Meat

An additional word about protein. Many books advise that some proteins, especially meat protein, simply cannot be completely di­gested. This is not true. What IS true is that meat protein is among the most difficult foods to completely digest, and any compromise of food combining principles, or of the other principles of good di­gestion, will easily result in incompletely digested meat protein. Such incomplete digestion will result in the rotting of that protein in the place of good digestion. If you don't break the rules on how to properly digest food, complete digestion of meat protein can be an­ticipated in most cases. However, problems may still arise if your digestive system has been ill and functioning poorly for a long enough period of time. Only when you are convinced that nothing seems to allow proper digestion of the meat protein you eat should you consider severely restricting or completely eliminating meat from your diet.

Both the popular press and some of the scientific literature have asserted that red meat is one of a number of factors causing colon cancer. This has always been used as one supposedly compelling argument in favor of a vegetarian diet. In fact, statistical studies have revealed that the vegetarianism of Seventh-Day Adventists is associated with a substantially lower incidence of colon cancer than the general population.² And in 1990, the New England Journal of

28 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

Medicine published a very large prospective study involving over 89,000 subjects, concluding that eating more red meat and animal fat resulted in a greater chance of colon cancer.³

Statistical studies can be very useful, but they can also be enor­mously misleading. Not infrequently, they lead to a conclusion that is actually the opposite of the truth. Consider the following: First of all, when meat eaters convert to vegetarianism, they typically do far more than just stop eating meat. Often, people who stop eating meat have been advised to do so by their health care providers to protect against heart disease and other degenerative diseases. Usually not only will they eliminate the meat, they will also eliminate most of the processed foods that comprise so much of the modern American diet. Any diet that severely restricts the consumption of processed foods and replaces them with a wide variety of fresh vegetables will usually make people healthier, even in the face of no meat in the diet. How­ever, it is not uncommon to have studies group multiple undesirable dietary habits together and then conclude that the target of their dis­favor, such as meat, must be the only significant offender. Slattery et al. concluded that a "Western" diet was linked to an increased colon cancer risk.⁴ Such a diet was one high in red and processed meats, high in refined grains and sugars, and low in fresh fruits and vegeta­bles. Any one of these factors could be a positive or a negative factor, and such a study does not begin to differentiate the conflicting fac­tors. Nevertheless, these are often the types of studies from which re­searchers conclude what is or is not carcinogenic in the diet.

Furthermore, many converts to vegetarianism will also start ex­ercising for the first time in their lives. Alarmed by their doctors' warnings, these new vegetarians will also often develop an interest in doing everything possible to promote their health for the first time in their lives, including drinking purified water and buying or­ganic foods. Yet, just because they also gave up meat in these dra­matically changed lifestyles, meat ends up getting blamed for all of the negative effects of the old lifestyles.

Food Combining Principles 29

It is true that meat poorly digested will have toxic consequences on your health. If you chew it poorly, eat large amounts of it at a sit­ting, combine it poorly with other foods such as starch, or drown out your stomach's digestive capacities with large amounts of water or other liquids when eating it, you can expect a portion of it to rot and putrefy, with completely predictable toxic side effects. Two clas­sic American meals will reliably impair complete digestion of the meat in them. The great American hamburger combines bread, usu­ally white, with meat (starch + protein). The classic dinner of meat and potatoes also combines protein with a starch. This combination of starch with protein is an especially poor one. In their book on food combining, Grant and Joice⁵ cite the work of Lionel J. Picton, who in 1931, wrote about indigestion promoted by starch, which he called amylaceous dyspepsia. In this article, Dr. Picton discussed some of the work of the famous Russian scientist, Dr. Ivan Pavlov. Dr. Pavlov found that minced meat fed to dogs took four hours to pass through the stomach. Bread by itself took about one and a half hours. But when these two foods were eaten together, the food would take eight or more hours to evacuate the stomach! When this poor food combination is combined with wolfing down the food in large chunks and with drinking large amounts of liquids, it is virtu­ally impossible for digestion of the meat protein to proceed to com­pletion. The meat then proceeds to do what it would do if left out anywhere else: It rots. And not only does the meat rot, the starch in the food ferments as it is held back in the stomach, transforming the nutritive sugar breakdown products into alcohol and a variety of organic acids, as I explained earlier. Remember that proper food combining principles not only directly aid the digestion of different foods, they also directly affect the retention times in the stomach and other areas of the gut, which further relates to whether a food will digest or spoil. When every meal spends four or more hours than it should in the stomach, everything else downstream slows down as well. Bowel transit times increase, and at least some degree

30 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

of constipation, with the increased production and absorption of toxins in the colon, will result.

Conversely, good food combinations help ensure that any food that remains undigested doesn't get the chance to be retained in the gut and rot before getting eliminated. If you are having less than one bowel movement per twenty-four hours, your bowel transit time is too slow and is likely making a significant contribution to your daily toxin exposure. It is also important to remember at this point that if something is done improperly for a long enough period, it doesn't gradually and magically become the right thing to do. In a NOVA miniseries for television entitled "Ice Mummies," a 5,300-year-old frozen man was found to still have identifiable food in his stomach. The food was meat and an ancient form of wheat. But just because our ancestors were improperly combining meat and forms of bread many thousands of years ago doesn't mean that way of eating agrees with our digestive physiology any better now than it did then.

