For books and charts on Food Combining, see the RawReform Store HERE.
In nature, wild animals don’t combine foods. You’re unlikely to see a bear catch a fish, then pick berries to go with it before eating. Animals generally eat one thing at a time – a ‘mono-diet’ – and there are substantial benefits to eating this way. Different types of foods – proteins, starches and sugars, for example – all digest in different ways. So when we combine different foods together, it can be challenging for digestion. Unfortunately, most of us learnt to eat exactly this way – combining many different foods in one meal. It took time to learn to eat this way: people don’t tend to feed babies complex concoctions, rather simple blended fruits/veggies. It also takes time to unlearn eating this way, but the benefits are worth it. All you need to know are a few simple food-combining rules and you can improve digestion immediately.
What we consume either digests easily or ferments and food combinations strongly affect this outcome. This doesn’t mean you have to follow a strict ‘mono-diet’ (though many raw fooders certainly do choose this path). It just means paying a bit more attention to what you mix together: the simpler you keep things, the easier it is to digest. One term coined by raw foodists is ‘combo-abombos’ – i.e. abominable combinations resulting from budding raw foodists throwing everything into the blender at once. The more you avoid such combo-abombos and aim towards keeping things simple, all the better for your digestion.
Imagine the difference, for example, between digesting a mono-meal of five peaches OR a slice of raw peach and blueberry pie with a base of three kinds of nuts and honey, plus chocolate sauce. Get the idea?? ;) The fruit mono-meal is easily recognised by the body and digested within about 30mins. The pie on the other hand is much more puzzle-like for your stomach. The fruits and honey are simple sugars, which means they digest quickly. The heavy nuts are protein-rich, so they require substantial time in stomach acid to break down. These two food groups thus start to ‘compete’ for digestion. This confusing set of messages challenges the stomach. Sugars are our primary source of energy and therefore ‘shout the loudest’ to get priority for digestion. This means that the protein-rich nuts get hurried out of the stomach, along with those sugars, before they’re really ready, leaving them to putrefy in the intestines. Hmmm, perhaps that pie doesn’t sound so pleasant after all? ;) Let’s not get too rigid here though. It doesn’t need to be about perfectionism. For those starting out raw especially, it can be much more a case of ‘anything goes’. If you’re coming from a background of processed junk foods, just the fact that you start eating mostly or all-raw means your digestion and health will improve. There is more margin for ‘error’ in the beginning. As time goes on, your cells get cleaner and tighter and your body lets you know it would prefer simpler combinations. Then you can start refining things, as feels good to you. That’s really what it comes down to – do you feel good after you eat a certain combination? Nobody knows your body better than you and what feels just fine to you might feel like a horrible combination to someone else. We can certainly use books and ideologies for reference, to learn about general patterns people find useful, but more key is listening to our own bodies.
The Side Effects
So, what happens when foods are not ‘well-combined’? A very common side effect is feeling sluggish, tired and heavy. This is because complicated combinations require much energy to digest. There is little energy left for anything else. We may also feel mental fogginess, especially if we’ve eaten a lot of fat. Digestive issues may include gas, bloating, constipation, fermentation and candida overgrowth. You may also experience rashes, mucus, spots, weight gain/difficulty losing weight or any number of other symptoms, as gas and waste back up in your over-worked system.
A less-obvious side effect is that it’s much easier to overeat and to overeat things you later realise don’t agree with you, when eating ‘combo-abombos’. Many people eat quickly and this, along with the longer time taken to decipher messages in muddled combos, means that by the time the stomach’s worked out the puzzle, you’ve already finished a plate of something that doesn’t serve your health.
The Benefits
One major benefit of good food combining is it helps conserve energy. Digestion of food takes a lot of energy. The simpler our combinations, the easier it is to assimilate and use this fuel efficiently. As a result, you’ll feel cleaner, lighter, alert and more energetic.
