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2009-03-09 13:10:35
Food Combining
"You have three wishes for free", the fairy godmother said, "and you wished
1. always to have a good and rich dinner,
2. thereby to loose your pounds down to your ideal weight,
3. and to feel well all the time.
Okay, try this: Food Combining!"
The fairy godmother is right, I tell you! And I know what I am talking about: I
did not intend to loose weight at all, I just out of curiosity tried the
tasteful Food Combining meals which my wife had prepared for herself, and I
didn't take the Food Combining rules too seriously, but then I suddenly noticed
that the new food made me feel much better:
After dinner, the meal did not lie in my stomach like a stone for hours, there
was no belching, no heartburn after dinner any longer, esophagus reflux had
ceased, too, and stomach troubles, bowel spasms, obstipation were gone, too!
Finally I had also lost 22 pounds, and now my weight is exactly the same again
as in my youth, when I was a sportive young man of 20 years. Incredible! After
only five months of Food Combining I felt better, brisker, and lighter ... That
was when I decided: I will stick to Food Combining!
You see, Food Combining is no singular diet, but a lasting new form of
nourishment, with a small but important change of your nutritional habit.
How Food Combining works
That's the trick. To see what food you can combine please look at these three
groups (the table1 is incomplete, but it can give you a first impression):
Protein Neutral Carbohydrate
Egg white Egg yolk Potatoes
Milk Milk products Cereals
Cheese < 60% fat Cheese > 60% fat Grain products
Meat cooked/fried Meat raw Sugar
Fish cooked/fried Fish raw Dates, Figs
Fruit Vegetables, Salad Bananas
Wine Coffee, Tea Syrup
Please combine only the food of two neighboring groups:
Protein and Neutral, or Neutral and Carbohydrate.
Protein Neutral
A meal for example:
A good steak
Gravy
Brussels sprouts
Green salad
Neutral Carbohydrate
A meal for example:
White herring
White cream sauce
Fried potatoes
Never combine food of the two distant groups:
Never eat Protein and Carbohydrate at the same time!
Protein Carbohydrate
A bad meal for example:
Shashlik
Tomato Sauce
Spaghetti
You can eat Protein and Carbohydrate one after the other, of course. But be
sure that there are at least three hours between eating food with protein and
eating food with carbohydrate to give your body enough time first to digest
one food sufficiently before the next food comes which requires another way of
digestion.
Why Food Combining works
Food Combining is derived from the biochemistry of our body which has two
different ways of pre-digestion: for protein and, on the other hand, for
carbohydrate:
Carbohydrate is predigested in our mouth with help of the alcalic saliva,
Protein is predigested in our stomach with help of the acid gastric fluid.
Biochemistry with a correct food combination
Already when we first look on our plate, and "our mouth waters", our body has
made its choice between these two ways of pre-digestion, and prepares our
saliva and our gastric fluid for the expected food:
forms an amylase, which imbues the chewed food and starts the transformation of
carbohydrate into sugar. The stomach is only a transit station then: The food
pulp is only acidified here and then forwarded into the intestines.
only task is to help the food to slide down into the stomach. Here the needed
enzymes and the gastric acid are prepared to acidify the food pulp, to collect
concentrated protein, and then forward it into the bowels.
alcalic again, and then is digested by the needed enzymes in the small gut
finally: All nutrients are extracted and introduced through the bowel skins
into the blood and the lymphatic circulation which distribute them in the whole
body.
