pH Urine Test
Checking pH is not a Diagnostic Test
pH testing is about evaluating your potential for health. pH testing cannot diagnose or cure disease. However, it can give you a clue that your body is “fighting stress” rather than “fighting disease.”
pH is an indicator of the condition of your internal environment, and your internal environment affects your overall health. If you find that your internal pH is higher or lower than “ideal,” you won’t know any more than you did before about which, if any, disease you may have. However, you will have a strong indication that your body’s systems and organs are working under extreme stress of toxicity – its internal fluids are being “poisoned” by too much acid. But that does not mean you have a particular disease. It means that unless you change your ways, probably starting with the types of food you eat, you could develop a disease.
Too Much Protein
Recall that your alkaline reserve is made up of neutralizing minerals that keep the strong acid byproduct of high-protein foods from sizzling your innards. After the acid has been neutralized, it and the minerals leave your body in your urine. Your urine holds clues to whether or not, or how seriously, your supply of alkalizing minerals has been drained. The condition of your alkaline reserve depends on how much high-protein food your body has had to contend with over time.
Keep in mind that we all need protein in our diets. Protein is a building block of cells, body, and health. We need protein. However, we don’t need too much protein. That’s what we’re talking about, too much protein!
What you need:
(1) pH strips/pH litmus paper; (2) notebook and pen to track your results.
pH paper – registers moderately strong acid (pH 5.5) to mildly alkaline (pH 8.0). The thin strip of pH paper changes color when it comes in contact with moist acid or alkaline substances. A color guide on the package shows how each color represents a particular pH number.
The pH Challenge
Note: Urine pH and saliva pH results are valid only if checked under the controlled conditions about to be explained. You need to set the scene first. With a little planning before you whip out your pH paper, you get something to hang your health on.
Here is the challenge: you are going to flood your body with excess acid ash producing protein and see how it holds up.
Eat only acid-ash foods for two days. This includes meat, chicken, eggs, pasta, rice, bread, peanut butter, and other items on the Acid Ash food list. For these two days only, avoid fruit, vegetables, whole grains, salads, guacamole, wine, and all other alkaline ash foods.
Upon rising in the morning after your two-day acid producing food binge, do the urine test. Take a one to two-inch strip of pH paper. Quickly direct one end of the paper into your urine stream; wet pH paper and pull out immediately. Match the color of the wet pH paper with the corresponding color and pH value on the chart. Write and date your results.
That’s all there is to the actual pH testing. Now comes the important part: interpreting the results.
CAUTION: If you are seriously ill with a life-threatening disease – or any major illness – do not go on a diet of high-protein foods. Those who are seriously ill already have too much acid in their systems – their bodies are quite toxic; they don’t need a test to tell them that. Putting more acid ash-producing foods in a body that’s already toxic from too much acid could have disastrous results.
Results of Urine pH Test
Your urine pH numbers are alkaline reserve indicators.
Urine pH 5.5 – 5.8
Your alkaline reserve is adequate meaning you have enough alkalizing minerals in your body to handle a concentrated load of dietary acid.
Go back to your regular diet and after a few days, check your first voiding urine pH again. If it registers pH 6.2 or below, you are eating too much acid-ash food and need to adjust the quantities. If this follow-up pH test checks in at above pH 6.2, keep doing what you’re doing. You are on the right road. You probably already eat generous amounts of vegetables, fruit, and grains, and minimal amounts of meat. If you reduce the amount of grains in your diet, your pH numbers will rise even higher. That’s even better.
Urine pH 6.0 – 6.6
Results of 6.0 to 6.6 are not “good”, but not “horrible”. This is the “warning” stage. Your alkaline reserve is running low; however, you still have some alkalizing minerals available.
In the past few months, you may have noticed more “signs of aging” such as stiffness in the morning, and becoming easily tired or short tempered. In reality, you are not only getting older, you are speeding up the aging process by eating too much protein. Your alkaline reserves are so low that your body has called on backup systems to help neutralize excess dietary acid. It’s beginning to get tired, no matter how old you are.
