Hi everyone this is monica right nickel and you're listening to the nutrition he's a quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous. Claudia right i've heard a lot about food combining for example that you should full anything certain types of foods together and avoid certain combinations will i lose weight or feel better if i follow these guidelines. There's an old but persistent idea that combining certain types of food at the same meal causes all kinds of bad things to happen to you everything from indigestion two fifteen to weight gain. There are several variations on this team but the most common one is that proteins and start yours should never be eating together. As with so many of the nutrition it's i've talked about in this show this one has a very scientific sounding explanation which goes like this. Starch is require and oakland environment for digestion. Proteins on the other hand require and it's sitting environment for proper digestion when you eat these lose it the same time today justice system pulled into opposite directions a sort of stalls. Food then gets stock in your system where the carbohydrates for meant and the protein computer five or rocked. Now when this theory was first put forward at the end of the nineteenth century we did completely understand how the human digestive system worked. So i guess we can cut the originator so this notion a little slack even though they're theory was inherently illogical for reasons we'll get you in a moment. These days we have a pretty solid understanding of how food gets digested and we can say for sure that this idea is completely false so it's hard for me to understand why these ideas are still floating around. Worse than that people are still publishing diet book based on them. Let's see if we can set the record straight your digestive system is a little like an automatic car wash when you drive your car through the car wash a sequence of different chemicals square it's out of a series of novels aimed at various parts of your car. But your whole car goes through the entire car wash together. Similarly everything you eat has history your entire digestive system and the trick is pretty much the same no matter what kind or combination of food you eat. First stop after you chew and swallow your food is the stomach. Here food is treated you too in acid bath which serves a couple of purposes first to the acid kills bacteria and other passages that could otherwise make you sick. Secondly stomach acid begins to break down proteins and prepare them for leader phases of digestion. Now here's the first changing the food combining perry as doctor martin rapist's so brilliantly put it in his nineteen thirty four address to the american medical association quote. Affect sizes apparently escape to the proponents of the carbohydrates oakland's theory is that no carbohydrates are interested which are not followed by a direct acid response on the part of the stomach end quote. I wish i had known doctor may fifth he sounds like my kind of guy. Next stopping a digestive car washes the small in testing. Here the stomach acid used neutralize back pain create excuses and this allows a variety of and dimes to go to work. Most enzymes even those that uh just proteins don't work very well in the city environments no there are enzymes that digest protein there and things that digest carbohydrates and and lines that i just fat. But the full array of enzymes is produced every time no matter what you eat. Not only is your digestive system capable of the adjusting a combination of protein and carbohydrates but it appears as if this is the default setting and if you sync for just a moment you'll realize how illogical it is to think that the body might have been designs to digest proteins. Separately from carbohydrates. We could spend the rest of the day arguing about whether humans are meant to to consume grains or animal proteins but i think we'd all have to agree that humans were definitely meant to consume breast milk as infants. Breast bill contains both protein and carbohydrates and this glen cardwell so colorful you put it in an article for the skeptic go woman has got been born with one breast labeled protein and the other carbohydrates. Quite a visual isn't it. In fact most foods that we would identify start just contain protein about fourteen percent of the calories and spaghetti for example are from protein. Rice and potatoes contain about eight percent of calories from protein and we'd bad contains about sixteen percent of calories from protein. On the flip side being the lagoon foods which supply much of the world protein needs contain roughly as much carbohydrates as they do protein. Proponents of food combining record it'll in horror at the idea of eating steak and potato with the same meal but they'd approve of a nice bowl of black bean soup and hit the tool meals contained roughly the same proportion of protein and carbohydrates. The despite everything i've just set a lot of people swear that following these guidelines makes them feel better helps them lose weight and you know what it just might and here's why. Food combining rules haven't on advertise benefit and that is that you often end up eating less when you are following them. Typical restaurant meals for example include protein starch and vegetables if you're following the rules some portion of that meal is going to remain on your plate. And even if you're cooking for yourself research shows that when a meal contains fewer different things you tend to eat fewer calories. If that sounds suspicious stop for a moment to recall test how much you eight the last time you were faced with a buffet. Not over filling your stomach can definitely improved digestion reduce fatigue and enhance weight loss. You could probably get the same results by said like cutting back on portion sizes but it following these rules works for you go for it just to know that there is no physiological or biochemical reason to avoid combining protein and starched. In fact there's at least one reason why you might want to go out of your way to combine protein with start eating protein was carbohydrates tends to smooth out the rise in blood sugar that happens when you eat carbs by themselves. And it sounds like a good topic for a future show. This is monica right ankle the nutrition d but with your quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous is it nutrition divide that quick and dirty tricks dot com for a transcript of today's episode along with links to some more research on this topic for you sign c types. If you have an icon you can get nutrition do that other they chose from quick and dirty tip streams right here i found with the free program called fisher check it out thatcher dot com. Have a great day and something good for me