Food Combining for Health

Often our meals are rushed affairs--tossing as many calories, flavors, and nutrients as we can into our mouths during a half-hour lunch break. But proper food combining can lead us to better digestion, increased general nutrition, synergistic nutritional effects between certain nutrients or food chemicals, and overall better health.

When we eat, what foods we eat together, and the order in which we eat the particular foods that constitute each meal can have substantial effects on how well we digest our food and how our bodies incorporate the given nutrients from a meal. For instance, many vitamins require fats to be present in a meal in order to be dissolved (fat-soluble vitamins) and thus incorporated into the body. Likewise, the ratio of fats, carbohydrates, and protein in a meal has an effect on our health.

Home Remedies: Several more or less comprehensive approaches to food combining (such as the Hay Diet) exist to guide the way we prepare and consume our meals.