The Importance of Proper Food Combining

Do you ever experience incidents of gas, bloating, low energy or weight gain? And if so, do you simply take Tums, drink a Red Bull, or harness yourself to a treadmill only to have your symptoms reappear in the future? What if I told you that the root of your discomfort may lie in the combining of incompatible foods in one meal.

Recently I was assisting my friend, Elaina Love , a master raw food chef during her gourmet raw food preparation class at Cafe Soulstice San Mateo, CA. “Cleansing and Detoxing with Raw Foods” was the theme. There were about thirty people in the class, all excited to learn how to make energy soup, green power smoothies, and low-glycemic desserts. But the fist thing Elaina spoke about was the importance of food combining.

What is food combining?

Food combining is the combination of foods we put down the digestive track in one sitting. Lets imagine a decorative glass bottle filled in layers with different-colored sand. After eating a meal our stomach may look similar to such a sand bottle. The only difference is that the food does not stay permanently in the stomach like the sand in the bottle. The food transits out. And it is the transient time for each food group that is of interest to us in the subject of food combining.

First lets identify the different food groups:

• Animal proteins: flesh foods, dairy, eggs
  Dense oily proteins: seeds, avocados, nuts and oils
• Starches: corn, artichokes, carrots, potato family, all grains and beans
• Low starches: all green leafy veggies, sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, zucchini, peppers
• Fruits
• Melons

Now lets see how long it takes for each food group to leave the stomach:

• Water: 5-10 min.
• Juice: 15-20 min.
• Fruit and melons: 20-45 min.
• Sprouts: 1 hour
• Most vegetable: 1-2 hours
• Grains and beans: 1-2 hours
• Protein: 3-4 hours
• Animal flesh food: 6-8 hours

Have you noticed how fruit leaves the stomach in less then an hour, while the dense oily proteins like seeds and nuts stay in the stomach for 3-4 hours. So if we first eat nuts and then on the top of it put fruit (or eat fruits and nuts together), the fruit is going to be ready to get out of the stomach in no time, but will have nowhere to go because there is something still being digested below it. So the fruit will just sit on the top and ferment, creating incidents of gas, bloating, heartburn, low energy and weight gain.

Fear not my friends, Tums and the gang maybe going out of business, but there is a new sheriff in town- proper food combining. Sure, go head and follow a few rules, after all, what do you have to lose except constipation.

If you liked this article, you might also like   Three Golden Rules for Fantastic Digestion

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