‘Good’ food combining will also help you lose excess weight, especially if you avoid complicated meals late at night. Ideal combining also helps you maintain an ideal weight. Your digestion and elimination become smooth and regular and your skin clear and fresh.
Simplifying your food can have knock-on benefits in other areas too, like using less electricity, having less washing-up and shorter food-prep times. Mono-mealing fruit for example usually involves picking up fruit and eating it, with maybe a bowl, knife and chopping board at most to wash. Compare that to making a raw pie, or more complicated yet, a greasy cooked meal.
When you mono-meal, the body can tell you precisely when you’ve had enough, as it will begin to taste different and even unpleasant. This is the body’s way of letting you know it’s had enough for now. This feedback’s a real advantage, as you can get exactly what you need, without going to excess.
Overall, eating ‘good’ food combinations can thus bring more energy, time and vitality to enjoy the things you love.
NO MORE PIE???? :O
Does all this mean you’ll never eat raw cake again?? Not necessarily – it’s really up to you ;) How easy do you want to make things for your body; how much energy do you want going to digestion? The example with the peach pie above, for instance, illustrated the overall idea behind why someone might want to pay attention to food combining. You don’t HAVE to do anything, or be ‘perfect’: just do the best you can, while enjoying yourself. A less-than-optimal combination’s unlikely to leave you in hospital – this isn’t a critical matter – it’s more about tweaks that can take your health to the next level, whether you’re 40, 80 or 100% raw.
The Raw Advantage
The good news for raw foodists is that food combining boundaries can be a little more flexible than for traditional cooked food eaters. This is useful if you do desire to eat raw gourmet foods. The high enzyme content of raw/living foods helps digestion enormously, meaning you can afford to make more ‘mistakes’ (at least in the beginning). In moderation, you can often eat ‘less-than-optimal’ raw combinations and find you feel fine afterwards – eat complicated recipes to excess however and you’ll unlikely feel great. (Taking digestive enzymes at such times will help.) Many different theories exist about food combining and here we’ll examine only a basic, suggested outline. For optimal digestion, try not to eat raw nuts and seeds, avocadoes, etc (fats) with your fruits (sugars), or starchy vegetables with either. Green leafy/low starch vegetables combine fine with just about everything. See the diagram below:
(N.B. this diagram is simplistic, as foods don’t consist exclusively of sugars, starches or fat/protein. So aim at not combining concentrated protein foods with concentrated starchy foods and so on.)
Guidelines
A key recommendation is keeping melons separate from all other food. Melons digest extremely quickly (in about 20mins), so are best eaten by themselves. You can, however, eat different melons in one sitting if you like, with little digestive interference. Some people also keep other types of fruits separate from each other. For example, it’s recommended to avoid eating ‘acid’ fruits, such as citrus, with ‘sweet’ fruits like bananas. ‘Sub-acid’ fruits like peaches and plums can be enjoyed with either acid or sweet fruits.
Examples of acid fruits: oranges, pineapples, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.
Examples of sub-acid fruits: Apricots, strawberries, nectarines, raspberries, blackberries, mangoes, apples, cherries, peaches, plums, gooseberries, pears, kiwis, grapes.
Examples of sweet fruits: dates, bananas, raisins, papaya, figs, prunes, persimmons, grapes.
One way to avoid considering whether something is a ‘good’ combination or not is to just ‘mono-meal’ fruits. Eating only one kind of fruit at a time until you’ve had enough is an easy way to keep things simple and digest more easily. You’ll likely also notice and appreciate the subtleties of fruits more when mono-mealing.
Preferably, acid and sub-acid fruits shouldn’t be eaten within 30mins of any other food, to avoid complications. Less acid fruits, like ripe bananas can be more easily combined with other foods, e.g. a banana/coconut smoothie, though this isn’t considered ‘optimal’.