Biochemistry with a wrong food combination
If you give your body a mixed food of protein and carbohydrate at the same
time, the digestion process is more complicated, needs more time, and yet the
food is not digested completely.
to find and to pre-digest the carbohydrate which it may contain in case that
the needed amylase was prepared at all.
the protein in the mixed pulp. Acidifying the whole mass takes an unnecessarily
long time: The food lies in the stomach for hours, while the carbohydrate often
already begins to ferment: You start to belch, and maybe you also feel
heartburn or even esophagus reflux if your stomach needs an unusually big
amount of gastric acid to acidify the whole pulp in this case the gastric
acid also may attack the mucous membrane of the stomach which may lead to
stomach spasms and, in the long run, to gastritis and stomach ulcers.
up for the unsatisfying pre-digestion of the carbohydrate in the mouth,
moreover they and the enzymes for protein probabely will hamper each other in
their effectivity if they altogether try to imbue the food pulp at the same
time this may considerably delay the process of the whole digestion, and lead
to obstipation, while in the bowels the carbohydrate starts to ferment and the
protein begins to rot which leads to flatulence or bowel spasms, and produces
toxic substances which also pass the bowel skin to get into the blood and
lymphatic circulation and may cause indisposition as well as diseases.
That is why: Food Combining!
A correct food combination, on the contrary, gives your body only food for one
of the both natural processes of digestion: From your "watering mouth", which
is your first physical response to the offered food, to the final digestion in
your guts the whole process follows the same rule: The food is correctly
pre-digested, passes your stomach in maximally two hours, is digested properly
and excreted daily. You feel easy, brisk, and healthy ...
How old is Food Combining?
The method of Food Combining was developed in the USA by Dr.Howard Hay in the
thirties of the previous century, and it soon has found followers in the whole
world. According to new medical findings it has been modified, optimized, and
specialized again and again, and to the actual application spectrum belong
medical therapeutic methods of Food Combining, vegetarian and full value health
food variants, regional versions preferring the native foods of their
countries, and fashionable movements like "Fit for Life" and "Wake Up". But I
think, Food Combining is much older:
Biogenetically we all are created for Food Combining
Most researchers are convinced that the evolution of manhood has begun about
1,000,000 years ago. So, before we settled down about 10,000 years ago and
became farmers, we for 990,000 years, that means for 99% of our evolution, have
been roaming collectors and hunters who lived from hand to mouth and ate their
fill with that what they just found: In the morning maybe berries, in the
afternoon nuts, next day they dug out eatable roots, and then the hunters had
killed a bison from which they all could eat for many days ...
This was pure Food Combining which we practised for nearly the whole long time
of our biogenese because we simply had no choice: The case that the prehistoric
wilderness offered different food at the same time and at the same place must
have been very, very rare. Most likely, there was only one single food to be
found, and it was eaten up and digested properly before the next food was found
several hours later. So our organs were optimized for the separated digestion
of either protein or carbohydrate.
Even if in the last 1% of our evolution finally also mixed food became avaible
regularly by grain-growing and cattle-breeding and the new possibility of
storing supplies, and though mixed food has become predominant nowadays
biogenetically we all were created for Food Combining!
Children are spontaneously practising Food Combining
According to the theory that a man in the course of his life repeats the whole
biogenese of the human race, let's have a look at the children: Did you ever
notice that children very often practise Food Combining by their own choice?
They can eat their fill with noodles and sauce and vegetables but disdain the
offered meat rissole, or they put aside the potatoes and eat only meat and
salad.
But then we, the adults, teach them our behavior rules, that one first has to
take something of every offered food, and then has to empty one's plate
completely ...
But perhaps the children are more prudent than we in this respect? Perhaps they
still have a more natural understanding of their body and know better than we
what is really good for them?
Criticism
In summer 2001 a big German journal2 has tested the twenty most popular diets
and has found fault with Food Combining: "Hay's digestion rules", they
criticized, are "scientifically not provable", and "for everyday practice Food
Combining is too complicated". On the other hand, only two of these twenty
diets are found to be successful without the risk of health damages, without
big expenses, and without extreme challenges of patience and perseverance, and
one of these two diets is Food Combining: "The loss of weight is granted."3
Dr. Hay's digestion rules
Dr. Hay's digestion rules have been discussed controversially since he first
published them. There is hardly any other nutritional form which has caused
such a flood of literature as Food Combining. But as long as the world of
ferments and enzymes in the human body is not researched completely, every
opinion is finally based on incomplete knowledge and speculative deductions,
and Dr.Hay's digestion rules cannot be proved nor disproved in a scientifically
unimpeachable way at the present time.
