How To Test Your Body's pH Level

Sinead Adedipe
How To Test Your Body's pH Level

Everything that you put into your body and do to your body affects its pH levels. Your lifestyle plays a major role in your overall health but improving your diet is the best way to improve your well-being.

The foods you eat contribute to your pH levels because they carry acidic or alkaline properties that get absorbed into your bloodstream, so it’s important to eat a well-balanced diet. If your pH levels become either too acidic or too alkaline, you could have health-related issues pop up in the future.

What Is the pH Scale?

Let us quickly take you back to an intro to a biology course during high school to cover the basics of the pH scale.

The pH scale measures how alkaline or acidic a specific substance is. A balanced pH scale ranges somewhere between 7.35 and 7.45 on the scale. The overall range of a pH scale is from 0 to 14.

  • Acidic: 0-6 on the pH scale
  • Alkaline: 8-14 on the scale
  • Neutral: 7 on the scale

Each substance that you consume has its own pH level, which can impact your pH levels as it’s absorbed into the body.

If you can maintain a healthy and balanced diet, your pH levels are most likely considered normal. Any alteration from the normal can be a sign that there is something wrong within your body. Understanding your typical pH and what can affect pH is helpful to find underlying problems that might not be able to be seen with the naked eye.

Normal pH Levels Vary

The two main pH levels that are tested are going to be your blood and your urine. Each is important because it can tell you different aspects of what’s going on in your body. The average person has a blood pH level Acid-Base between 7.35 and 7.45 and a urine pH level between 4.5 and 8.0.

The food and drinks you consume get digested and absorbed into the body and excreted as waste, so your urine pH levels can indicate whether your diet is too acidic, too alkaline, or if it’s average.

The body tightly regulates blood pH in healthy individuals and should not change with diet. Abnormal blood pH is more likely to come from a lack of oxygen due to blood sugar imbalance, prolonged exercise, medications, alcohol intake, or sickness.

If your blood pH levels are off, it can signal to a doctor that they need to do more testing to learn about what might change.

While the range of urine pH levels is quite large, most people will average out around 6.0. Diet also plays a role in the pH levels of your urine, and it’s an easier test to take than a blood test. Certain foods will alter your pH levels, so if you are seeing changes in your urine’s pH levels, it might be time to consider changes in your diet!

Symptoms of Abnormal Blood pH Levels

If your blood pH levels are off, your body will let you know. There are two conditions that can arise from either too high levels of acidity or too high levels of alkaline in the blood. Acidosis is having too much acid in your blood.

This happens when blood has too much carbon dioxide and too little bicarbonate. Some symptoms of acidosis are:

  • Fatigue or feeling drowsy
  • Shortness of breath from a buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs
  • Headaches and sleepiness

Alkalosis is the opposite of acidosis. Alkalosis is when your blood pH levels show a buildup of alkaline in your body’s fluids. Unlike acidosis, if there is too little carbon dioxide or too much bicarbonate in your blood, you will begin to feel the effects of alkalosis. Symptoms of alkalosis are:

  • Confusion that can progress to a coma
  • Hand tremors and muscle twitching
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Numbness in hands, feet, or face

Both dangerous conditions require a medical professional. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms and believe it might have to do with your pH levels, you should seek out medical attention. Professional treatment is necessary for both acidosis and alkalosis.

Testing pH Levels

There are a few ways that you can test your pH levels. If you are looking to test your blood pH levels, you will need to go to the doctor to schedule a blood test.

After a few days, you will have your results on what your levels actually are and will be able to contribute certain symptoms to the actual numbers. Blood tests are great because they are accurate and measure a very important pH level, but more testing will be needed if there is an abnormality.

When you look into your urine’s pH levels, you are able to receive similar information to what your blood pH will tell you. You will learn if your diet is too acidic or if you are consuming too much alkaline. Your urine pH levels are a good indicator of what your diet might consist of. Testing your urine’s pH is actually quite easy, and you don’t even have to go into the doctor’s office for it.

You might relate to the feeling of not understanding what the doctor is explaining to you, and that’s normal! Using at-home testing on your phone with Vessel Health can eliminate this feeling of misunderstanding.

Vessel Health Wellness Card

Vessel Health offers an easy, at-home way to test your pH levels, along with other important nutrient and mineral levels. Using our Wellness Test Card, you can gain access to your health information from the comfort of your couch. It takes minimal effort to learn about what is going on in your body and how to improve your health.

Here’s how it works:

  1. We send you the test card in the mail.
  2. You use the test card by going to the bathroom, as you would with any other urine test. It’s very similar to a pregnancy test.
  3. You scan the test card on the Vessel Health app to get access to your results instantly.

Once we have received your information, we can learn a ton about your body. From here, we can offer you solutions on how to improve your overall health. It might be that you need to drink more water or change your diet to reduce the acidity in it. Whatever the issue is, we can give you suggestions on how to improve it. 

In Conclusion

Testing your body’s pH levels does not require a trip to the doctor. You can learn about your body easily with Vessel Health’s Wellness Test Card.

You should be able to feel confident that your body is regulating pH levels if you're maintaining a healthy diet. However, this isn’t always the case. If you are feeling concerned about your pH levels, you deserve to know what they are. It’s easier to work towards possible solutions when you understand what’s going on inside of you.

Use Vessel Health to understand your body and make the proper changes necessary to achieve better health overall.