Food combining

Combine your meals properly to improve your digestion and, therefore, your health.

The new chefs are getting more creative and mixing all kinds of foods to keep people from getting bored. But have you ever wondered how it affects your health? Did you know that how we combine our meals has a significant impact on our health? Here are some terrible combinations that you should reduce or eliminate from your diet. It can be overwhelming but read to the end because here I will tell you what you can do to counteract the effects of a bad combination.

Beans

It would be best not to eat beans with the following: fruit, milk, cheese, yogurt, eggs, meat, and fish.

Milk 

It would be best not to eat milk with the following legumes, meats, fish, vegetables, fruit, grains (especially bread cooked with yeast), nightshades (potato, tomato, eggplant, chilies.

Tip: Milk should be consumed hot and with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, turmeric, cardamom, and chamomile, among others. Generally, milk is best when drunk by itself, hot, and with spices, but it is acceptable in rice pudding and oatmeal. It can also be drunk with dates, mangoes, figs, and almonds.

Cheese

It would be best not to eat cheese with the following beans, eggs, and yogurt.

Yogurt

It would be best not to eat yogurt with milk, fruits, hot drinks, meat, fish, cheese, and nightshades (potato, tomato, eggplant, chilies).

Eggs

It would be best not to eat eggs with milk, yogurt, meat, cheese, fish, fruits, and potatoes.

Ghee

It would be best not to eat ghee in equal weight proportions with honey.

Honey

It would be best not to eat honey in equal weight proportions with ghee.

Tip: Honey should never be heated or cooked with it (it becomes toxic).

Fruits

Fruit is better to eat by itself.Fruits are incompatible with other foods since they use a different metabolic pathway. Our digestive system spends like an hour digesting fruits. Other foods such as meats, fats, and legumes can take up to six hours to be digested. If you combine fruits with these foods in a meal, the fruits will have to stay in our digestive tract for more than an hour; this will cause the fruit to ferment and turn into toxins. The fruit should be consumed at least one hour before eating or three hours after eating. It would help if you did not mix cantaloupe and watermelon with other fruits. The GIT digests faster cantaloupe and watermelon even faster than other fruits. So the fruit cocktails are difficult to digest.

Vegetables

It would be best not to eat vegetables with milk or fruit.

Well known dishes with bad combinations:

• Pizza

• Beans with cheese

• Banana smoothie

• Stuffed peppers dipped in a fluffy egg batter.

• Fruit cocktails with melon or watermelon.

• PBJ sandwich

Our bodies sometimes get used to combinations that are not optimal for our digestion, like beans and cheese for Hispanics or pizza for Italians. We are giving extra work to our body until it says enough is enough when the disease begins.

Overwhelmed? You can start by remembering this:

• Milk and fruits alone.

• You can eat vegetables with everything except milk and fruit.

• Try to consume only one protein at a time, especially animal proteins and beans.

Little tricks to be able to enjoy bad combinations.

When you cook everything in one pot (including fruit) with enough spices, like in a stew or soup, all the qualities of the food blend together and become easier to digest; for example, if you take a piece of gold powder and silver powder, and mix them. They will continue to be gold and silver because you can still see the independent particles of each metal. On the other hand, when you have a mixture like the above, and you melt it down, there are no longer separate particles of silver or gold; they become one. It is the same when you mix different types of food in a pot like stew or soup. Cooking this way, you do not have to worry about combinations.

Eating a lousy combination once in a while is ok. Like when you go to a party, it is not the end of the world. What you do every day is what creates an impact on your health. Have a ginger tea or CCF tea, a digestive tea that will help digest the lousy mix when you can't avoid it.

Try to follow these rules for ten days in a row so you can see how it impacts your digestion.

1.-Lad, Usha and Dr. Vasant Lad. Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing. 2nd ed. Albuquerque: The Ayurvedic Press, 2006. Print. 45-48.

2.- Alandi food combinación handout

3.-Lad, Vasant. The Complete Book of Ayurvedic Home Remedies. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. Print. 101.

4.-Robert Sachs : Tibetan Ayurveda: Health Secrets from the Roof of the World. Rochester Vermont. Healing of Arts Press, 1995. Print 73- 74.