Food Combining? Just Go Crazy
Well, I tried this Montignac diet and I have to say, it sort of works, but I think that’s not because of all of the complicated directions on food combining. You could get the same results from a diet based on one simple rule: reduce your carbs, increase the rest. The only problem with this diet is that it will produce very slim diet books. Just one page.
The Montignac diet, on the other hand, has a lot of complicated rules that has to be followed — which also happens to be a requisite for success in the diet book business.
The main idea behind the Montignac diet, besides selling books, is to cut out high GI foods and stay away from food combinations such as sugars and fats or protein and carbohydrates.
It seems my blood sugar goes on a bit of a roller coaster ride on the Montignac diet. I find I get cravings from sweets an hour or two after having a protein-rich meal. I never used to get that when I practice my have-a-little-carbs-to-your-meals-it-wont-kill-you principle.
FOOD COMBINING
Studies that have tested the effects of following these rules of food combining report no significant difference in weight-loss between dieters on the same diet if the only difference is the rules of food combining, 1 but the normal diet caused blood pressure to go down more. A lot of trouble, but no real benefit.
So why do a lot of people report they feel a lot better when they follow food combining rules?
Perhaps they not only introduce a change in how they combine foods, but also an actual change in what they eat? Maybe they benefit from starting the day with fruits for breakfast because they generally are a little dehydrated in the morning? Or do they have a disturbed intestinal ecology that reacts favorably to the change? A leaky gut that makes them more sensitive to increased levels of bacterial toxins? A placebo effect?
There is another possibility: I might be wrong. I might get away with my own food combining because I never combine high-starch foods with protein and because I only eat small amounts of carbs.
I was very skeptical about the whole idea of food combining when I started to write this article, but there are so many factors that come into play because of the abuse we subject our digestive systems to that I reluctantly have to allow for the possibility that there might be something to it.
Not because our digestive system is designed as a rickety machinery that needs a lot of tinkering to work. No, it is an amazing and versatile pice of equipment, but since the dawn of civilization we have been increasingly feeding it things it never has evolved to handle. It is entirely possible that most of us walk around with seriously dysfunctional digestion in various ways and from that perspective, food combining principles provide a kind of dietary reprogramming that possibly could make our engine run a little smoother. But, in my opinion, the priority must be to fill the tank with the kind of fuel the motor has been designed to run on and make sure the gut bacterial populations reach an ecological balance with the type of food we normally eat. The latter is a process that may take some time.
Our parents and grandparents could violate every food combining principle known to man and still avoid most stomach troubles. Why can’t we? Possibly because of unbalanced intestinal bacterial populations, increased use of antibiotics, less physical jobs, heaps of processed and pasteurized foods and constant stress.
If you look a little further back in time, one of the largest deviations from the natural diet of the human animal is the change from high volumes of vegetables and fruits to bread and other grain based foodstuffs. This is a change from higher volumes of soluble fiber, high water content and a fantastic range of beneficial phytochemicals to a grain-abased diet with antinutrients, starch, abrasive insoluble fibers and low amounts of soluble fibers.
The results of this change is constipation and a whole range of other detrimental effects on the intestines such as villus atrophy, increased gut permeability, immune reactions and impaired nutrient uptake. The complex carbohydrates stimulates overgrowth and imbalance of intestinal microbial flora that can lead to ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome. 2 The low-volume diet allows the damaged tract to narrow from inflammation. When we feed it hard-to-digest meat and bread, diverticulitis is an inevitable consequence when the compromised tract is put under high pressure.
In one study the difference in risk for diverticulosis between those people who frequently consume vegetables but rarely consume meat, and those who rarely consume vegetables and often consume meat, was almost 50-fold in favor of the vegetable-rich diet. 3
Meat, you say? Didn’t our ancesters eat meat?
Yes, they did, but they didn’t like to eat the lean muscle meats we consume today. They went for fattier organ meats such as brains, kidneys, eyeballs, tongue, bone marrow and gut fat. Studies link muscle meats of beef and lamb to diverticulosis. Lamb in particular appears problematic.
Also, the pitiful amounts of vitamin C that modern man consumes cause all structures in the body that depend on collagen for strength to be weak and frail.
