Complex Foods

Complex foods containing both protein and carbohydrate in their natural state can vary in the completeness of digestion from one

22 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

person to another. Many beans naturally combine significant percentages of both protein and carbohydrate, and many people do not comfortably digest them. Certainly, the guidelines in this chap­ter are not intended to have you ignore your body and the signals it might be giving you. If a food always gives you gas or indigestion, regardless of when or how well you process it, then avoid it. Not all foods naturally occurring in nature are well tolerated by everybody. Some people will actually have superior digestive abilities over oth­ers for a given food. For example, some people have the enzyme lac-tase that can directly break down the lactose in milk, but other people are completely deficient in this enzyme and intolerant to all milk and milk products. Genetically, we all have our own unique an­cestral roots, and our digestive systems will typically digest the foods that our direct lineal ancestors ate better than other types of foods.

Critics of food combining like to point out that no foods are pure carbohydrate, pure protein, or pure fat. They point to foods such as some beans that have significant percentages of both protein and carbohydrate. In fact, almost every food contains SOME carbohy­drate, protein, and fat. The intelligent combination of foods is based on what the dominant nutrient is in a given food. The dominant nu­trient is the one that is greatest in quantity in that food. The greater the percentage of dominance, the more easily that food will be di­gested when it is eaten alone. If enough foods are eaten simultane­ously, it becomes impossible for protein, fat, or carbohydrate to dominate, and the digestion will be impaired by the mechanisms that I have just described.