food combinations???
 

I have heard that some peoples problem is food combinations. I was wondering if anyone could tell me more about this... I have not been able to find anything out my researching the internet, but I sure am interested in what foods should not be combined with others...

Thanks
Penny

I have a friend who talks about this. Roughly speaking from what I can remember, she feels that carbs and protein cause trouble because they digest funny together ... cause gas and bloating.
There are some aspects of food combining involved in a couple of food plans I've read about.
I'm not sure .... I do believe that lots of folks have way more food sensitivities than they realise.

And I honestly believe that everyone should pay more attention to the foods they eat. This is the fuel that runs the machine. It is that from which we make new cells. You'd be surprised how many people with irritable bowel type symptoms would rather take a pill than dicker with their diet.

Humbly stepping down off my soapbox. Ahem ... I hope you get some answers to your questions, Penny.

If you type "food combining" into google, you'll get tons of info. Also try "Somercizing" ... Suzanne Sommers has used this idea, which is a rather old one, in her diet books, there are a lot of other plans, as SusanB points out, that use variations on the concept, which seems silly to me and just another example of people looking for a "magic bullet" in weight loss ... which seems to be a theme in my posting today ... everyone's looking for the latest, greatest, best diet ever and hope it will solve their weight problems ... there's no magic bullet, IMO ... just hard work, getting rid of the junk food, cutting amounts and exercising.

The only problem I have with food comining is if I try to combine things like....beer and nachos......or cake and ice cream LOL :D
I think it's a joke really. When I am eating clean I feel great no matter if I eat carbs with protein or fruit and dairy or whatever else. It's simply a matter of getting off the processed junk!:^:

Basically it's a fad.

When you do a Google search on "food combining" you end up with a lot of sites that sound very authoritative but for the most part, they're usually selling their diet program...keep in mind that often these sites utilize Search Engine Optimizers to maximize the chance that their site will be listed at or near the top of page 1 of any search results...so it won't necessarily be the CORRECT information or UNBIASED information...

That said, as far as I know, there is really no scientific basis for food combining as a way to lose weight.

Quick and Easy Weight Loss, Is It For Real? - the practice is mentioned here as 'junk' diet advice.

From what I've seen, a lot of the hype about food combining began back when the book Fit For Life came out. You can find an article about the book/program here.

From the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter:

The Myth of Combining Foods Properly (from the Kansas State University Foods & Nutrition Digest):

Here's a study from Pubmed, titled Similar weight loss with low-energy food combining or balanced diets - where they put study participants on either food combining or a balanced diet to see what the results were:

(here's a link to an article about the same study, only written in laymen's terms)

Lastly - An excellent summary of food combining written by Australian dietician Glenn Cardwell can be found on page 22 of this PDF. I especially enjoyed the bit where Mr. Cardwell points out that if you can't digest protein and carbs at the same time, why don't women have one breast labeled 'protein' and the other 'carbohydrate' - as breast milk is a blend of protein, carbs and fat! :carrot:

I took a vegetarian cooking class many many years ago. It turned out to be more of a nutrition class rather than a cooking one. I do remember the instructor talking about combining plant foods to come up with a complex protein to make up for the lack of meat, I don't remember the details though.

This is a different kind of "food combining." As a vegetarian for 11 years (no longer), I think what she/he was talking about was the fact that while animal proteins are always "complete" ... meaning they contain all the essential amino acids needed by the body ... most vegetable sources of protein are not "complete" ... an exception is soy ... anyhow, it used to be thought that vegetarians had to "combine" protein sources in dishes or meals (rice and beans is a prime example) to get the "complete" protein ... now it's pretty well accepted (my opinion) that just eating a variety of good protein sources throughout the week takes care of things.

Again, if you type "combining protein for vegetarians" or some such words, you will get a lot of hits ... NOT ALL SITES AND HITS IN A GOOGLE SEARCH WILL BE RELIABLE OR GOOD INFORMATION, AS YOU KNOW! :)

Friend of mine who is a lifetime vegetarian won't eat fruits and vegetables at the same meal. Says digestion is better to keep the two separate..anyone else hear this?

THAT's the "food combining" being referred to here, if memory serves.

(so I guess your friend doesn't eat veggies in tomato sauce...since tomatoes are a fruit... ;) )

The "complete protein/amino acids" food combining became known with the general public following the pubication of the book Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe, which came out in the very early 1970's. (note that despite the title it's not a 'weight loss' diet.)

Yes, that's part of the "food combining" idea behind what I believe is being discussed. :) Somehow this idea and variations has crept into a lot of weight loss books, diets, whatever.