Low fat meat and bread is a poor substitute for a a high volume of fruits and vegetables complimented with nuts 4 and fatty meats. Vegetables and fruits contains a lot of water whereas bread and other high-starch foods need a lot of extra water to prevent painful and damaging constipation. You didn’t see our pre-historic ancestors carrying around bottles of mineral water. Drinking water is a risky business in the wild, it is much safer to get the water from fruits and vegetables. So if we picture our ancestors and ourselves as hunters-and-gatherers, it is much easier to have a safe and healthy diet and lifestyle. Eat small meals frequently, enjoy liberal amounts of good quality fats and move that body around.
If food combining principles are helpful, maybe they are helpful mainly because they help you avoid the most damaging combinations of hard-to-digest protein and starch in a otherwise nutrient deficient and low-volume, gut-damaging diet.
Food combining?
Just go crazy. If your gut is healthy and you are on a diet that is backed up by a few million years of evolution.
THE ARMCHAIR — A RISK FACTOR
Alaskan Inuit and the Masai is an interesting example that can illustrate the importance of fat and a non-sedentary lifestyle. They seemed to fare well on their traditional diets high in saturated fat and meat and virtually no vegetables. They even managed to avoid heart disease. Then civilization caught up with them as they were sitting in an armchair, a pizza in their lap, television flickering — Bam! Heart disease.
Wait a minute! No fiber, but still no tummy aches?
Heaps of good quality fat and a very physically active lifestyle could explain why they didn’t need much fiber in their diet.
Or maybe we are forgetting something? Although there was very little dietary plant fiber in their diet, they did consume a lot of animal fiber-like substances in the form of connective tissues and what not which would serve the same function.
GAS
OK. Back to present day and a french pharmaceutical executive and his invention: the Montignac method. I guess it must have some sort of beneficial effects among a baguette-wielding population, but there are aspects of it that seems counterintuitive.
What about beans? He recommends beans! Why is it OK to eat beans if you are not allowed to combine carbs and protein? Beans are just that, a combination of carbs and proteins. It makes no sense.
I generally avoid beans. I don’t find toxic lectins and flatulence particularly useful or amusing. It has been suggested that up to 5 gallons of methane and hydrogen can be produced per day if you really put your mind to it, beanswise.
Talk about the wrong kind of fuel. And what about global warming?
Of course, when I emerge from the bathroom, I do not expect to see sea levels immediately rise as a direct consequence of my emissions, but in the long run, it seems prudent to avoid manufacturing large quantities of these powerful green house gases. They are bound to create problems somewhere along the line.
CARROTS
Our friend, the good Mr. Michel Montignac is criticizing carrots. That says it all.
Yes, they contain carbs, but if you just cook them the right way, you have wonderful slow carbs. Add some butter and your carbs are even slower. Digestion plays a major part. Swallow an uncooked carrot whole and you have unbeatable slow carbs (and a dangerous bowel obstruction).
Recently, I understand he recanted and got his nose up from the GI-charts and entered the real world with regards to carrots.
Besides the wonderful vitamins in carrots, I suspect you even get candida-killing substances since it is a sugary root vegetable which means it needs protection from the various kinds of sugar loving fungus in the soil.
Better check if I’m right… This has been a theory I’ve had from back in 1988 when I had a bout of serious nonsense going on in my bowels. Carrots and garlic worked wonders.
[Checking...]
Yes. I thought so. An article in The Journal of Microbiology in 1988 discussed antifungal properties of carrots and a 1998 study published in The Journal of Microbiology implicated raw carrots as a good fungus fighter.
ONLY THE LONELY
What about the idea about eating fruit by itself and not directly after a meal? Well obviously — if you have problems with candida or an otherwise disturbed intestinal ecology, fruit might be problematic and your cubic milage of gas produced might vary, but fruit is beneficial in many ways and often, fiber and antioxidants in fruit will offset the sugar content. Antioxidants will counter the effects of free radicals produced during digestion of your meal. Fruit can also supply enzymes like bromelain or papain that helps digestion.
So if I feel good when I have some pineapple, mango or cherries as a small sweet treat after the meal, it cannot be all that bad. I’ll admit that mixing starchy foods and meat in equal proportions might be problematic, but a small dessert of berries and whipped cream — can it really be a serious problem? If bloating occur, my personal gut ecology might not currently allow for fruit, but in that case I would treat that as a signal to try to introduce a change in gut ecology and eliminate problematic fungi like candida rather than giving up on fruity desserts for the rest of my life.
