You must like fine, beautiful things that always stay clean, unblemished and beautiful. If you were able to acquire a Lamborghini and drove it through mud and slush with corrosive road salt, and if a flock of pigeons roosted on its roof, and a family of raccoons made a home in the backseat and a pack of rats nested in the ventilation piping, would you just accept or ignore those things and keep on driving?
We each possess something far more precious and magnificent than the most expensive luxury car, something we actually live in, yet most people accept dirt, defilement, putridity, destruction, creeping unsightliness and decrepitude without questioning if it has to be that way. Yes, I am talking about the human body when it is fed modern dietary rubbish—foodstuffs that cannot be completely digested. It’s hideous to think that most people always harbor rotting stools in their bowels, but we must face this fact because even raw fooders who eat incorrectly live with this. Is that a harmless situation? No!
The toxic compounds that result from food decomposition poison the blood and other body fluids, drag down our energy, disrupt and alter our endocrine system and brain chemistry and muddy our thinking. These are the main poisons that result from decomposing proteins and carbohydrates: indoles, skatoles, putrescine, cadaverine, hydrogen sulfide, methane, ammonia, alcohol and vinegar. Yes—we don’t want that sad scene!
As a Fruit-Powered Magazine reader, you surely know better than to eat cooked and processed foods that cannot be completely digested and will invariably defile the bowels, poison the blood and cause bodily degeneration. And you surely know the outstanding benefits of eating the most purifying, beautifying and healing-promotive foods: fruits. But, some of you may not yet have learned how to eat to maintain a pure body that performs at its peak level. If you have not yet learned how to eat for complete digestion and elimination, here’s a lesson on how to achieve this luxurious state of embodied being.
Food Selection
Choose only the foods that can be completely digested with no fermentation of carbohydrates, no putrefaction of proteins and no rancidification of fats. Fresh, ripe juicy fruits and tender leafy greens and shoots are the most perfectly digestible foods for humans and, therefore, they should anchor our diet. Fatty high-protein foods—nuts, seeds and avocado—must be minimized so that fat and protein each do not comprise more than about 10 percent of our diet calorie-wise on a daily basis. We simply do not need and cannot digest and use more fat and protein than that; if we eat more than we can digest and use, we make ourselves toxic, acidic and inevitably sick.
Food Combining
We need to practice proper food combining because constitutionally we are not omnivores. We are designed to eat simple meals of primarily one kind of food at a time. This is suited to our fruitarian constitution, as we would procure in nature. While monomeals (one type of food per meal) yield the best results, simple meals of two or three different compatible foods also work well.
We have digestive limitations—we cannot completely digest haphazard and complex food combinations, as evidenced by these toxic disease conditions: indigestion, flatulence, acid reflux, diarrhea, vomiting, irritable bowel, body odors, colds, flu, pimples, dandruff, chronic pain, fatigue, earaches, colds, sore throats, fevers, acidosis and countless other signs of toxemia. This is because meals of improperly combined foods limit or negate digestion—the foods will decompose or rot in the gut, poisoning us and potentially leading to inflammatory bowel disease.
If we have chronic gastrointestinal gas, queasiness, bloating and body odors, we are not healthy, even if we feel “fine” in some ways. Toxic matter and gases in the body erode our health, leading to disease and suffering sooner or later.
Specific digestive enzymes are required to digest specific food components, i.e., to split certain molecules into assimilable and usable components. Herewith are the physiological basics of digestion with regard to food combining.
Starch digestion begins in the mouth. Salivary amylase enzymes/juices are secreted when we chew starchy foods. Therefore, we must chew starchy food well, mixing our saliva with the food (the process known as “insalivation”). Our salivary enzymes are highly alkaline and their functionality is weakened when mixed with acids. When alkaline and acid enzymes are mixed, the pH’s cancel out and digestion is impaired. Therefore, we must not consume acid fruits with starchy foods.
Strong acidic digestive juices (hydrochloric acid and pepsin) are secreted in the stomach when we eat high-protein foods (e.g., nuts, seeds and avocado). If we eat starchy foods with high-protein foods, the alkaline salivary enzymes will mix with the acidic stomach enzymes in the stomach, curtailing digestion, causing the starches to ferment and proteins to putrefy in the gut. Thus, it is obvious that nuts and white potatoes or grains cannot digest well together. This also applies to the conventional combinations of meat with potatoes, pasta with meatballs, pizza with cheese and meat, hamburgers and hot dogs on buns, meat and bread sandwiches with mayonnaise and butter, cereal with milk, and rice with tofu or beans.
