What Living Alkaline Means to Cancer Survivor Kris Carr

She has written multiple books, made an award winning film, and survived an incurable stage four cancer with which she was diagnosed in 2003. During the subsequent twelve years while she has been living with cancer, she has explored all possible healthy lifestyle options with her attending physicians. One of her lifestyle choices was to live alkaline.

For Carr, living alkaline means being healthy; it is one of her strategies to keep her cancer in check. She is not alone when thinking that alkaline bodies are ones in which cancer and degenerative diseases remain under control. Many researchers agree.

This is not the only health benefit. Bacteria, yeast, and fungi thrive in acidic environments, so an alkaline lifestyle can keep some common infections at bay. Alkaline diets with their accompanying alkaline environments are also more inhospitable breeding grounds for cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis.

The explanation is straightforward. Naturally, our bodies maintain a pH of 7.4. Bombarding it with foods and beverages with a pH of less than five, as the typical Western diet does, imposes an unnatural condition on the body for which it is not prepared and for which it was not developed.

Through skin rashes, colds, bacterial infections, pain, fatigue, and more serious illnesses, our bodies try to let us know they are under pressure. Unlike most of us, Kris Carr listened and changed her lifestyle until her body felt healthier.

Living alkaline means living with energy. Most of us battle to cope with our jobs while we are living without an incurable terminal illness. Carr writes books, she makes films, she blogs, she gives motivational lectures, and she builds a busy career on top of her cancer. This is not surprising. An acidic body must spend vast amounts of energy on regulating its pH to its preferred level of 7.4. In an alkaline body, all that energy is available for general use.

As Carr describes our typical Western acidic diet: Moreover, an acidic diet with all its processed carbohydrates has been associated with fatigue and depression, which places anyone who omits them from their daily diets in a good position.

Since she was diagnosed with cancer, Carr has understandably emphasised the importance of her psychological health. Living with a terminal incurable illness is one of the hardest things one can be expected to do. 

She has made numerous lifestyle changes to improve her psychological health, such as adopting a pet, pursuing an enjoyable career, managing good relations with family, and improving her diet to one rich in alkaline foods. 

Researchers have long understood that diet and depression are related, and that an alkaline diet filled with fruit, vegetables, pulses, nuts, and seeds reduces the likelihood of depression. 

As mentioned above, the acidic refined carbohydrates so routine in the typical Western diet have been definitively associated with depression. As Carr describes her own attitude: "Healthy food creates healthy cells and healthy thoughts."

An alkaline diet is not only healthy, it is also enjoyable. Most vegans will testify that they started eating a much greater variety of foods when they abandoned meat, dairy, and eggs. 

Not only can one add vegetables to everything from pancakes to pizzas to muffins to yield tastier dishes than the standard ones, but healthy eaters can use a large variety of whole grains to spice up the taste of pastries and doughs instead of using only refined white flour.

Once you have eliminated the refined flour and animal products, you are eating alkaline and will enjoy not only better health, but better food.

1. Instead of drinking coffee, tea, and soft drinks, they drink alkaline water and green vegetable juices and smoothies.
2. Instead of eating processed flour, sugar, and animal products, they eat a diet that is almost entirely whole food and plant-based.

Kris Carr has not permanently beaten her cancer; it is, after all, not curable and could come back. But she has achieved a lifestyle that makes her feel healthy, energetic, and positive. Many of us achieve less even without her challenges. Her tips are therefore valuable lessons to us all.