BREAKFAST
Personally, I could never start my day with fruits. It simply doesn’t work for me. I get dizzy and a plethora of unusual noises issues from my mid-region. On the other hand, if I start my breakfast with a high-fat low-carb meal and THEN take some fruit, everything is OK.
I frequently make a breakfast consisting of carrots, tomatoes, garlic, broccoli and spinach which is cooked together with coconut oil, butter, olive oil and creme fraiche and reduced down with various spices to a thick and very tasty sauce. Besides tasting great, it really calms my stomach down. After this I can feast on yogurt with friendly bacteria, fruit and berries without problems.
Why?
I am not sure, but that will not stop me from speculating: There is a popular belief that problems with stomach acid is most commonly a problem of having to much of it. Pop a over-the-counter antacid and all is fine. Or is it? In many cases the problem can be just the opposite, too little stomach acid, which enables bugs to enter and colonize the normally sterile upper part of the small intestine. Or, in some intestinal disorders like diverticulitis, there can be colonies of bacteria that originate from the lower parts of the digestive tract.
So, when you lie in bed sleeping and snoring for hours, you grow a menagerie of interesting bugs in your mouth, some of which is swallowed along with mucus, creating an army of hungry bugs that are just waiting and longing for you to throw them some sweet fruits to enable them to re-colonize any lost gut territory. A high-carb breakfast might also stimulate the growth of already existing bacteria.
Give them a substantial high-fat low-carb breakfast instead and what happens? The fat is in part forming monoglycerides and free fatty acids that have strong antibacterial and antiviral properties. As this mass moves down the tract, it selectively kills a lot of the bad bugs. Possibly with a little help from the anti-fungal substances in the garlic and carrots if they survive the cooking process.
If I follow this up with an army of gut-friendly bacteria, I am good to go for the rest of the day without any noisy intestinal going ons, but with a silly smile on my face.
So, perhaps the order in which you eat certain foods to some degree might be more important than the combination of foods?
OBESITY
To sum it up: Politically correct food combining seems to have no effect as a tool for weight reduction but may help keep rising sea levels at bay and for some people, it appears to help with stomach problems such as diverticulitis and IBS.
We don’t need complicated diets to reduce weight, we need to get rid of ‘Bisphenol A’, MSG, aspartame and other toxins messing with our metabolic systems, improve our gut ecology and beef up our immune system and get away from the crazy fat phobias and eat the foods we are evolved to handle. It is a as simple as that. The FDA, EPA and the chemical, agro and food industries, they are the villains.
It is good for business, messing up our finely tuned metabolic systems and then telling us we are lazy sods and that we need to eat fat free tasteless special diets, watching our bank accounts drain as the fat containers in the fat suction machines fill up and big pharma profits rise.
We are not to blaim. Blaim the industry and the government and the fast food chains.
Kids didn’t get type II diabetes in the beginning of the century. What did they eat? Pretty much the same thing kids eat today except for the heaps of heat damaged vegetable oils, corn syryp laden soft drinks and various toxins we give our kids today. Some of these toxins have been documented to cause obesity and insulin resistance.
Our kids are programmed for obesity by the industry through their use of Bisphenol A. No amount of food combining is going to address that problem.
- 1 A. Golay, A. Allaz, P. Bianchi, et al., Similar weight loss with low-energy food combining or balanced diets, Int J Obes 24: 492-496 (2000). ¶
- 2 Many sufferers of ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease find they go into remission by strict adherence to the “Specific Carbohydrate Diet”. See http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.org/, http://www.healingcrow.com/dietsmain/scd/scd.html, http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info/, http://www.scdrecipe.com/ ¶
- 3 O Manousos, N E Day, A Tzonou, C Papadimitriou, A Kapetanakis, A Polychronopoulou-Trichopoulou, and D Trichopoulos, Diet and other factors in the aetiology of diverticulosis: an epidemiological study in Greece., Gut. 1985 June; 26(6): 544–549., PMCID: PMC1432747. ¶
- 4 If you already have diverticulosis, you have to be careful about what you eat. A diet that prevent diverticules from forming isn’t necessarily beneficial for preventing diverticulitis, the dangerous and painful inflammation that can occur as a result. Nuts can possibly be problematic. ¶
Posted: June 16th, 2010 at 18:41 →
my mom suffered colitis last year and it was quite an expensive disease.-”:
Posted: July 12th, 2010 at 09:39 →
my dad suffered from colitis a couple of years ago, this disease is quite painful`.: