business spotlight
Peak Alkalinity Offers
Simple Solutions for Overall Health by Meredith Montgomery
C
an the key to wellness be in the water you’re drinking? Missy Guitterrez believes that the most important step to healthy living is maintaining a slightly alkaline blood chemistry. As the founder and co-owner of Peak Alkalinity LLC, she suggests that the easiest way to do this is to drink alkaline water. “Sure, you’d probably be alkaline if you ate a raw food diet, lived a stress-free life and avoided coming in contact with toxins, but that’s hard to do,” she notes. “Drinking alkaline water is the simplest and quickest solution, plus it’s all natural.” When pH levels in the bloodstream are at an optimum level (7.2 to 7.4), the body thrives, resulting in a boost in the detoxification process, improved immunity, easier weight management and slowed aging. Guitterrez practiced pharmacy for six years in Louisiana before spending 20 years in the financial services industry. She is a former collegiate athlete and holder of 10 AAU medals in Shotokan karate, but she has also suffered from several chronic health issues. After spending copious amounts of 18
time with various physicians, a doctor with a biochemistry background offered Guitterrez some solutions. “She taught me that everything happens at the cellular level, which helped me look at things from a different perspective,” she recalls. Following an intensive round of diagnostics, the doctor incorporated western and eastern medical approaches which, for the first time, led to drastic improvements in Guitterrez’s health. “It motivated me to change my lifestyle—especially my diet, since most everything starts in the gut—and I started drinking alkaline water to change my blood chemistry,” Guitterrez says. More than a decade later, as a mom and successful businesswoman, Guitterrez experienced another shift in perspective with the passing of her mother. “I knew Mom was a giver but I had no idea to what extent until I started looking through
Gulf Coast Alabama/Mississippi Edition
clockwise: countertop ionizer; Missy Guitterrez and family; Peak Alkalinity storefront; HealthyLivingHealthyPlanet.com
her checkbook and talking with all the people she had touched,” Guitterrez recalls. “Her life was so meaningful and it made me question what mine was going to be about.” She began researching alkaline water businesses as a desire to give back to the community grew. The multi-level marketing and online sales approach of other alkaline water companies did not appeal to her because she wanted a larger educational component. “I felt called to help others detoxify and I had a vision for a showroom that could be used to educate the community,” Guitterrez explains. Through a series of serendipitous events, things fell into place and her dream became a reality with the opening of Peak Alkalinity last fall, in downtown Fairhope. Guitterrez chose to relocate her family from Louisiana to open the store in Fairhope not only because of its small-town charm and proximity to her previous home, but also because of the clusters of rare cancers being documented along the Gulf Coast. Approximately a quarter of the people that come into Peak Alkalinity are oncology patients. Because cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment, it is believed that a higher pH level in the body can slow or stop cancer growth.