What Is Food Combining?

Before we can dive into what food combining is, it’s important to illustrate the Ayurvedic belief at its core. In this ancient holistic science, an individual’s “correct” diet is based on elements that comprise their person. There are three categories that most people fall into: vata, pitta and kapha.

This belief teaches that the gastric fire, or agni, in the stomach and digestive tract is the main gate through which nutrients enter the body and pass along to each individual cell to maintain life functions.

Just as every person has their own gastric fire, every food has a different taste, its own energy – whether that be warming or cooling energy – and a post-digestive effect. When executed properly, food combining is believed to support digestive health and help stimulate the body positively.

What Is Food Combining?

Food combining is the purposeful pairing of compatible foods to support healthy digestion and stimulate agni. Poor combining happens when two or more foods with different taste, energy and post-digestive effect are consumed together. This is believed to overload the agni, inhibiting healthy digestion and resulting in negative effects such as indigestion, gas formation and more.

‘Proper’ Food Combining

Essentially, this eating method encourages consuming only one category of food at each meal and then sticking to non-starchy (and preferably green) vegetables, as they are considered neutral foods that can be paired with anything.

Other suggestions for “proper” food combining include only eating fruit on an empty stomach and consuming a raw salad before every cooked meal.

Foods to Avoid Combining

According to this form of eating, mixing protein and carbohydrates is discouraged, as an example of foods that digest at different rates. A few other examples include not eating:

• Beans with dairy or animal protein
• Melons with any other food
• Milk with bread containing years, fish, meat, yogurt or bananas
• Yogurt with cheese, eggs, fish, warm beverages, meat, milk or nightshades

Supplement Your Diet

No matter what eating pattern or diet you’ve adopted, it’s important to make sure you’re getting all the necessary vitamins and nutrients your body needs to function! Click here for BIOVEA’s selection of multivitamins.