Benefits of an Alkaline Diet

An alkaline diet works on moving the balance toward fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, wholesome protein sources such as beans and legumes, and healthy oils such as olive and flax seed.
The high sugar, high fat, refined foods like white bread make way for a diet which is less acidic.
Understanding acidity may be a good way to understanding how your body reacts to foods, and why perhaps introduced refined foods, or more so an over reliance on them can affect the chemical balance of your body.
Black tea is highly acidic, and green tea is alkaline. So we could assume that the tea making oxidisation process transforms the chemical properties of tea.
We mentioned olive oil as being a healthy oil, part of this is the lack of acidity.
Apples are alkaline.

Fruit

pH

pH is the most widely used scientific method for ranking acidity, and it goes from 0-14, with low numbers being the most acidic and high numbers being the least acidic.
(http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=dailytip&dbid=383)

When the body's pH is kept at a slightly alkaline level, all the systems can work more efficiently.

When we refer to the alkaline/acidity of foods we are referring to the affect on the body being an increase in acid levels or an increase in alkalinity.

Lemons have an alkaline affect on the body, even though they are acidic.

Food classifications

Acidic: meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, grains, alcohol
Neutral: natural fats, starches, and sugars
Alkaline: fruits, nuts, legumes, and vegetables

Digestion/Cooking foods

To aid digestion you may want to 'process' alkaline foods. Look for cooking methods that retain nutrients like steaming.
Avoid overcooking vegetables.
When you have weaned yourself off of the 'modern refined foods' you will start to notice the flavour of vegetables like carrots and cellery.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes deserve their own special mention.
The acidity of fresh tomatoes can be closely associated with their degree of ripeness. The more mature and ripe, the lower the acidity, with pH approaching the 4.9 end of the range described earlier. For this reason, if a person is looking for ways to decrease the acidity of his or her tomatoes, I would suggest buying only the ripest ones, and steering clear of anything less than fully ripe.
(http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=dailytip&dbid=383)

Carbonated Water (Soda Water)

Drinking carbonated water instead of a sugary soft drink has to be better for you right?

Glycemic index

The glycemic index ranks carbohydrates on a scale from 0 to 100 based on how quickly and how much they raise blood sugar levels after eating.

The University of Sydney has a searchable database of foods and their corresponding glycemic indices.

Notice how the low alkaline foods also have a low Glycemic index. And these are also the foods recommended in the book Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspé to eat first when trying to flatten Glucose (blood sugar) curves. Harvard have a good resource for understanding Carbohydrates and Blood Sugar. It also describes Glycemic load.

This is something you can try yourself without dramatically changing what is in the pantry and refrigerator. When ordering the foods with vegetables with fibre first, it has been proven to have a beneficial effect on your blood sugar levels even if you are eating exactly the same foods. This is related to diabetes 2 and insulin resistence issues.

We have discussed what to eat, there is also the issue of overloading your pancreas.