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Food combining and other strange 'natural' diets
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In more recent years, the focus has shifted towards "blood type" diets following the book, Eat Right 4 Your Type by Peter D'Adamo, whereby different people are supposed to eat differently depending on the blood types.
Also popular these days is the theory of Glycemic Index. People are being discouraged from eating too much carbohydrates, especially grains, as such foods are supposed to cause blood sugar levels to rise too quickly.
These are all strange. They go against traditional ways of eating. And they imply that humans have been eating wrongly for thousands of years.
Some of these strange, supposedly natural, diets were discussed in a 1994 issue of The Good Life, which had the theme, Strange foods.
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Even in the natural health movement, strange diets a bound. Because many people don’t really know what’s natural and what isn’t.
These diets, such as food combining, are not necessarily harmful. In fact, some have been extremely helpful.
After I advised against raw foods in a previous issue of The Good Life, for example, I heard about someone who cured his psoriasis -- a supposedly “incurable” skin disease -- after going through a 16-day fast on raw juices.
The purpose of this article is not to dismiss these diet plans. They can be life-saving. But it is important to put them in perspective.
I like the term that cancer survivor Lim Swee Cheong used when, at the height of illness, he decided to eat raw fruit and vegetables. In Dawn Breaks Upon the Darkest Hour, under the name, R Z Lin, he writes:
“I don’t need a so-called ‘balanced diet’. I need a correction diet.”
The trouble is, some people eat “correction diets” every meal, every day, thinking that it is the correct thing to do. They “over-correct.” And develop new problems.
We take a closer look at some of these “correction diets”.
Fasting
The argument for fasting is that we naturally lose our appetite when we fall sick. That’s true. And in that sense, it is natural to fast.
But only when we are sick. It is a different matter if we fast regularly once a year, once a month or even once a week -- because we think it is good to do so.
If you have a good appetite -- which is a sign of good health -- why pretend that you are sick?
Raw diets
Raw fruits, raw salads, raw juices…. I have already written much about these in the last issue.
Click here to read a discussion about cooked versus raw foods.
Raw foods can be beneficial for those who had eaten large amounts of animal foods in the past. As a daily diet, however, it is strange and potentially harmful in the long run.
Food combining
One of the best selling health books in recent times (during the 1980s / 1990s) is Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. They preach food combining -- no protein with carbohydrates, no fruit with other fruits, and so on.
This is very strange idea.
But the advocates of food combining put forward a convincing case. They say acid is needed to digest protein. While alkaline is needed to digest carbohydrates. When you combine the two, your stomach produces both acid and alkali. They neutralise each other. As a result, you don’t digest your food well.
Those in the food combining camp further point out that fruit is easily digested, usually within 20 minutes. If you eat fruit with your meal, it sits there with everything else and does not get digested foe several hours. And so on.
The food combining theory is very elegant. And yes, there are people who feel better when they combine their food according to this theory.
But according to this theory, all traditional ways of eating are wrongly combined: rice with tofu, chapatti with dhal (lentils), corn with beans, meat sandwiches….
Beans are, on their own, wrongly combined as well, because they contain high percentages of both protein and carbohydrates. So they are discouraged. Rice and other grains are also discouraged as they are “concentrated foods”.
To be fair, advocates of food combining have done much to educate the public about the importance of good digestion.
They also discourage the consumption of meat, dairy foods and other animal products. Unfortunately, they provide a loophole -- don’t combine these with starchy foods. So some people eat large quantities of meat. They think it is okay as long as it is properly combined.
The basic flaw of food combining theory, however, is that it assumes digestion begins in the stomach.
Actually, it begins in the mouth. Chew your food very well and you will need not worry about food combining. That’s what people had been doing for thousands of years -- because traditionally, diets are high in fibre and high fibre foods require thorough chewing. They practically "force" you to chew.
When you chew your food well, your saliva -- which is alkaline -- predigests your food so that the stomach and intestines do not need to work so hard.
Food combining theory implies that humanity has been eating the wrong foods and combining them wrongly all along. It even seems to suggest that nature, or God, made a big mistake by creating grains and beans.
This is extreme arrogance!
Click below to read about the potential problems associated with:
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