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Food Combining
October 12, 2009
Changing to nutrient dense carbohydrates from refined carbohydrates might seem to trigger digestive problems unless you understand about food combining. Some food combinations are difficult for the stomach and intestines to digest when eaten together because each food requires specialized enzymatic conditions in the stomach and intestines in order for optimal digestion and assimilation of that food to take place. Using the rules of food combining will help prevent gas and indigestion due to difficulties with digesting discordant combinations.
Protein and starch foods should be eaten at separate times, or at least layered. Layering foods means to eat one by itself before starting on the next so they end up in the stomach in separate layers rather than all mixed together. When layering, the food that takes the longest to digest (the heavier starch) should be eaten last. If a friend serves you a meat and cheese combination you can eat the cheese first, scraping it off a bite at a time, then eat the meat, then eat the bread or pasta (if it is whole grain). A child will eat this way. You may have tried it as a child and gotten admonished, maybe even sent to your room leaving your food on the table. Becoming childlike and instinctive again can be beneficial to your health.
Layering heavy protein or starch foods in the stomach one on top of another by eating different starch or protein foods one at a time is preferable to eating them all at once. However, ideally, complete digestion should be allowed between each different food of a predominantly starch or protein nature. It is better to, instead of layering the different foods by eating them one after another, wait 4 or 5 hours after eating a predominantly starch or protein food before eating another predominantly starch or protein food. In other words, do not have more than one starch or protein food per meal. This is the rule, and it is not always possible to follow it because of social reasons, the culture having been so accustomed to recipes and menus that combine two or more dense starches or proteins. Layering is second best. But there are times when you can try eating only one starchy food or protein food at a meal. I am hoping you will like the pleasant sensations in your abdomen after a mono-meal better than the confused jumble after a sundry stuffing. The lack of digestive ease that results from inharmonious food combinations is so familiar that many don't know what it is like to digest a meal in perfect comfort, and consider the normal mild discomfort after eating to be a necessary part of life.
As you have no doubt noticed, many standard menu items contain multiple starches and proteins which ideally should be eaten separately. A salad and broccoli can be eaten with milk OR cheese OR chicken OR beef OR fish OR beans OR whole grain tortillas OR whole grain noodles OR whole grain bread OR potatoes OR eggs OR winter squash OR brown rice Or nuts Or seeds OR butter OR oil OR avocado, but an animal protein should not be eaten with a starch or even with another type of animal protein.
Meat and potatoes are both dense foods. Meat is protein and fat, potatoes are a dense starch. Either can be eaten with a salad or non-starchy vegetables such as cucumber or pepper, but eating meat and potatoes together is against the rules, as there are different digestive enzymes needed to digest each. The protein (in this case the meat) should be eaten before beginning to eat the potato, or better yet, eat them for separate meals spaced apart by 4 or more hours. Most restaurants will be accommodating. If you want sushi with fish and no rice, most will accommodate you, some will not, but you don't need to go there again. You can have a hamburger delivered without a bun, or a steak without the baked potato. But perhaps the potato would provide better nutrition than the steak, so you can order a large salad with no cheese or croutons, and some baked potatoes.
Salad dressings often contain an oil (which is a fat). A fat should not be combined with a protein or a starch food (unless it comes that way in nature). If a dressing with oil is used on the salad, then none of the starch or protein foods should be eaten with the salad. Salsa with no added oil makes a nice dressing and still leaves room for one dense starch or protein food on the menu along with the salad. Sandwiches can be made with vegetables such as tomato and lettuce with a little salsa or mustard (but not mayonnaise, because the egg in the mayonnaise does not go with the heavy starch in the whole grain bread).
Nutrient dense starchy foods such as whole grains and even potatoes do contain protein. Obviously than, if a food comes direct from Nature containing both starch and protein, than the starches and proteins of that particular food can be eaten together and our digestive system, which had millions of years of experience digesting that food, should not have a problem. It is only combinations of different dense foods that give us problems. Probably for most of our millions of years of human life on this planet, we ate much more simply.
Different vegetable starches, fats and proteins (such as grains, potatoes, nuts, avocados or beans) should technically not be eaten together according to the strict rules of food combining, but this is not as serious a transgression as eating 2 or more different animal proteins together (such as the meat and cheese that occur together in many recipes), or an animal protein with a dense starch (such as meat and potatoes or a hamburger). When combining plant starches or plant proteins, foods of the same family seem to combine better than completely unrelated foods
Water and other beverages should be imbibed prior to eating because foods need a relatively dry condition in the stomach in order to be digested properly. Water leaves the stomach in about 15 minutes, then food can be eaten. Otherwise, wait 2 hours after eating to drink a beverage. The idea of washing food down with a beverage is a habit of poor eating hygiene. Food should be thoroughly masticated. Food in it's natural state, uncooked, not dehydrated should contain enough moisture that liquid to wash it down is completely unnecessary. When about to eat cooked food, drink plenty of water beforehand.
Sweet fruit such as melons, peaches, mango, or sub acids such as oranges or pineapple have the shortest digestive periods of foods and should be eaten alone, with seeds, or other foods can be layered in the stomach after the fruit. A meal of nothing but sweet fruit is paradisiacal. No longer under a ration of one small apple a day, you can literally eat your fill of a variety of sweet, delicious fruit such as bananas, pineapple, grapes, melon, papaya, oranges, peaches, apples, cherries or pears. A large party platter of sliced fruit can be enjoyed by one or two people. When fruit is not just the appetizer or the dessert, but the main course, a sufficient quantity is appropriate. Our amazing food delivery system makes a variety of fresh fruit available almost anywhere any time of year. Of course, it is probably better to eat locally grown, seasonable food, but change is easier if you don't rigidly insist on being perfect, just take a step in the right direction.
Instead of cereal and milk (which is a bad combination since it pairs a starch (the cereal) with a protein (the milk) try a whole grain cereal and cocoanut milk (made by pureeing cocoanut meats in a little water). Any of the non-dairy milks commercially available such as almond milk, rice milk or soy milk are more digestible in a combination with grain cereals than is dairy milk. (Just make sure there is no refined sugar or hydrogenated oil added, or make your own.) If you still want the dairy milk, you can drink it first.
Speaking of better, seed cereal and seed milk is the most digestible cereal meal since it is seeds with seeds. Fruit also combines well with seeds. A nice meal is raw, hulled, unsalted sunflower seeds (grind in a coffee grinder if you are new to chewing fibrous foods) and sliced bananas. You may stir hot water into the seeds to soften them prior to adding the sliced fruit if you like. Other seeds such as sesame, flax and pumpkin also work well, as do other fruits.
When you end up with gas and indigestion, sometimes it is puzzling to find where you went wrong. Maybe you impulsively ate a piece of sweet fruit after a meal of seaweed and butternut squash. The nagging internal voice that says, "Finish your food," may be the reason you ate more than you really wanted, and this resulted in indigestion. Maybe a piece of fruit or vegetable didn't quite look right, but you ate it anyway, to your detriment. A lot of us think of ourselves as disposal systems. If something is going to go bad if we don't eat it, we eat it. This is not an appropriate reason for choosing to eat a piece of food. Food should look good to us, it should smell good. Taking a moment to physically sniff the food and then allow ourselves to respond to the aroma with genuine desire is better than the sort of unconscious stuffing we are sometimes guilty of.