The original Sugar Busters diet, which I follow more or less, held that you should only eat fruit by itself ... for digestion and to safeguard (somehow) the glycemic lowering response of the fiber in fruit. Later the docs who wrote the book backed away from that idea, but originally they advised eating fruit 30 minutes before or after other foods so you digested it separately. :carrot:

I remember the elderly people in my family when I was little used to think that milk should not be drunk with other foods as it had to be digested separately, so they advised drinking your milk after the meal was over or before it began, never during the meal.

They didn't think you should drink water during a meal either ... bad for the digestion. :carrot:

There are lots of beliefs like that out there ... who knows, maybe they are right? But personally, I don't see any validity to any of the "food combining" diets, at any rate, but if it works for some folks, who am I to say? :carrot:

Regarding the source of the idea of food combining in vegetarianism to produce a complete protein, in my opinion, it predates the 1970s considerably, as I was taught this concept orally during my early childhood by my somewhat eccentric auntie and frankly I was a child before the 70s ... and my aunt was, of course, older. :)

She and her hubby don't eat alot of tomatoes period do to the acidity. Their diet is about 80% raw & 20% cooked--she makes an awesome pizza with a spelt flour crust, her own nut cheese and veggies. She also bakes all their bread. They do no pasta and use no processed white flour. Alot of it is do to the hubby's health problems which are gone. They are retired now and just came back to the area for a visit. They both look great!

People seem to always be trying to find a way to change their diets to lose weight that doesn't involve "eating less, moving more". That way is too simple, and yet at the same time not easy enough.

From all the sources I've read, the hypothesis of "protein complimentarity" (mixing foods to create a complete protein) was brought forward by Frances Moore Lappe in the late 1960's; in 1981, she recanted that theory after doing actual research on the subject. (see pages 178-183 of Diet for a New America by John Robbins; also Wikipedia, "Combining Proteins", "Complete Protein Myth", among other sources).

However, since the old saying goes "there is nothing new under the sun", I would not be at all surprised if the now-repudiated practice of 'protein combining' predated Lappe's hypothesis - especially since she based her theory on traditional diets such as corn tortillas or rice with beans in Latin America, rice or wheat chapatis with lentils in India; soy products with rice, wheat, or barley in Asian countries and so on...

My thoughts exactly...

So many people want a gimmick or magic solution to weight loss, but none exists.

Good analysis, Mrs. Jim. And so true about the traditional foods: tortillas and beans, rice or wheat with lentils, etc. ... and our taste buds seemed to have evolved from the dawn of time wanting these combos in places where meat was not the major food source, IMO.

On that note, I will go eat my steak! :carrot:

Food combining have very little, if any, rational basis. Almost all the foods we eat have a combo of the three macronutrients: proteins, fats, and carbs and our bodies are pretty much made to digest them simultaneously.

However, food combining may work because you're eliminating one major food group (and its associated calories) from the meal. For example, instead of steak and potatoes--you may get steak and veggies, which reduces overall calories of the meal and thus, weight loss/maintenance.

Maybe food combining has nothing to do with weight loss, however, it CAN help in how you feel! Take Ayurveda for example... for a long time I ate in certain food combinations for my type (Pitta) and I had less problems with indigestion, heartburn, gas, bloating, etc... whether it helped me lose weight is neither here nor there... maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

Even though I am starting my WL journey again I learned A LOT over the years about what foods make me feel good and what foods made me feel crap. I would love for there to be a magic pill, but there isn't. Isn't it also important that you FEEL GOOD while you are losing weight? In that respect I see nothing wrong with food combining :)

I see nothing wrong with food combining methods either as a way of eating for feeling good or health as desired by individuals. :)

I only feel there gets to be a problem when celebrities or other individuals with no scientific background write books about food combining or other methods and market them as THE way to FINALLY lose all that weight, then the public jumps on the bandwagon and spends its collective hard-earned money on this final solution and touts its effectiveness, until the next fad comes along. :)

I think that the problem with saying that something "can" help someone feel better, or lose weight better, is that well, just about *anything* can do this if the person really believes that it will. It can be a placebo effect or can be an effect that is coming about from other factors that the person is mis-attributing to the effect in question. Without a double blind study, there is no way to know that what is being reported is actually due to the properties of the procedure in question.

This is why individual "But it worked for me!" reports are almost worthless in determining if something is an effective strategy. Unless you were part of a study that did a double blind study, there is no way of knowing exactly what it was that was working for you.