dry the grains in sunlight before you get the atta from the grains.

The above process transforms millet from slightly-alkaline-forming to highly-alkaline-forming. Wheat is transformed from highly-acid-forming to neutral / slightly-alkaline-forming.

Of course, you can’t do this with Rice. White rice has no nutrients to start with. And soaking brown-rice in water is not helpful because brown-rice has some vitamins and other things like gamma oryzanol but NO minerals.

Talking about Sprouting, you can easily sprout millet in 2-3 days. Sprouted millet can be really really useful for Psoriatics (at least, it is for me as I witnessed huge changes in my skin-condition).

Also, including mung-dals sprouts, black-eyed-beans sprouts, and chana sprouts can not only provide our body with minerals, but also different kinds of proteins. (I said black-eyed-beans and NOT black eyed peas :-D). Same logic holds for these items. Mung Dal and Chana are acid-forming where as Mung-dal sprouts and Chana-sprouts are alkaline-forming. Actually, naturopathic doctors suggest us to consume raw sprouts. That’s the best we can do because raw-sprouts also contain enzymes. But if you are tired of sprouting on a daily basis and consuming them raw, then you can do the following:

1) Sprout mung-dal, black-eyed-beans and chana separately, dry and then grind it.

2) Sprout millet, dry and grind.

3) Mix 1 part each of mung-dal, black-eyed-beans and chana flours with 4 parts of millet flour. This flour contains most of the essential minerals and different kinds of protein.

4) Mix the above made flour with water, simmer it on a low flame for 5-10 minutes. You need to stir the mixture continuously.

5) You can also mix small quantity of jaggery to make it taste better. (Sugar is highly-acid-forming whereas jaggery is slightly-acid-forming because of the presence of minerals like Iron). The prepared mixture can serve as all-natural energy drink.

To summarize, soaking the grains in water for at least 12 hours destroys most of the phytic acid whereas sprouting the grains completely wipes it out. Absences of phytic acid in the grains allows our intestines to absorb all the minerals and there by resulting in more alkaline blood.

Similarly, using jaggery is a better option than using sugar.

Home-made food versus outside food

We psoriatics should avoid outside-food because we are never sure if the vegetables are washed properly (remember the pesticides ?) and never sure what all harmful chemicals (like colors) are used to make the food appealing to us.

For instance, we can talk about so-called green-peas that we get in India. Fresh green-peas are alkaline-forming and are OK. But fresh peas are available only 2-3 months a year. Unfortunately, greedy people soak dry-peas in green color and fool urban customers to believe them as fresh green-peas. These colors can be very harmful to our bodies.

Similarly, commercially prepared sweets not only contain artificial colors, but are made using hydrogenated oils/fats (called dalda in India) even though they claim to have used Ghee. Check on internet about all the ill-effects of hydrogenated oils/fats and you will know what I am talking about.

So avoiding outside food is of utmost importance for us Psoriatics.

Note: Oxygen is another factor that decides acid/alkaline nature of our blood. We need to exercise regularly, do pranayam and practice meditation in order to give our blood the alkaline nature.