Bad food combining: the scourge of the body that causes 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 easy to remember way.

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 you using good food combining?

Think of your digestive tract as a one-lane expressway. Passing is not an option. So what can you do to 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 plants or fresh kill for the carnivores.

We like to eat a variety of  ~ different} foods and it is really 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 stopped by the slow ones. To make things even more complicated, the different food groups also require different digestive juices and often 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 unaccompanied 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 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!