Weight Loss Interview

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But I think from when you look at what does your body good, eating lot of animal protein is very, very acidic. And that’s an issue; that’s a problem because having an acidic diet and an acidic body is related to illness and disease and eating a lot of dairy and meats and stuff, it’s pretty hard from an acid standpoint but it’s also very hard to digest. So that’s one of the things...eating a lot of protein as well, it puts a lot of stress on the kidneys and your body can only utilize so much protein. So if you’re taking in more than your body can use, you’re just going to be excreting the rest of it. So it’s kind of…you’re not getting the best bang for your buck necessarily; it’s your eating meat at every single meal.

At the same time, people have this fear of carbohydrates and when they think of carbs, they think of bread and pastas and that’s true to some degree. I don’t believe that eating lots of bread and pasta is good but that doesn’t mean that eating carbohydrates is bad. Carbohydrates also come in the form of vegetables and fruits, so and different types of grains that are, for instance, non-glutinous like quinoa, millet, amaranth which are actually pretty good for you. So I think if you focus on better carbs, if you’re focusing more on vegetables and maybe starchy vegetables if you want and a little bit more of a substantial carbohydrate; and maybe like a sweet potato, beets, stuff like that. I think those are great.

There are so many great health benefits, but if you’re going to be focusing, especially for people who want to lose weight; if you want to lose weight, you’re going to notice that you’ll lose weight as soon as you remove bread and pasta. Not because they’re very calorically dense but they just hold on to water in your body and they’re also pro-inflammatories so they cause inflammation in the body to some degree. So as soon as you remove those from the diet, you’re going to notice your weight is going to just kind of…you’ll lose 5 to 10 pounds pretty easily. But we know studies have shown if you introduce those back in, your weight is going to go back up.

Jim: Go back up, yeah.

Yuri: It’s not a matter of just removing carbs and eating lots of protein. It’s a healthy balanced diet getting…again, moving more towards a plant-based diet – eating lots of vegetables – getting in some animal protein every now and then is fine, but I don’t think that every single meal is a way to go. It just has a lot of…it’s very, very tough on the body and that’s kind of my personal approach.

Jim: Okay. Now you touched on something, I’m going to jump ahead a little bit, but it’s about the pH; and going through all your information and reading your information, I never realized – this probably going to sound incredibly ignorant – that you’re blood has a pH to it and that it can be alkaline or not. Could you talk to us a little bit about the pH of blood and how that actually affects us, how our body functions and performs?

Yuri: Yeah. Well, first off, any fluid pretty much has a pH. We learned back in high school, chemistry, or whatever it was, about the pH – zero being very acidic, 14 being alkaline and 7 is neutral. So within our body we have different solutions, different fluids that need to be different pHs. For instance the stomach, it needs to be very, very acidic – roughly the pH of 2 to be able to digest protein. The urine is slightly more acidic, 6.5, somewhere in that area. The saliva as well is a little more acidic. But our blood needs to be slightly more alkaline; and it’s a very, very fine line. We’re talking…it has to be between about 7.35 to 7.45 and it just fluctuates. If you are too alkaline, that’s not a good thing as well, but if you go just like to 7.2, that’s very, very detrimental because it kind of works out like an exponential scale.

So the reason why our blood needs to be alkaline is that…that’s pretty much the environment in which everything works as it should. So the red blood cells which carry hemoglobin which carry oxygen, so they provide oxygen to our cells. That’s pretty much…if we don’t have oxygen, we kind of don’t breath and we die. So that’s very fundamental.

Jim: It’s not to worry about what you’re not eating if you don’t oxygen, right?

Yuri: Yeah, exactly. To make sense at a very fundamental level, it’s important to be able to distribute oxygen through our cells. So just from an oxygen perspective, if your blood is acidic, your red blood cells actually start to degrade – explode if you want. Basically, there’s charges that the red blood cells have; so they have positive charges and negative charges – positive charges on the outside, negative charges on the inside; and because of that they repel each other. So if you have two red blood cells come in contact with each other, they’d repel each other because they have a very similar charge.

The problem is that when some of these red blood cells begin to degrade, their negative charge from the inside begins to seep out and then they start basically accumulating or sticking together with other red blood cells and if you think about…I’ll just make it a little bit more easy to understand. If you think about driving on a highway during rush hour, very…lots of cars, very poor flow of traffic – that’s exactly what’s happening in your blood when your body is acidic. If your body is more alkaline, if your blood is more alkaline, it’s like driving on the highway through the morning when there’s no cars so you can just go crazy. It’s not really, but there’s a better flow of traffic and that’s what’s happening in your blood is…if your blood is acidic, the red blood cells are not moving as freely as they should. And if anyone has ever done a live blood cell analysis or also known as live cell microscopy where you can actually see your blood live, not like frozen but actually live and see stuff moving around, that’ll give you a really good indication of what that looks like.

So if the blood is acidic from an oxygen perspective, it’s not good. Also from a fat storing perspective, it’s not good because when your body…when your blood is acidic, your body is not stupid; it’s like…it’s not good to have acid flowing in the blood. It finds ways to get the acid out of the blood and the way it does is it actually stores the acid in the fat cells of your body. So your body actually holds on to fat because it’s acidic. So if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re still eating an acidic diet, for instance like a low carb high protein diet, it can be hard to lose weight sustainably because your body fat needs to be there to hold on to the acid just as a protective mechanism. So until it starts to…alkalines your body, it might be tougher to lose weight not only improve your health.

Jim: I know it’s like, again, it sounds like very ignorant but I was like, “Whoa! My blood has a pH to it!” I felt that I wish…I didn’t even thought that no doctor I have ever even brought that up to me.

Yuri: Yeah, and a lot of people don’t focus on that. Like you’ll never really hear that from most medical practitioners and it’s just because that’s not what they focus on that’s not what they really talk about. Yeah.