Pain is the most obvious symptom of disease or “trouble” in your body.  However, not all symptoms are painful.  Symptoms of acidosis don’t appear suddenly.  They, like the acidosis itself, “creep up.”  Creeping acidosis differs from the acidosis you may experience when taking the pH challenge.  That’s when you intentionally flood your body with high-protein food for a couple of days and raise your internal acid level quickly to test your response.  The kind of acidosis we’re talking about here comes from months and years of day-after-day, high-protein intake.  This is the diet regiment that strains your alkaline reserve and backup systems, and it is the cause of much of the pain and misery that show up in doctors’ offices. 

However, before you reach crisis-level acidosis, your infinitely intelligent body often provides pre-pain warning signs that it is overly acidic.  These pre-pain signs, like road signs in a foreign language, are easily ignored if you don’t know how to read them.  One of the most important early indicators of excess acidosis is the inability to sleep six to seven hours straight without waking up.

In 1921, Hasker Kritzer, MD, offered a list of nine symptoms of acidosis.  These symptoms are so mild and so commonplace that it’s hard to think of them as legitimate “symptoms.”  They don’t hurt or interfere with the day’s activities.  They appear to have more personality traits than symptoms.  In fact, you may recognize these symptoms in your family members, friends, spouse, children, or even yourself.  Here is a summary of Dr. Kritzer’s 75-year-old observations.

Symptoms of Acidosis

1. Exaggerated sense of well-being – belief that he/she is perfectly healthy.
2. Overly ambitious – very restless.
3. Increasingly irritable and ill-tempered – disagreeable to family and friends.
4. Difficult to please – fault-finder.
5. Pessimist – sees only the downside of every situation.
6. Restless sleeper.
7. Wakes up tired in the morning – needs coffee and perhaps a cigarette to start the day.
8. Becomes increasingly fatigued – physical symptoms begin to appear.
9. Begins to have muscle weakness or cramps – calcium loss in bone is not as obvious.

Unfortunately, it’s a personality profile of huge numbers of people in this country.  But then, huge numbers of people in this country follow diets that make them prime candidates for acidosis.  Many of the symptoms of acidosis are more obvious to others than to the symptom bearer.  Irritability, pessimism, and fault-finding send large ripples through social and business relationships.  However, more personal signs and symptoms can give earlier warnings of creeping acidosis: diarrhea, constipation, and even a cold.  Any major change in how you feel or your body is functioning indicates that your body is seeking a balance of some sort.

Link to Morter March Monday Rebroadcast