5 Vitally Important Alkaline Minerals No Diet Should Be Without

It’s no secret that alkaline minerals play a vitally important role in regulating the pH of your blood and tissues – that’s why they appear in so many of our green food supplements, and why we’ve made them the main component of our Biocera Jug Filter and Energy Plus Under-sink Filter.

Alkaline minerals aren’t just useful for promoting better body balance, though. These highly beneficial nutrients can also play a key part in facilitating a broad range of enzymatic reactions.

In this article, we're putting the spotlight on five essential alkaline minerals that no diet should be without.

As well as playing an important part in regulating calcium uptake from your bowels, Magnesium plays a vital part in most of the electrochemical reactions that take place in your body. It works with adenosine triphosphate to produce energy in every cell, as well as helping to synthesize nucleic acids and transporting essential vitamin complexes across semi-permeable cell membranes.

Without sufficient amounts of this important alkaline mineral, many of your body’s critical processes will quickly become impaired, and you will find yourself running out of energy. Extreme magnesium deficiency is often associated with tremors, muscle weakness, vomiting and depression.

In The Guide to Body Chemistry & Nutrition, Dr Jensen refers to calcium as ‘the knitter’ because it plays such an important part in maintaining the health of your skeletal system, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. This important alkaline mineral is actually vital to the maintenance of your acid/alkaline balance, and very important to the proper functioning of your cardiovascular system. As an electrolyte, it plays a necessary part in the enzymatic reactions that control heart function and blood pressure, as well as regulating osmotic pressure in your cells.

 Most important of all though, is calcium’s ability to neutralize the harmful acidic compounds that build up in your blood and tissues as a result of poor diet and exposure to pollutants. Without sufficient intake of this important alkaline mineral, our bodies struggle to maintain their proper acid/alkaline balance, and we quickly find ourselves suffering from aching joints, frequent muscle pains, low energy levels and an increased susceptibility to a variety of common illnesses.

Zinc is important primarily because of its role in bolstering the health of your white blood cells, and helping your body to fight off bacterial or viral infections. This crucial alkaline mineral does play a very important role in regulating cellular regeneration as well though, and there is some evidence to suggest that it’s needed to regulate the assimilation of other important alkaline minerals like calcium and iron.

One study, which was published in the Journal of Nutrition in 1994, indicated that small supplements of zinc could even help to combat the onset of diseases like osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, which are both commonly associated with mineral deficiencies caused by an acid/alkaline imbalance.

Iron is the principle oxygen-carrier in both haemoglobin and myoglobin, which makes its presence absolutely essential to the proper oxygenation of your blood and cells. This important alkaline mineral is also involved in electrochemical reactions in the brain, and it is iron-containing enzymes in your cells that help to produce energy as part of the Krebs cycle, and eliminate toxins like hydrogen peroxide.

Our bodies need between 6 and 20 milligrams of iron a day, and insufficient iron uptake is associated with a number of different problems, including impaired cognitive function, chronic fatigue, irritability and even hair loss.

Working alongside magnesium and calcium, potassium plays an essential role in providing your cells with the electrical energy that they need to break down essential nutrients and repair oxidative damage. This important alkaline mineral is also understood to help regulate nerve impulses throughout the body, and boost the enzymatic reactions that control the growth and development of muscle tissues.

Without potassium, changes in body chemistry, water balance and blood pressure are unavoidable. Poor reflexes, mal-coordination and reduced brain function are all commonly observed symptoms of a potassium deficiency and, thanks to the important part this alkaline mineral plays in the maintenance of water levels throughout the body, extreme cases can even result in kidney failure.

Most of the minerals mentioned here can actually be found in green vegetables like kale, spinach or broccoli sprouts, but our western diets are increasingly lacking in these essential foods, and many of us are starting to suffer from serious deficiencies as a result.

To combat this, and ensure that you’re providing your body with most the alkaline minerals it needs to maintain your good health, you might want to consider increasing the amount of greens in your diet. You can do this simply by supplementing your regular meals with a raw, green side salad, or by starting your morning off with a dense, alkalizing green smoothie.

Green Superfood supplements like Vibrant Health’s award-winning Green Vibrance Powder are also a very convenient and cost-effective solution to providing your body with a full width of important alkaline minerals. These high-quality green powders are made using dehydrated vegetable and grass extracts that are very rich in a number of important nutrient co-factors, including magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc and iron, and they can be mixed into any fruit drink or smoothie.

Perhaps the best way to nourish your body with alkaline minerals, however, is to ensure that you are drinking healthy, alkaline water with a high mineral content. Unless you live very near a natural mineral spring, you will find that the best way to do this is by using something like the Biocera alkaline jug, or the Alkalising Teabags. These alkaline water products use natural bioceramics to enrich tap or bottled water, imbuing it with essential alkaline minerals like calcium or zinc that can, once digested, immediately begin replenishing your bodies ailing mineral reserves.

They can also produce antioxidant water too, which can help to supply you with the highly beneficial activated hydrogen needed to properly neutralize any oxygen free radicals in your system, and increase your resistance to inflammation based conditions like arthritis or osteoarthritis.

If you’d like to discover more about the importance of replenishing your body’s store of alkaline minerals, you might be interested in reading Dr. Jensen’s Guide to Body Chemistry and Nutrition.

Alternatively, remember that you can contact us at any time to learn more about using a combination of superior hydration and nutrition to increase your alkaline mineral uptake, and restore your body to peak efficiency. Just call us on +44 (0) 1764 662111 or drop us a message using the contact form on our website.