Published: 07/07/2007 - Updated: 09/15/2018
Author: K. Laura Garcés G
You feel weak, hearted and depressed even though you eat nutritious food, do exercise and take enough natural water? Perhaps it is the right time to pay attention not to what you eat, but how you do it. It may seems unimportant, we have mixed food to the whims and requests of the palate throughout life, yet what happens in the stomach when we finished eating is something that we do not pay attention because it doesn’t appear physically, but we could have a look at everything that happens in the digestion and throughout all the tremendous effort that makes our stomachs after we got up from the table and go to work or any other activity, then perhaps we could consider combining food.
Eating
We know that health is the result of many factors involved in the body, and yet sometimes it seems that even if we do more things to be okay, we have poor health and encouragement to maintain enthusiasm during the day. We must insist, no doubt, in keeping looking until we find what is preventing us feel energetic, vital and full of joy for living. Among the many things that could be preventing us from our well-being is the proper food combining. Eating correctly is a habit that greatly facilitates the digestive process. Going against the basic principles of digestion involves many problems not only for health, but also we are preventing properly nourishment of body and keeping an appropriate weight.
Right combination of food
- Our stomach is designed to digest one cooked food at a time. Cooked food is one that has been heated by some form, whether soup, meat, stews, fruit or vegetables heated.
- The ideal is always a dish that combines cooked (a solid food) with a salad (liquid meal without cooking). We must note that the cooked vegetables are cooked food.
- The combination of protein and carbohydrate is incompatible. To decompose in the stomach, each of them require acidic gastric juices and alkaline respectively. If you mix carbohydrates and protein at mealtime, the stomach secretes both acids, the result is that the mixed juices are neutralized. It is then that your stomach has trouble digesting food very much, indeed often it cannot do it, and this is what causes you indigestion or heartburn.
- When mixing protein and carbohydrates in one meal, food spend hours without being digested in your stomach, and here the decomposition process of the food occurs, then begin to produce toxins, gases, bad breath, etc.
- The last mixture creates alcohol even if you have not consumed it.
- During our diet there are many common examples of this combination (carbohydrates and protein): pasta (carbohydrates) and cheese or mushrooms (protein), meat (protein) and potatoes and olives, milk (protein) and pasta, bread, fruits, etc.
- The combination of carbohydrates in one meal is not as harmful as the two proteins in one meal.
- Remember that everything that is cooked or heated is a solid food, so if the vegetables are cooked, are as cooked food.
- The theory that proposes a meal mixing all the food groups is incorrect.
- Fruit is highly recommended to consume it alone, without mixing with any other food. The reason is that the natural sugar from the fruit ferments any food in the stomach.
- When you eat fruits with other foods, these accelerate the fermentation of food, this causes indigestion and the vitamins of the fruit will not be utilized fully. Moreover, as noted above, when food is rotten and fermented in the body, it's like taking alcohol.
- If you are going to eat fruit, it is best to consume citrus as the first food in the mornings. Lemon, guava, pineapple, plum, strawberry, grapefruit, orange, etc. are ideal as they purify the body and purify the blood, clean and prepare the stomach to start working. You need only twenty minutes to fully assimilate these fruits in your body, so after waiting twenty minutes, have breakfast.
- You can eat other fruit at different times of day, making it half hour before or two hours after eating something.
- Try not to drink liquids at lunchtime. They dilute the digestive juices and cause food takes much longer to assimilate. A small cup of digestive tea is recommended and sufficient liquid before, during or after the meal. Try to drink water half an hour before or one hour after the meal.
Four Ideal Foods
- A sandwich with whole wheat bread, lettuce, spinach, alfalfa sprouts and avocado.
- Raw salad with panela or cottage cheese.
- Steamed vegetables combined with a salad of crisp lettuce and vegetables.
- Brown rice and salad.
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