Bad food combining: the scourge of the body causing abdominal bloating, stomach gas and fermentation.

In addition to eating great raw organic plant foods, you want to know the rules of food combining. In this post we will cover them in an easyway to remember .

You’re 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 youdoing food combining the right way ?

Your digestive tract is like a one-lane expressway. There is no passing . So what is the best way to keep things moving?

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 grasses or fresh kill for the carnivores.

We enjoy eating a variety of  ~ different} foods and it is important to follow a few simple rules to maintain good digestion. I learned these from the Hippocrates Health Institute, the leader in raw food health.

Let’s begin 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 quicker ones are blocked by the slow ones. To complicate things , 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 alone and eat it an hour before other food as it passes through very rapidly. You could have fruit an hour before a meal instead of for dessert.

By the way: is tomato fruit or vegetable ? FRUIT

And an bonus 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!