Although evolutionary considerations seem to allow one culture to digest certain types of foods chronically eaten throughout its an­cestral history better than other foods, this form of adaptation should not be confused with the contradiction of basic physiologi­cal principles that have not significantly changed during man's traceable history. Man has been drinking a wide variety of alcoholic beverages for thousands of years, and man has been smoking to­bacco and other combustibles for thousands of years. The test of time has not made these two culturally ingrained habits any less toxic and detrimental to our health than when they were done in an­cient times.

When proteins putrefy, they are essentially allowing the bacteria in the gut to grow unchecked and out of balance, and a large num­ber of by-products from this surge of bacterial metabolism ends up being produced. When food ends up trapped in various areas of the gut for a long enough period of time, as commonly occurs in a poorly functioning intestine, or even in the stomach, the conditions

Food Combining Principles 31

become ripe for the growth of bacteria that require little or no oxy­gen. These are called anaerobic bacteria. Multiplying anaerobic bac­teria produce some of the most toxic substances ever discovered. One of the most chilling examples of this kind of toxicity is botulism. Botulism occurs when an anaerobic bacterium, Clostridium botu-linum, gets trapped without oxygen, as might occur in a vacuum-packed can of food, for example. But botulism-like poisoning can also occur in a very chronic, low-grade fashion when a wide vari­ety of anaerobic bacteria, including different Clostridium species, get the opportunity to multiply on undigested foods, especially meat protein.

Specific research on this subject by Maier et al. showed that the levels of these toxic anaerobic bacteria increased when the diet was high in red meat.⁶ Conversely, meat-free diets resulted in aerobic (oxygen-requiring, less toxic) bacteria predominating. Of course, there is no indication that the principles of proper digestion and food combining were being followed by the students tested in this study when the meat was part of the diet. It should also be pointed out that much of the positive effect of a vegetarian diet probably re­lates directly to the combinations of foods typically eaten in a vege­tarian diet. Specifically, the very lack of meat in such a diet makes many of the food combinations even taken by chance in a vegetar­ian diet acceptable ones. This proper combining will also consis­tently result in shorter bowel transit times, with more frequent bowel movements, usually several per day. A shortened bowel tran­sit time is an enormously important factor in keeping down the populations of toxic bacteria in the gut. With relatively few excep­tions, the only consistently poor combination that will commonly be seen on a vegetarian diet is the addition of fruits or dairy products to a vegetable meal. But it should also be remembered that this combination is still a very bad combination, and a few slices of fruit are a common part of a vegetarian meal. The resultant recommen­dation is that a large amount of vegetables along with a small

32 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

amount of added meat, as long as the meat is properly digested, should represent the healthiest of all nutritional regimens.

The bacterial toxins from rotting food can have several negative effects on health. They can be directly absorbed by the intestine into the blood and lymphatic circulations. From there they can exert a toxic effect on virtually any part of the body. They can also have a direct toxic effect on the absorptive intestinal lining. The intestine is supposed to be selective in its absorption of properly broken-down foods. However, toxins can be one cause, perhaps a primary cause, of the "leaky gut" syndrome, which results in the intestine absorb­ing into the body much more than should be absorbed. This results in incompletely digested fragments or particles of food, especially protein, getting absorbed directly into the blood or lymphatics. The immune system is immediately challenged by such an absorption. The immune system perceives these incompletely digested food particles as an alien "nonfood" substance, much like a microbial in­vader against which the body needs protection. This results in the formation of antibodies and other immune responses to the per­ceived invasion. This is probably one of the primary reasons why food allergies develop initially and then persist. If poor dietary and digestive practices are never changed, then almost every meal pre­sents poorly digested food anew to the gut. The intestinal lining never gets a break, and it simply cannot heal while continuing to be traumatized on a daily basis. It also means that even good food poorly digested can result in a further stress to an overworked im­mune system, rather than result in a supply of positive nutritional building blocks to support the immune system and give it a break.

The degree of toxicity of anaerobic bacterial toxins should also be emphasized. The neurotoxin that is manufactured by Clostridium botulinutn is considered by modern science to be the most potent lethal substance known. It is at least 15,000 times more toxic than sarin, the organophosphate nerve agent used in the terrorist attack that took place in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995. As many

Food Combining Principles 33

as 565 people were reported to be hospitalized by that toxic attack, and 5 people were confirmed to have died from it. Even the tiniest amounts of such toxins should never be dismissed as insignificant.

So it is clear that meat can be very toxic to you if poorly digested. Is this a good reason to stop eating meat completely? Absolutely not. All foods can be toxic if they are allowed to ferment (carbohy­drates), go rancid (fats), or putrefy (proteins) prior to proper and complete digestion. No one would dream of eating food that al­ready smells and has obvious colonies of bacteria growing on it. But this doesn't mean that the food shouldn't be eaten if it is fresh. And it doesn't mean that any good food can't later become toxic if the principles of digestion outlined in this book end up being ignored. Meat has a great deal of nutritive value that simply cannot be matched by fruits and vegetables, in any combination. I address this subject at some length in chapter 5.

As emphasized earlier, the bowel transit time should be mini­mized and constipation of any degree avoided at all costs. Elimi­nating ingested toxins, following proper food combining principles, and taking adequate amounts of vitamin С as sodium ascorbate can all shorten the bowel transit time. Note that strong, chemical stimu­lant laxatives are not generally desirable, and they certainly should not be among the first measures taken to ease constipation.