So let us keep to the facts which we can control and measure: Loss of
superfluous weight and decrease of indigestions are the undeniable, measurable
effects of this method.
And as long as the critics cannot produce a better hypothesis, Dr.Hay's
digestion rules may very well serve as a useful reasonable medical explanation
of these effects.
Is Food Combining too complicated?
That "for everyday practice Food Combining is too complicated", is strictly
denied by my wife and she ought to know because she long since prepares
tasteful and various Food Combining meals day by day.
Okay, as a Food Combining Cook she had to change several old habits, she says,
and she had to learn what food she can combine, and how to avoid wrong
combinations by using several new materials, but soon the new combination and
preparation of the meals has become a habit as well.
I as a Food Combining Eater, however, need only a few rules of thumb: I have to
separate meat from potatoes, fish from rice, noodles from shashlik. So in the
restaurant I leave potatoes, rice and noodles on the plate and eat my fill with
meat and vegetables. Is this complicated?
Can Food Combining guarantee a well balanced nourishment?
Food Combining is also reproached sometimes with the argument that is does not
give you a well balanced nourishment. But these critics mix up two concepts
which should be separated neatly, even if they both were developed by Dr.Hay,
and are still in use in several Food Combining schools.
Concept No.1 is the Food Combining method as it is described here, based on the
separation of protein and carbohydrate from each other. This method gives you a
completely sufficient nourishment if only protein meals and carbohydrate meals
are offered in a various sequence: This form of nourishment, in a whole,
provides you with the same nutrients as the normal mixed food does, only in
better digestible combinations, and as it contains much more fruit and
vegetables you get even more minerals and vitamins than by mixed food.
Concept No.2, on the other hand, is in fact dubious: When Dr.Hay had succeeded
to cure his own kidney disease by eating only food of extremely low acidity, he
believed he could prevent respectively cure nearly all other diseases,
including cancer, if only an "over-acidification of the body" could be avoided.
So he recommended a nourishment containing 80% of food which develops bases in
the body, like raw fruit and vegetables, and 20% of food which develops acids,
like sugar, potatoes, bread and other grain products, eggs, cheese, meat, fish,
and so on.
This disproportion, the critics say, must cause a malnutrition of the body with
calcium, iron, iodine, vitamin B, grain roughage, animal protein, and so on.
From the medical point of view, they say, a healthy body cannot be
"over-acidified" on account of the self-regulation of the organism by excreting
and breathing. The postulation of an "over-acidification of the whole body" is
regarded to be as high-flown as the claim to cure nearly all diseases only by
food of low acidity.
But all their criticism aims only at this dubious Concept No.2 which is based
on the theory of "over-acidification" with its restricted nourishment rules
and that has nothing to do with the Food Combining concept which allows you a
full value nourishment without restrictions and only regulates its combination
to achieve a healthy and natural digestion.
Further Information
My Food Combining Page can only give you an appetite, not more. I did not
intend to give instructions for use here. But if I could convince you that Food
Combining is a reasonable, simple, and successful method to solve weight
problems and indigestions and to increase your well-being all around, then you
perhaps might want further informations now.
The Internet gives you everything you need. When I fed the search engine
Altavista with my input "food+combining" in summer 2001, it listed 5,312
websites: literature, first hand experience reports, Food Combining recipes,
and shops where you can order special cooking materials, Food Combining clubs,
and seminars, and correspondence courses, and Food Combining hotels ...
Here I can only hope this page gave you at least some well combined food for
thoughts, and for your personal life I wish you with or without this method
of Food Combining at any rate health and well-being!
Sources: All quotations are translated from German into English language. Here
you will find the source where the German version was published.
1 Table after I.Schlieske: Kochbuch zur Trennkost, ISBN 3-7999-0237-6;
shortened
2 K.Leyendecker: Di t wozu?, in: Stern 20/2001, S.40ff
3 All quotations in: Stern 20/2001, p.58
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