Fruits are predigested by the ripening action of the sun and their enzymes. As such, they require little digestion in the body. Their nutrients need to be absorbed into the bloodstream within 10 to 60 minutes—otherwise, the sugars will warm up and ferment. The denser, bulkier fruits that have a bit of fat such as bananas require the longest detention time in the stomach—about an hour. There, they are mixed with a small amount of bodily water and gradually released into the small intestine. Fruits digest best by themselves or with “neutral” green vegetables. The “neutral” vegetables (such as celery, lettuce and baby spinach) are so called because their starch, protein and fat content is low and, thus, their digestion will not interfere with the digestion of fruit. In fact, the inclusion of greens with fruit meals generally aids digestion by virtue of their fiber and complimentary nutrient content. Energetically, greens with fruit is known to have a balancing effect.
Read a special interview on food combining with Dr. David Klein and Jesse Bogdanovich.
The fat in fatty foods (most of which are also high in protein) is primarily digested in the upper part of the small intestine. Fat is emulsified (broken down into small, assimilable droplets) by the strong alkaline enzymes in bile. Bile is made in the liver, sent to the gallbladder and secreted into the duodenum. When large, complex meals are eaten, the food will be held up in the stomach for many hours, and the fat likely will become rancid and rendered unusable before it can be acted upon by bile.
The complete digestion of starch, protein and fat requires time—about one to two hours for raw food meals and several hours longer for cooked foods. The digestion of these nutrients also requires full-strength enzymatic action. If starchy and fatty high-protein foods are ingested with water, beverages and watery fruit, the additional liquid content will dilute the concentration of the digestive enzymes, reducing their effectiveness.
If sweet nonacid fruit is eaten with large portions of starchy and/or fatty high-protein foods, they will be detained for more than an hour in the stomach and will transit more slowly through the bowel. Their sugars will warm up and ferment, potentially causing all sorts of problems, including irritable bowel, bacteria overgrowth, gassiness, diarrhea, vomiting and brain fog. Furthermore, simultaneous high concentrations of sugar and fat in the bloodstream causes problems with blood-sugar metabolism such as diabetes.
If small portions of starchy and/or fatty high-protein foods are eaten with large portions of sweet fruits or juices, this hinders the body’s ability to sense the presence of the starch, protein and fat. The digestive enzymes they require may not be secreted, and fermentation and putrefaction likely will occur. As an example, nuts/seeds/butters/avocado added to sweet nonacid fruit smoothies will not be digested.
Food Preparation
K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple Señor (or Señorita). A meal of one kind of fruit is optimum. Blending two or three different fruits with some celery and lettuce also yields an easily handled meal. A simple torn- or shredded-vegetable salad with tomato and cucumber and half an avocado or a dressing of 1 to 2 ounces of soaked seeds or nuts blended with celery and tomato or citrus fruit will generally make for a digestible meal if we chew well and do not overeat.
Meal Sequencing
Based on our digestive physiology and bodily rhythms, the best meal sequencing is two to four fruit or fruit-and-greens meals during the day. You could follow that by a glass of raw vegetable juice and then for dinner, at least one-half hour later, a properly combined vegetable salad with one fatty food such as avocado, nuts or seeds.
Note that it is not necessary and, in many cases, it is unhealthful to eat fatty food every day. Furthermore, it is OK to have a dinner of simply more fruit or fruit and greens.
Avoid eating a meal of sweet (nonacidic) fruit after a meal with nuts or seeds, even if done many hours later. Nuts and seeds require several hours to transit through the bowel, and the digesta from those concentrated foods will block the movement of sweet fruit, which must move more quickly through the bowel to avoid fermentation. Never eat starches and nuts or seeds on a given day, and never eat sweet or acid fruit after eating cooked food, even if spaced apart by many hours. Never eat sweet fruit after a meal of cooked food—wait until the next morning to have fruit again.
Eating
In order to completely digest our food, we must be present, not tired, calm, relaxed and truly hungry. An empty stomach is not the sign of true hunger. True hunger is a slightly uncomfortable feeling in the back of the throat.
When we are truly hungry and we select natural food, which is visually and fragrantly appealing, and we chew it thoroughly to the point of liquefaction with our salivary secretions mixed in, and we eat in a relaxed matter and stop eating when we feel satiated (long before feeling stuffed), and then relax for the next hour or so, we will have given our digestive system the best chance to completely digest the meal and we’ll derive optimum benefits with no indigestion, provided that we have correctly put all the previously discussed alimentary factors in order.
When we completely digest all our food and have regular elimination, we will feel great about our body and know we have something far better than a Lamborghini and that we are dwelling in a temple more luxurious than the Taj Mahal. Beauty, optimum function and vibrant well-being will be ours!
More with Dr. David Klein in Fruit-Powered Magazine
