The Food Combining Diet Meals

Food combining is the term for a nutritional approach that believes in what proponents feel is properly combining foods, as well as beliefs about the proper timing of their consumption. According to its advocates, the most important rule of food combining is not to mix at the same meal carbohydrate-rich foods such as bread, cereals, carrots, beetroot and protein-rich foods such as meat, milk, eggs, beans, nuts and seeds. Another important rule is to always eat fruit alone and wait 20–30 minutes before eating another meal so that the fruit has time to pass through the stomach, since fruit does not require to be digested in the stomach with the help of gastric juices. As another example, advocates sometimes recommend that carbohydrates and citrus fruits should not be consumed at the same meal, claiming that the enzyme that digests carbohydrates (amylase) can only function in an alkaline environment. Similarly, when proteins are consumed, the stomach releases pepsin, which is its enzyme for digesting protein foods. Alkaline and pepsin neutralize each other when in the stomach together, thus rendering the digestive juices less effective in breaking down foods that have been miscombined.