A sample of blood from the author as taken by Jan Browne.
In a sunny, upstairs office near the beach, nutritional microscopist Jan Browne eyes a tiny red bead of blood forming on the tip of my finger. Gently, she smears it onto a slide, places it under her microscope and grows quiet. Moments later, my blood cells come into focus on her computer screen—the size of golf balls, and very much alive—and we embark on a Magic School Bus-like tour through my own being.
Browne has been studying blood under her microscope for years, with the belief that it carries important indicators of a body’s overall health. And since the body fully replaces its red blood cells every 120 days, she’s found that monitoring the blood is an effective way to measure progress made from diet and lifestyle changes.
Large amoeba-like globs trudge through my plasma, cleaning as they go—white blood cells she deems “very active.” But there are telltale signs of weakness, too—fermentation showing in the middle of some of my blood cells, and small areas of debris that look like crystal forms, which she identifies as yeast and bacterial fermentation from sugars.
“When there’s been a lot of acidity, and the body can’t process it, your body kind of collects it together,” explains Browne. “The organs and brain are most critical. In its wisdom, the body will move things it doesn’t have the ability to flush out to the extremities [such as] skin, soft tissues and joints.”
Browne’s blood cells are plump and healthy, and pretty much devoid of crystal forms and fermentation. Of course, Browne eats like a nutritional saint: vegetarian, mostly vegan, and mostly raw. She is a guru of the alkaline diet, which I had filed away a while back as a trend to be investigated.
“An alkaline lifestyle is one focusing on optimizing our ability both to flush out and to reduce the accumulation of acidic waste rampant in our bodies from the standard American diet,” says Browne. For the blood, alkalinity is vital. “Blood must maintain a pH of 7.365. If it varies much in either direction, it would cause convulsions or coma.”
A pH of 7 is neutral, and anything below it is acidic—battery acid has a pH of 1, for instance, Coca-Cola, 2.5. While the blood is slightly alkaline, or basic, the body often isn’t. Browne belongs to a growing school of thought that believes alkalizing the body promotes well-being and disease resistance, although research is as yet inconclusive.
In many respects, this simplistic perception of health is subversive. Medicine as we know it stems from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory—germs enter the body and create disease. The alkaline lifestyle embraces Antoine Béchamp’s theory that bacteria changes from beneficial to disease forms depending on the internal environment. If the internal environment meant nothing, challenges Browne, there wouldn’t be a variation in who gets sick and who doesn’t get sick.
Acidity causes inflammation. According to Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1932: “When the pH is wrong, oxygen falls, cells respire in an anaerobic environment by fermentation giving rise to increased acidity. Cancer is a result of an acid environment.”
But Browne doesn’t take any one expert’s theory as dogma, and encourages her patients to explore their own unique bodies by testing their pH first thing in the morning, and after eating different foods. (A roll of pH test strips costs around $12 at Horsnyder Pharmacy.)
So how does one alkalize, and build healthier blood? Start here: the molecular structures of chlorophyll and red blood cells are almost identical. The main difference is in the center atom—in chlorophyll, it is magnesium, and in blood, it is iron. Not surprisingly, the majority of green vegetables are highly alkalizing foods, as are other vegetables, fruits and grains (such as quinoa). Cow’s milk, meats, processed foods, alcohol and sugar are all highly acidic.
But none of this will make a difference without one last crucial ingredient: 75 percent of Americans are estimated to be chronically dehydrated. But how much water is right? Most people should divide their weight in half, and drink that number of ounces every day. “Virtually every reaction in our body is caused by a fluid exchange,” says Browne. “The level of hydration should be high so that as the alkalinity effect is neutralizing, there is enough fluid to move it out.”
