Some believe that food combining is the basis of good health. But is there any scientific validity to this idea?
It's our mothers and grandmothers who stopped us from eating fish and dahi at the same time, or cautioned us against drinking milk after we had eaten melon. Old wives' tales apart, various theories about food and eating abound. Some suggest that combining different food groups has an adverse impact on the digestion and health, and even promotes weight gain. The idea of appropriate 'mixing' is reinforced by modern diet theories that stress the right mixing of food and eating of certain foods at certain times of the day.
Some nutritionists and health experts have gone one step further and broadened the definition of a 'balanced' diet to include the appropriate mixing of foods: Trophology is the study of combining food based on its energetic and nutritional properties, and advocates simple principles on mixing foods according to their important constituents. But is there really any scientific basis to the idea of food combining? We decided to find out what experts think and also talked to several people who believe that combining foods appropriately has improved their health.
RAW FOOD CLEANSE
Raw food expert Soorya Kaur is critical of the regular Indian diet of daal- roti , which she calls acidic. Herself a raw food eater, she believes that 'living' food such as fruit, vegetables, sprouted nuts, seeds and grains can keep the body disease free. " Our diets should have 70 percent of alkaline food and 30 percent of other foods whereas most people do it the other way: They eat wheat products, pulses, sugar and drink coffee or tea which are all acidic in nature and cause many health problems," says Soorya, who not just prepares appetising meals from raw foods for her detox programmes but also delivers it at home for those interested.
Kaur's 7- day Raw Food Cleanse programme begins with raw foods along with dishes made with raw foods.
After that it moves on to a day of only green vegetables and fruit. Next, a day of juices only which comprise of 10 different liquids to drink. The remaining days will include a day of fruit only. In the final days you go back to the full spectrum of the foods enjoyed on the first two days. Throughout this process, you are provided with 2 full meals a day, yoga classes and consultation. For those, who might find it difficult to survive on raw foods for long once the programme is finished, Soorya recommends cooking food at 48 . C which preserves the nutrients.
" I tell people never to mix raw foods and cooked food together. Instead they should keep them for separate days or for separate meals and also to eat cooked food minimally," says Soorya. Milk and milk products are avoidable, as she believes them to be genetically modified and impure. " Hormones which are injected to cows and buffalos make the milk unfit for human consumption," says Soorya. She also advocates a 'Detox Juice Cleanse' program aimed at cleansing and detoxing the body. She believes juice allows you to draw the maximum nutrition from fruit and vegetables.
BLAME IT ON MIXING
According to some theories, inappropriate food combinations are to blame for obesity and stomach disorders. Our digestive tract becomes confused when we eat more than one form of concentrated protein or starch at a time, leading to incomplete digestion and toxicity. In fact random food combining is also believed to result in chemical imbalance, the underlying cause for most health problems.
These ideas have led to the formulation of diets that stress keeping food groups separate.
The Fit for Life diet which was hugely popular in the '80' s is the best known in this category. Fit for Life is a diet plan rich in fruit and vegetables and recommends eating fruit from the time you wake up till noon. You are not supposed to mix fruit with any other food. While there is more choice for lunch and dinner, again one should not eat more than one concentrated food at a time so proteins should not be mixed with carbohydrates. And there should be at nearly a break of 3 to 4 hours between meals. This is because both proteins and carbohydrates require secretions of very different digestive juices for complete digestion. And the mix of both the juices in the stomach leads to incomplete digestion of both carbohydrates and protein.
It's believed that the proteins putrefy and the starches ferment due to the continuous presence of bacteria in the digestive tract. Also, they should be accompanied by raw vegetables. The diet asks people to avoid all kinds of dairy products and drinking water with meals as it dilutes stomach digestive juices.
The desi version of Fit for Life is advocated by Mumbaibased Dr Vijaya Venkat, who has been living and creating awareness about eating carefully since the mid 1960s. " Fit for Life is a documentation of principles of natural hygiene which I have been following for ages. The book established the fact that humans are essentially fruitarians. It also encouraged me to tell the world that all this while I have been on the right tract," declares Dr Vijaya Venkat.
Vickie Rai turned to Dr Venkat's diet two years ago when she developed a malignant lump in her breast for the second time. She stopped her medication and began on the diet. Three weeks later, she went for an ultrasound and was delighted to receive a clean chit of health. " First the lump in my breast went but with time my other health problems also reduced. My frequent visits to the homeopath for constant cold and cough problems also declined.
What worked best for me was the lime shot Dr Venkat's advises after every meal," says forty- four- yearold Vickie.
Ayurveda also goes against the mixing of variety of foods.
According to this system, each food has its own taste ( rasa), energy ( virya) and post- digestive effect ( vipak). So, when two or three different foods of different taste, energy and post- digestive effect ( proteins, carbohydrates and fats) are mixed, it disrupts the digestive power ( agni) and hamper the digestion. This results in indigestion, fermentation and gas formation.
On the contrary, if we eat these foods separately at different times of the day they are digested quickly and easily as the agni gets stimulated. " Each individual should eat according to his constitution i. e. vatta, pitta and kapha.
And, equally important is to have an appropriate combination of food as each food substance demands different degree of digestive power to be digested. For instance, water melon is digested relatively much faster than milk. So mixing both can disrupt the digestive power," explains Ayurveda specialist Nilima Jain.
THE COUNTER VIEW
Most doctors and nutritionists rubbish food combining theories, saying that they lack scientific basis. " I am not aware of any clinical study which proves that having carbohydrates with proteins or any two concentrated foods at a time can cause digestive disorders. It's a myth that gastric enzymes change the digestive tone or decreases gastric juices.
Contrarily, eating more of one kind of food sometimes can lower the secretion of other enzymes," says Dr M P Sharma, Head, Internal Medicine & Gastroenterology.
The diet regimes also suggest that an alkaline diet ( fruit and vegetables) rather than acidic diet ( cereals and pulses) can prevent deadly diseases which are an outcome of eating foods that result in an acidic ash residue. An acidic diet is also blamed for causing an imbalance in the pH levels leading to digestive problems.
However, doctors reject these ideas as halfbaked theories. " It's the internal environment of the stomach that controls the digestion and not food. Moreover, our digestive mechanism is too strong to get disturbed by eating two different kinds of foods together and even if it does, the body rejects such food.
The job of the gastric juices is to neutralise the food we eat, so both acidic and alkaline foods are neutralised by the stomach," Dr S P Thakur, senior consultant, Gastroenterology.
According to Dr Thakur, medicine doesn't recognise acidic or alkaline diet or the argument that pH levels in the body get disturbed by certain kinds of acidic food. And, those who are selling such theories to people are misguiding them. Body's pH levels are affected under certain health conditions such as infections or diabetes or kidney problems and not by the foods. So, to stay healthy it is important to have a balance diet.
Rather than losing yourself in the various ( often contradictory) theories put forth by health experts and doctors, we advise you to trust your own body. You could try some of these diet plans and see if they work as well for you as they did for some of the people we spoke to.
Wait and watch, keeping an eye on how you feel for some weeks before you establish a conclusion. While eating in the ways advocated by these plans is unlikely to harm you, some foods or eating habits may aggravate health conditions so it is always better to discontinue them till the time you feel better.
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