Bad food combining: the scourge of the body that causes abdominal bloating, stomach gas and fermentation.
Even when you eat great raw organic plant foods, you want to be knowledgeable about the rules of food combining. In this post we will cover them in an easyway to remember .
You have been eating raw organic fruits and vegetables, you’ve come a long way from meat and processed foods. But let’s take it up to another level. Are you using good food combining?
Think of your digestive tract as a one-lane thruway. Passing is not allowed . So what is the best way to keep things moving properly ?
You may have noticed that animals in the wild don’t combine foods, we’re the only ones who do. They eat one thing at a time, whether it’s plants or fresh kill for the carnivores.
We enjoy eating a variety of ~ different} foods and it is really important to follow a few simple rules to avoid indigestion . I learned these from the Hippocrates Health Institute, the leader in raw food health.
Let’s start with the slowest foods in the digestive tract:
1. Protein sources are the slowest. For vegans, these come primarily from seeds and nuts although the greens also contain significant amounts. But it’s the seeds and nuts that are slower, taking 4 hours to move through the digestive tract.
2. Starches are the winter squashes, yams and beans. These are about 3 hours to digest.
3. Veggies: greens, growing sprouts from sunflower or pea greens, kale, lettuce; in short most of the green veggies. These take about 2 hours.
4. Fruit — takes 1 hour or less.
What happens when you do improper food combining is that the faster ones are blocked by the slow ones. To make things even more complicated, the different food groups also need different digestive juices and frequently cancel each other out as they try to digest it all at once .
So here’s what you do:
1. Eat protein sources only with veggies.
2. Eat starches only with veggies.
3. Veggies go with protein sources or starches, but never both at once.
4. Fruit: eat exclusively and eat it an hour before other food as it passes through very quickly. You could have fruit an hour before a meal instead of for dessert.
By the way: is tomato vegetable or fruit? FRUIT
And an extra tip: you do need to drink a lot of water, but not with your meals. You are making your body work much harder to digest the food because you are diluting your own gastric juices!
