Herbert Shelton was an American doctor and essayist born in the first half of the 1900s. He was the founder of hygienist theories to maintain health, at the base of which there is a correct diet and a correct combination of foods .
Hygienism is an articulated system of simple rules to maintain the state of health and well-being of the organism, based mainly on a correct digestion and elimination and, therefore, on an optimal combination and distribution of food within the day and meals .
Why combine food?
Foods need, to be properly digested, assimilated, and subsequently to facilitate the elimination of waste products and waste digestion itself, of different substances and environments within the various digestive systems.
The animal proteins are digested in the stomach in a more or less acid environment in time frames ranging from 3 to 5 hours, the vegetables are digested in about 3 or 4 hours, the simple carbohydrates are digested more slowly and finally the fruit has a time of digestion that varies from 20 minutes to about 2 hours.
Combining foods with different digestion times in the same meal leads to lack of assimilation or swelling and fermentation .
In addition, some substances necessary for the digestion of certain foods (such as ptyalin, which in the mouth predicts carbohydrates) interfere with various substances present in other foods (ptyalin is inhibited by proteins), or produced by the body to digest different foods.
Harmful food combination
In general , harmful food combinations are:
- starches + acids (eg pasta with tomato sauce)
- protein + starch (eg ham bread)
- animal proteins + vegetable proteins (eg meat and legumes) or combinations of different proteins from the same group (eg meat and eggs)
- acids + proteins (pizzaiola steak)
- fat + protein (buttered eggs)
- simple sugars + proteins (cakes with eggs or dairy products)
- simple sugars + starches (eg cakes)
Improving the state of the stomach and facilitating the work of the digestive systems, including pancreas and liver, improves the state of the intestinal flora, facilitates digestion and allows the excretory organs to easily eliminate waste due to digestion.
Do you know that eating fruit half an hour before a meal promotes digestion?
Fruit classification
Within the same food category, for example, further classifications can be created. As for proteins, vegetable proteins can be distinguished from animal proteins, even for fruit we can distinguish between:
sweet fruit : bananas, persimmons, figs, dates, mangoes, papayas;
sour fruit : pineapple, kiwi, citrus fruits, strawberries, berries when ripe;
semi-acid fruit : apricots, peaches, apple, grapes, pear, plums, plums.
The basic rule, according to hygiene, is to eat fruit alone away from meals, to allow it to pass in an empty stomach, then about an hour before every other meal or 4 hours later, to avoid fermentation and therefore of abdominal swelling.
In the summer season it is easy to adopt combinations of different types of fruit inside a fruit salad or even inside a salad or in smoothies.
Fruit combinations
The ideal food combinations for fruit, based on the basics of hygienism, including green leafy vegetables, starchy vegetables such as corn, potatoes, carrots and pumpkins, avocado-derived proteins, coconut, seeds such as almonds, walnuts, pistachios, peanuts, corn seeds, etc. include:
combination of vegetables + starch i;
vegetable pairing + protein fruit ;
combination of sweet fruit + semi-acid fruit ;
combination of semi-sour fruit + sour fruit .
Finally, melon and watermelon do not fall into any ideal combination, therefore they are excluded from combinations with other fruits and vegetables : they should always be eaten alone and at a distance from other meals .
