Simple & Easy-to-digest Food Combinations

If you've ever wondered why a food you usually find easy to digest is now causing gas or an upset stomach? Maybe it's not the food, but what you ate along with it.

Poor food combining can turn one of your easy to digest foods into a digestive nightmare.

A bad food combination is anything that aggravates doshas without expelling them. And while your digestion can get used to some difficult to digest foods and combinations, eating them often will eventually catch up with you and impact your health.

Let's take a look at why and what you can do about it.

Who's at Greatest Risk?

Generally Vatas struggle the most with poor food combinations because they lack adequate fluids to break the foods down effectively.

However, proper food combining is also important for anyone with a weakness, those recovering from an illness, or those who need to cleanse or rejuvenate.

Reduce Digestive Multi-Tasking

Every ingredient demands separate digestive enzymes and attention from your gut. Which is why one pot meals, preferably soups with a few simple ingredients, are typically the easiest to digest.

With simpler food combinations your body can focus on each ingredient without getting overwhelmed with multi-tasking. Here are some general guidelines:

Here are some general guidelines:

• Don't eat more than three main ingredients in a meal.
• Avoid mixing animal with vegetable proteins such as beans.
• Eat proteins with leafy greens or rice only.
• Don't eat fruits within two hours of a meal. Otherwise they will form a sour wine in the stomach.
• Avoid dairy, including cheese, within two hours of a meal. Milk curdles in the stomach when mixed with other foods.
• Refrain from combining raw foods with cooked foods and fresh foods with leftovers.

Do You have a Traffic Jam in your Gut?

Eat foods that are easy to digest first and hard to digest last. For example, eat rice before lentils, steamed veggies before nuts.

This is because your gut holds onto foods until it can extract all the nutrition from them. If easy to digest foods are stuck behind difficult to digest foods, you'll have a traffic jam in your gut.

And when stuck behind a traffic jam, food that is easy to digest will begin to ferment causing gas buildup.

Proteins Don't Mix Well With These Foods

Avoid mixing proteins with foods that suppress stomach acid, such as fatty or acidic foods.

Reducing gastric acid secretions inhibits protein digestion. For this reason, avoid mixing lemons with meat or oranges with nuts.

Since meat is often fatty and difficult to digest, eat it with bitters. Bitters stimulate digestion and help increase meat's digestibility. They will also counteract the digestion lulling properties of fats.

Cooking & Bad Food Combinations

The effects of bad food combinations are less when foods are cooked together, because their qualities blend together. Soup is a great example.

For the same reason, carefully chewing poor food combinations may help digestibility in situations (such as restaurants) where bad food combining is inevitable.

Avoid These Common Bad Food Combinations

• Sandwich - The modern sandwich is a newfangled invention by the Earl of Sandwich, a British lord named John Mantague who was also a pathological gambler.

  Sandwiches generally combine wheat with meat; raw food (lettuce) with cooked food (meat); and fermented food (cheese, sour cream, vinegar) with fresh.

  These combinations are very difficult to digest.

• Cheeseburger - Made with wheat, meat and dairy, each of which is difficult to digest separately. Together they confound the stomach.
• Yogurt with fruit.
• Burritos - These often combine vegetables with animal proteins (beans and meat), mix meats with dairy (sour cream and cheese) and combine raw tomatoes with cooked. Burritos also contain too many ingredients in general.
• Pizza - Usually mixes wheat with cheese and tomatoes.
• Apples with peanut butter - Beans take a long time to digest. While the body churns away at the beans, the bacteria churn away at the apples.
• Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers & raw mushrooms - This is an example of raw foods of different energetics mixed together.