Luckily, your health outlook can be improved rather easily. Reduce the amount of acid-forming foods and increase the amount of cooked vegetables, salads and smoothies in your daily diet.
Urine pH 6.8 -8.0
A urine pH score of 6.8 to 8.0 is very significant. It indicates that your supply of available alkaline reserve is virtually nonexistent. Instead of minerals neutralizing the acid from dietary protein, ammonia is doing the job. You may be frequently sick or chronically ill. You may be tired most of the time, have stiff joints, sore muscles, and burning on urination.
Your body’s systems and organs are working under extreme stress of toxicity – its internal fluids are being “poisoned” by too much acid. Unless you change your ways, probably starting with the types of food you eat, you could develop a disease.
How to Improve
Your urine pH test results can range from quite acid (pH 4.5) to slightly alkaline (pH 8.0+). Low urine pH indicates some alkaline reserve minerals are still available. High urine pH is a warning that:
- Your alkaline reserve is shot and can’t neutralize the flood of acid sufficiently before it gets in the kidneys, or
- Your body is overwhelmed with large quantities of protein by-products, so
- Ammonia is produced on the spot for last chance neutralization.
Ammonia is carried out by urine and if your pH numbers are high, you probably have burning on urination and/or your urine smells of ammonia. Most people think the odor of ammonia is “normal” for urine. Not so. Even in children, ammonia in the urine is crisis intervention. Ammonia is the body’s last ditch effort to protect your delicate tissues from the acid of excess dietary protein. Drinking cranberry juice will relieve the burning of urination. Cranberries are acid ash foods. In juice form, the acid of cranberries travels quickly through the digestive tract and “neutralizes” the strong alkali of ammonia.
Neither meat eaters nor vegetarians are immune to an over acidic system. Many vegetarians are heavy into grains, which are acid ash-producers, as are most nuts and dairy products. Your body doesn’t care whether it’s fighting too much dietary acid from meat or from grains and nuts. It still goes through the same survival tactics.
So, what to do if you “flunked” the urine pH challenge?
Start activating alkalinity in your body. Begin with drinking warm water with juice of a half lemon or lime each morning. Improve your diet slowly by eating more fruits and vegetables, salads, and more conservative acid-ash foods such as brown rice and whole grain breads like Hunza Bread rather than refined white flour breads. Drink freshly made juice, preferably green vegetable juice. Recipes for all of the above can be found in the Recipe section.
Increase the amount of vegetables in your diet. An effective method is to introduce one serving of cooked vegetables to your daily menu. After one week, add another serving of vegetables. Continue the add-a-vegetable-a-week routine for about six weeks. That may sound like a lot of vegetables, but you have three meals a day to work with. In addition, see an alternative healthcare practitioner to help you start a good nutritional supplement program.
Wait one or two weeks before checking your urine pH again. Even on an improved diet, the changes in your results won’t be as dramatic as you might like. In fact, for those with high pH the pattern of change will look as though things are going from bad to worse. With an improved diet, the alkaline minerals are finally doing the neutralizing instead of ammonia. However, alkalizing minerals aren’t nearly as strong as ammonia, so urine pH readings go down before they go up. Your readings should change gradually – one color at a time and you will probably see a dramatic change from your original pH challenge numbers in a couple of months.
What if you have a good diet, but your pH is still poor?
Suppose you’ve changed your diet, cut down on acid-ash foods, eaten mostly vegetables and fruit, and taken alkalizing supplements, but your urine pH is still locked in. Does it mean that this urine pH business is all a bunch of nonsense? Answer: No. There is more to pursuing health than just eating right. Other factors besides toxicity and diet enter into how your body functions. After you’ve “cleaned up” your diet, if you still do not feel as well as you’d like, it’s time to take the saliva pH test to see if emotional stress is leading to physical distress.
