Food Combining and Digestion...

The food combining diet is a cooked food diet.

What you'll find is that eating a living food diet often makes such diets obsolete, for many of the problems that such diets are designed to deal with are removed when you remove cooked food and animal products. Living foods makes food combining and digestion much less of an issue. Once you've been on live foods for a few years, especially with enough cultured foods and after doing some colon cleansing, you will likely find your digestion strong enough to combine most anything on the diet. Additionally, after years with the lifestyle, you will likely not be interested anymore in the larger, fancy, raw food creations that have multiple food items combined. You will instead desire to eat more simply, and maybe even more mono-style. Having an awareness of good food combining principles is still great though for optimal health. Here is a chart showing good and less than good combinations:

The major food combining rule that I have found to remain important, is to eat fruits on an empty stomach because they go through the digestive tract so fast. I have also heard that melons require a separate digestion process then other fruits, so to eat them alone, separately from other fruits, is important so that you don't get a tummy ache. Until your digestion gets stronger, it is best to eat one kind of fruit at a time, as well as eat sugars separately from greens. Also, dehydrated foods, like cooked food, move slower through the digestive tract, so if you combine these with high sugar fruits, it may lead to fermentation and gas, as your gut yeasts and bacteria have more time to go to town on it. My general food combining rules are eat dessert first, so it has time to go through the digestive tract faster without fermentation, and eat a dehydrated item with lots of hydrating greens.

The first few years I was raw, I often found it challenging to digest multiple heavy fats together, like avocado with macadamia nuts and olive oil in a salad. You will feel better if you stick to eating one kind of fat at a time at first, and eventually you will be able to handle more fat. In general though, you may never feel like it is right to over eat a ton of fatty items at once. Remember, our physiology hasn't changed since we lived in the wild, where a lot of different foods are not available all at once to combine together in one sitting.Also, we would not have been able to open more then a few nuts at a time in the wild; those suckers are hard to break open!

Thus, eating a handful of nuts with some green leaves is always going to make you feel better than eating nuts, green leaves, olives, avocado, olive oil, and then a coconut cream pie combined all together at one meal! Though once your digestion is stronger, this may not affect you at all. Most would admit though that even if it doesn't have a huge negative effect, that they would probably feel a little better if they didn't combine so much together all at once. It all really depends on the person.

So the moral of the story is just be more aware with fats and sugars and quantities, realize you'll feel more balanced long-term if you remember these principles. Other than that, just eat as much living food as you want and enjoy it! You have discovered the most amazing worry free way of eating on the planet, for you can essentially eat as much as you want and whatever you want and you know its all healthy for you and that you re never going to gain excess weight! Living foods from nature are hard to go wrong with in practically any way!

It is best to drink 1/2 hour before or 1 hour after meals so that our digestive juices are not diluted & to wait 1 hour between meals so proper digestion may take place & not cause indigestion, fermentation, bloating, gas & constipation.

*Soaking whole grains, legumes, nuts & seeds in spring or filtered water for 4-24 hours, depending on their size, before eating them breaks down concentrated starches & fats into simpler, usable carbohydrates & changes the protein into free form amino acids so our bodies can use up to 100% of their nutrition. Sprouting them also removes enzyme inhibitors & phytates. (Both are found in unsprouted grains & causes digestive problems.) Soak then peel almonds if you want since the skin contains tannic acid.

Bragg's liquid aminos and fermented soy sauces can cause imbalances leading to candida and water retention, so use sparingly. Some people will find they need to completely eliminate high-sugar fruits for awhile as fructose feeds candida. Once healthy bacteria is restored, this will shift. Remember most dried coconut is pasteurized and that many bottled oils can coat the lining of the digestive tract making it hard for good bacteria to attach. Many bottled oils are also rancid and this can often be detected by smell. Always use the highest quality oils and if dealing with candida try removing oils and oil salad dressings, and use simple lemon juice with herbs and pink salt instead. Remember we wouldn't have had oils at all in the wild, just what we would have naturally gotten from the nuts, seeds,and olives we ate:-). I'm much happier these days with a big bowl of greens marinated in lemon juice and A PINCH of himalayan salt and fresh herbs and fermented nuts than I am with an oil dressing. Eventually you may even enjoy it without the salt.

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