Picking up where we left off in the last article, let’s look at how food combinations can benefit your gastrointestinal system.

To boil it down, the problems that arise from improperly combining food types are nearly always related to how they affect your body’s acidity.  A healthy body is generally slightly alkaline, which promotes proper chemical function, especially in the digestive tract.

Knowing that, the rest is how well foods work together to not only be assimilated properly in the body, but to keep the alkaline balance at the right point.  Most of the work is done by your body itself, of course, but promoting proper nutrition in the right mix can greatly help this.  Most of the time that you experience indigestion or gastric dysfunction, it is probably due to your body’s reaction to the foods you’ve eaten as it attempts to compensate for the acidic gain.

Alright, I know all of that is pretty scientific-sounding.  Don’t worry, you won’t need a PhD to understand how food complementation works.  In fact, it’s so simple that any toddler can probably do it.  Actually, if you give your toddler a choice of raw foods, he or she will likely pick the right ones instinctively anyway.

First and foremost, avoid mixing high protein foods with high carbohydrates.  Proteins require a slightly acidic environment to produce the enzyme pepsin, which digests protein.  Carbohydrates, however, require a slightly alkaline environment to produce amylase for breaking them down.

When one or the other is eaten alone, the process works fine.  When combined, as with the “meat and potatoes” diet, they are at odds.  This is why those who eat red meats and potatoes often have constipation and, well, “stinkiness.”  One is not getting properly digested (usually the carbs) while the other is.  So the undigested foods start to literally rot.

The best complement for meats or high protein are green leafy vegetables and anything containing Vitamin C in abundance.  Vitamin C is an acid and most green leafy vegetables also contain acids.  These aid the digestion of meats.  This is probably where the first course of salad followed by a main course of meat tradition comes from.

Secondly, don’t mix proteins.  Nuts and meat do not go well together as they have slightly different requirements.  Eggs and cheese are also not complementary.  Fats are also to be avoided – you probably already knew this from other nutritional problems with fats.  They also inhibit gastric juice secretion.

Finally, if a food is a complement to proteins, it is contrary to carbohydrates.  So don’t eat oranges and beans at the same time and avoid mixing sugars and starches as well.  Of course, milk is an inhibitor so it should not be eaten with anything, really.  It leeches the anti-oxidants from vegetables and neutralizes the acids in other foods as well. Milk does go well with cereal grains and fibers.

So here’s the simplest breakdown:
Starches, fats and green vegetables go well together.  Green, leafy vegetables and proteins go well together.  Milk goes with fiber and cereals.  Proteins should not be mixed like complex carbohydrates should be.

It’s pretty easy once you look at it.  Most foods fall into one of those categories, some into more than one.  Mixing once in a while is OK, so long as one of them is definitely dominant, but overall, mixing should be avoided.

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