Food Miscombining
(Also known as "Food Combining" and "Food Separating")

By Don Bennett, DAS

Food miscombining basically has to do with avoiding the combining of dissimilar fruits. There are a few categories of fruits as far as their digestive environment requirements (the digestive "juices" that the body makes). If you eat two foods individually at the same meal and they each require different digestive environments, you'll get mal-digestion, aka indigestion. You may or may not feel this, but even if you don't feel it, each food will not be properly digested (digested as well as they would have if they had been eaten separately). Digestion is the most energy intensive process we have, and the easier the digestion, the healthier you can be. This is because the less nervous system energy (aka "nerve energy") is needed for digestion, the more is available for healing, or the less sleep is needed when healing is at a low.

Those fruit categories are "acid", "sub-acid", "sweet", and non-sweet.

To learn why the tomato, bell pepper, and avocado have a warning, click here.
NOTE: There are a lot of tropical fruits not shown due to them being unavailable.
And tropical fruits are what humans are biologically adapted to eat.
Most of them are in the "sweet" category.

"Transit time" is also another consideration that is not often spoken about when discussing food miscombining. Some foods leave the stomach quickly, and some need to spend more time there. If you eat two foods that are at opposite ends of this spectrum, one will stay in the stomach too long and will start to ferment. Not good. Or the opposite scenario: one leaves the stomach too early. Also not good. The worst case example here is eating almonds with watermelon.

The best way to avoid miscombining fruits is to eat the way all other primates eat... mono meals... it's impossible to miscombine if you eat a meal of just one fruit. This way of eating takes time to adopt, but it's a good thing to shoot for. But don't overeat when eating mono meals or you'll eat less meals, and that means less variety in the diet.

Another thing to be aware of that you won't hear mentioned in most food miscombining discussions is what happens when you take a food from two different categories and blend them together into one "new" food. If you ate bananas and seeds individually at a meal, you'll get indigestion, but if you blend them together, no indigestion (as long as you pay attention to quantities). The "tomato, bell pepper, avocado" warning article also speaks to this issue.