The reader may well be asking why all this detail on digestion has any importance at all in the practical achievement of optimal nutrition. After all, if you eat something and you have no intestinal diseases, the body will do the rest, right?
Life (and health) would be so much simpler if this were true. Ask yourself why you eat the way you do. If you are like most people, you eat for taste and out of habit. Who ever declared that a bowl of cornflakes with milk was the proper, if not ideal, way to begin the day? Probably your mother and the cereal-dairy arms of the food industry. Trouble is, only your mother was motivated by what she thought was best for you.
This is the first major revelation that must occur to the motivated reader. And it shouldn't be a surprise. The food industry cares
10 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health
about the food industry and the profits it can make. This is not to accuse the food industry of any deep, dark conspiracies. All of big business does whatever it can do to legally increase its bottom line. What you have to realize is that no big industry or business has your best interests in mind unless those interests coincidentally mesh nicely with what the industry goals were already. Therefore, one rule of thumb you should never forget is: Advertisements and business publications are not valid sources of scientific information. They could be, and rarely are, but they are never to be trusted as such. In fact, as you will see as these chapters unfold, many of the most common pieces of dietary advice are exactly the opposite of the scientific truth. Whoever first declared that "Milk is a natural" or "You never outgrow your need for milk" was only looking to sell milk. The truth is that the dairy industry has never outgrown its need for ever-larger profits. Science be damned. But I won't be picking on just the dairy industry. Much more of corporate America must take the blame for the daily poisoning taking place in the name of nutrition.
Regardless of whether you are concerned about why you eat the way you do, you must understand that the way you eat must be altered if you expect to obtain the benefits touted in this book. Food can be tasty, and all of the palate's desires can be satisfied, but be resolved that many of the usual ways in which you've satisfied these longings in the past simply must be abandoned. However, and this is very important, do not feel that you must do everything that I suggest. Obviously, I feel that following all of the suggestions made would be optimal for your health. But much of what I'll suggest might be very inconvenient or even overly expensive for you to incorporate into your lifestyle. That is not a reason to avoid following any of the suggestions. Just about any of the suggestions can make their own small contribution to your pursuit of optimal nutrition. So, do what you can. You may well find that making one small change at a time will get you much further than trying to do every-
The Importance of Proper Digestion 11
thing at once and becoming overwhelmed and frustrated in the process, while rationalizing that life wasn't designed to be that difficult, and that you have to die sometime, anyway.
Although the end of the book will contain a listing of many practical and important suggestions for achieving optimal nutrition, I would also advise you to dog-ear pages, make notes, and highlight what you consider to be especially important points. This book is intended to make you a healthier person, not just to satisfy your intellectual curiosity and to answer questions that may have always had you puzzled.
extended time, coping with the toxins of poor digestion and ultimately acquiring any of a wide variety of chronic diseases. The body will persist in staying alive and even be clinically "healthy" for prolonged periods of time in the face of poor nutrition. Most young people are still clinically healthy even though their nutritional habits are atrocious. However, as time passes and toxicity persists, diseases will manifest themselves. Most people cannot appreciate how this is happening in their own lives, since most of the world's developed countries are all in the same boat. Until there is a sizable control population of people who are all eating and digesting correctly, and as a consequence are living long, healthy lives, there will never be a wide appreciation by the public or their health care providers of how sick they are making and keeping themselves with their poor nutritional habits. And just because they ate a certain way and felt well when they were younger will be no justification for continuing to eat that way when they are older and have fought toxicity for a much longer time.
Simple, small meals are always best. Convenience and habit have many of us continuing to consume one or two massive meals a day rather than a greater number of small meals. Not only are large meals going to be consistently more toxic by mechanisms to be discussed later, weight gain will also be consistently more pronounced by eating all of one's daily caloric intake at one or two sittings rather than spread out over several more sittings. Look again at the example nature provides us. Many wild animals spend most of their waking time continuously eating (grazing) small amounts of food. Such animals are never obese and rarely toxic. Slow, controlled intake of nutrients tends more to be utilized at the time of eating to support the body's functions, while large amounts of food nearly always trigger the conversion of excess nutrients into stored forms, seen primarily as the epidemic of obesity across the country today. A blast from a blowtorch could easily kill you, but the same amount of heat delivered over an extended period of time could instead be
Food Combining Principles 15
a welcome support to your health. Rate of ingestion can be more crucial than the total amount ingested when looking at overall health and body size.
Toxic digestion can also promote weight gain. The leaky gut syndrome, to be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, permits greater caloric absorption from the food ingested as well as the absorption of toxins and incompletely digested foods. People who are obese and more toxic tend to have more prolonged bowel transit times. Their food simply spends more time in the gut than it should. Constipation of varying degrees will promote this excess absorption of both toxins and caloric content. If you are not having at least one substantial bowel movement per day, you are constipated to some degree. Consider this: You cannot leave any fleshy food such as meat sitting out on your kitchen counter without refrigeration for more than a day before it begins to noticeably rot and stink. Since your intestinal tract is a vastly better environment for bacterial growth than your kitchen counter, it shouldn't surprise you that food trapped in your gut for more than twenty-four hours can reliably be expected to begin rotting to some degree as well. Constipation is never desirable, but the severity of its negative effect on health remains little appreciated.
If constipation is one of your problems, be aware that the traditional methods of treating this condition are only very short-term, symptom-oriented approaches. An enema serves only to mechanically help clean out what has accumulated in the colon. Professional colonic therapies serve the same function, but tend to be more thorough in effect. Laxatives work in different ways, but most serve to soften the stool, increase its bulk, or directly irritate the colon into contracting more regularly. Some of these approaches may occasionally be useful to help "get you going" again, but it makes more sense to understand what caused the constipation in the first place.
Generally, waste will be slow to leave the colon and rectum if digested food is proceeding just as slowly "upstream" of the colon.
16 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health
The caboose goes at the same speed as the locomotive. One of the primary reflex mechanisms causing the colon to empty is triggered by the appearance of more food residue leaving the small intestine and entering the first part of the colon. Therefore, anything that slows the digestive process anywhere in the gut can be expected to contribute to some degree of constipation. Poor food combinations increase transit time in the gut and slow down the whole digestive process, which in turn promotes the toxic state of constipation.
Always remember the concept of rate in the support of the body's health. Anything that is good for you can be made toxic by an excess rate of administration, usually along with an excess amount. No exceptions apply, although many things have much larger margins of safety than others. Some psychiatric patients have developed compulsions and obsessions with continuously drinking water to extreme excess. Under such circumstances, too much water ingested too rapidly can actually do harm by literally diluting out the blood sodium levels to the point of inducing seizures, but no rational person would use this as a reason to stop drinking water. Nevertheless, even this most essential substance for sustaining life and health can be overingested, resulting in some form of clinical toxicity. Remember that all foods, supplements, and medications can demonstrate some toxicity when taken in excess and/or at very rapid rates, even when lesser amounts and slower rates are unquestionably beneficial.
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