Be cautious of eating fruit as a dessert, as it gets stuck behind other foods in the digestion queue and simply ferments. I would recommend instead eating fruit before other foods. Try to be aware of ‘overlapping’ your meals. After eating anything, or drinking a juice/smoothie, leave sufficient time to finish digesting that before you eat more. Otherwise, if you’re half-way through digesting some pineapple, for example and then eat a nut burger, you’re overlapping digestive tasks and asking for complications. An ideal set-up would be eating fruit, or drinking veggie juice before a meal, on an empty stomach (for better absorption), then eating about 30mins later.
I’d also recommend avoiding combining different fats in one meal – e.g. a salad with olives, avocado and nuts. Opt for just one or two fatty/protein foods in a meal and you’ll find them much easier to digest.
Cooked Combo Catastrophes
Cooked food eaters can and do easily run into combining issues. Classic combos like hamburgers, cheese sandwiches, rice & dhal or meat & potatoes for example are digestive minefields. This may seem shocking at first. We may argue that these ‘traditional’ meals of dense protein with starch are eaten all around the world. Surely all of those societies can’t be ‘wrong’: there must be a reason why people eat like this. Well, there is, but it has little to do with nutrition; it’s all about economics. In India for example, rice is widely available and cheap, so an average meal consists of a mass of rice, accompanied by something dense and spicy, like dhal. The protein and starch combination is troublesome for digestion, as these foods digest differently. This means digestion slows down. Thus, it takes longer for the eater to become hungry again. Naturally, this is good for finances, but hardly ideal for wellbeing. That’s not to suggest that India is in dire straits from bad combining. It’s merely to show that if we can move beyond the financial motivation for our traditional foods, we may find better health. If we’re in a position to choose what we eat and when based on health, rather than finances, I believe there’s no better choice than learning food combining basics and applying them, with a high-raw diet. As natural healer Dr John Tilden put it: ‘Nature never produced a sandwich’. For those transitioning to 100% raw, bear in mind that the more of a meal that’s raw, the more you can afford to have combination clashes. This is good news if you find eating salads challenging, for example. Making salad dressing with whatever ingredients you like (raw or not), not only makes the salad more attractive to you, but the enzyme-rich veggies also help you digest the non-raw foods.
Bending the Rules
There are also reasons why someone may want to deliberately not eat ‘good’ combinations. For example, in general, as we’ve seen, fruits and nuts don’t combine well. HOWEVER, for a diabetic, or someone dealing with blood sugar irregularities, eating these two foods together slows sugar absorption into the bloodstream. The heavy nuts interfere with the much swifter digestion of fruits, so, a diabetic can use this to their advantage, to be able to eat fruits, increasing the range of foods they can eat.
Other raw foodists may choose ‘less-than-optimal’ combinations like this to actually hold themselves back from rapid cleansing/detox. A raw lifestyle is highly cleansing and the more we eat simple combinations and mono-meals, the more we press onwards into cleansing. The body always works towards optimal health – every chance it gets to move more into cleansing, it takes. After months or years of simple eating, it becomes very uncomfortable to eat raw pie for example, as the digestion’s become so unaccustomed to such mixtures. While some people love being in that space of feeling so ‘clean’ inside, others don’t want to go there yet. They want to still enjoy raw gourmet foods if they choose, so will eat more complicated things sometimes, to stop their body from moving further into cleansing.
Keep it Simple
It comes down to this: better food combining means better digestion and less fermentation. That means more effective nutrient absorption and less back-up in the intestines. You don’t HAVE to follow any of the suggestions here, but you will feel benefits if you do. The most important concept to remember, is to let YOUR body be your guide. Everybody’s digestive system is different and can handle different combinations. This article’s hopefully provided some useful combination guidelines, but there really are no ‘definitive answers’. If you’re in doubt about whether a combination seems like a good idea, just think about the other animals in nature and how they eat: keep it simple and above all, ENJOY ;)
For books and charts on Food Combining, see the RawReform Store HERE.
To read more of Angela's thoughts on how to go raw successfully, happily and for the long-term, see her books HERE.