My Experience with the #1 Food Combining Rule

This one rule completely changed my conception of food and nutrition.  It made me reevaluate all that I knew about what humans should eat.

Before I went raw, my favorite snack was green apples and peanut butter.  Almost everyday, I would cut up one green apple into little slices and put 2 tablespoons of peanut butter into a little dish as a dip.  Not only was this one of my favorite things to eat, it was one of the healthiest components of my diet!

However, soon after I ate this snack, something terrible erupted in my tummy.  Each time, without fail, my stomach would start producing very strange noises and I would have foul smelling gas.

At the time, I did not know why this happened.  To be honest, I never even questioned it!  Like most people, I thought it was normal to experience some sort of tummy trouble after eating.  Hey, that’s life, right?

One day while perusing a vegan forum, I stumbled upon the concept of a raw food diet.  I also learned about food combining and that the number one no-no is combining sugar with fat.  More specifically, fruit and nuts!

I learned that eating foods high in sugar and foods high in fat together resulted in all the unpleasant results I experienced after eating my apple and peanut butter.  And here’s why…

Fruit  & Fat

The body quickly digests simple sugars, like the ones found in fruits.  It literally can take only 30 minutes for your body to digest a whole fruit meal!

Fatty foods, like nuts and oils, take much longer to digest.  Just a handful of nuts can take hours to be fully processed by the stomach.

When you eat these two foods together, the rate of digestion is slowed down by the fatty foods.  Rather than getting through your system quickly, the fruit has to wait for the fat to be digested.  The result?  The sugars ferment inside of you, leaving you bloated and gassy.

Is It True?

I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical at first.  Part of me wondered how a combination so delicious could be so bad for me.  The other part of me wondered why no one had told me this before.  I had never even heard of food combining, much less actually applied it!

So, I decided to experiment to see if this rule was really true by eating other fruit and fat combinations.  I ate dried apricots and almonds, bananas and cashews, raisins and pistachios, etc.  I even substituted raw unsalted nuts, but to no avail.

The only fruit/fat combination that did not bother my tummy was citrus and fat.  I found out later that because fruits like oranges and grapefruits have a lower sugar content than other fruits, they combine much better with fatty foods.  One very tasty citrus/fat combination is orange and avocado.

What I Learned

This little experiment really opened my eyes to how much fat I was really consuming.  Like most people, I considered foods like nuts to be high in protein, not fat.  The fat they did contain was good fat and provided lots of energy to the body.

Basically, I could eat these foods with reckless abandon…and often did.

While nuts do contain protein (like all foods), they are really high-fat foods.  Did you know that most nuts contain about 70% fat?  And eating these foods (like all foods) *require* energy in order to be digested.

This really surprised and enlightened me and I was curious to find out what other nutritional benefits I could gain from eating a healthy raw vegan diet.  So, I made the decision to go 100% raw.

And you know what?  It turned out to be one of the most rewarding decisions of my life.

Go raw and be fit,

Swayze