Food In The Order Of Digestive Difficulty.

Hard To Digest: Meat, fish, chicken, eggs (if cooked), all legumes including soy products, peanuts and peanut butter, beans, split peas, lentils, chick peas, dairy products such as cheese, milk, butter milk, nuts and seeds and their butters.

Intermediate: all grains–quinoa, amaranth, millet, spelt, rye, wheat, oats, barley.

Fairly Easy: Brussels sprouts, green beans, green peas, broccoli, cauliflower, raw cultured milk products, asparagus, cabbage, sprouts especially bean sprouts, kale, other leafy greens.

Very Easy: fruits, vegetable juices, fruit juices, broth (clear).

No Effort: herb tea, water.

Quote [8]

“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.”

(John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist, The Affuent Society)

Emotions and Digestion.

Another sure fire way to ruin any food, including the very best available is to eat in the presence of negative emotions generated by yourself or others. Negative emotions include fear, anger, frustration, envy, resentment, etc. The digestive tract is immediately responsive to stress and or negative thoughts. It becomes paralyzed in negative emotional states; any foods eaten are poorly digested, causing toxemia.

It is natural for a person who has lost a loved one or suffered a great loss of any kind to lose their appetite for a period of time. This reaction is pro-survival, because while grieving, the body is griped by powerful negative emotions.

There are people who, under stress or when experiencing a loss, eat ravenously in an attempt to comfort themselves. If this goes on for long the person can expect to create a serious illness of some kind. Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon genetics and personality and who is generating the negative emotions.

Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts and seeds.

Food Combination.

Few people seem to realize that each type of food requires specific and different digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach, and intestine. Carbohydrates, fats, proteins–each requires differing acid or alkaline environments in order to be digested. Proteins require an acid environment. Starch digestion requires an alkaline environment. When foods in complex combinations are presented to the stomach all together, like a meal with meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, bread, butter, a glass of milk, plus a starchy sweet desert, followed by coffee or tea, the stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine are overwhelmed, resulting in the fermentation of the sugars and starches, and the putrefaction of the proteins, and poor digestion of the whole.

For the most efficient digestion, the body should be presented with one simple food at a time, the one bowl concept, easily achieved by adherence to the old saying, “one food at a meal is the ideal.” An example of this approach would be eating fruits for breakfast, a plain cereal grain for lunch, and vegetables for supper. If you can’t eat quite that simply, then proper food combining rules should be followed to minimize digestive difficulty, maximize the adsorption of nutrients from your food, and reduce or eliminate the formation of toxemia, and of course foul gas.

• In general, fruit should be eaten alone unless you happen to be hypoglycemic or diabetic in which case fruit should be eaten with small quantities of a vegetable protein such as nuts, or yogurt and/or cheese if able to digest dairy.
• Starches should be eaten with vegetables, which means that a well combined meal would include a grain such as rice, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn, wheat, rye, oats, spelt, potatoes, or starchy winter squash combined with raw or cooked vegetables.
• Protein foods such as meat, eggs, beans, lentils, tofu, split peas, should be combined with vegetables, raw or cooked. But protein should never be combined with starches.

The most popular North American snacks and meals always have a starch/protein combination, for example: meat and potatoes, hamburger in a bun, hot dog with bun, burrito with meat or cheese, meat sandwiches, etc. It is little wonder that intestinal gas is accepted as normal, and that over time these hard to digest combinations eventually cause health problems that demand attention.

Healthfood Junkfood.

Many people improve their diet, eliminating meat and chemicalized food in favor of whole grains and organically grown foods, but they then proceed to make these otherwise good foods into virtual junkfood by preparing them incorrectly. What should be health-producing dietaries are ruined by frying, salting and sugaring.

Healthfood junkfoods include:

• organically grown potato chips deep fried in cold pressed organic unsaturated canola oil (made rancid by frying) sprinkled with natural sea salt;
• organically grown oat and nut granola roasted with cold-pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by roasting) hideously sweetened with honey;
• carrot cake made with rancid whole wheat flour, cold pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by baking), honey, and cream cheese (salted);
• whole wheat cookies (stale, rancid flour) sweetened with honey, made with vegetable oil baked at high heat (rancid);
• whole wheat pizza vegetarian style with lots of soy cheese;
• whole wheat pizza vegan style with lots of real raw milk cheese;
• organically grown corn chips deep fried in cold pressed vegetable oil with or without natural sea salt,
• yogurts made from powdered milk without an active culture of beneficial bacteria and covered with highly sugared fruits, etc.

These foods may well represent an improvement over the average American diet, but they still are not healthy foods, and should never be used in a diet for a sick person. Nor are they worthy of a person attempting to maximize health.

Quote [7]

“To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy. ”

(Hippocrates)

The Glycemic Index.

The dietary management of hypoglycemia requires that not only refined but also unrefined sugars and starches with a high glycemic index be removed from the diet. (The glycemic index measures the ease with which the starch is converted into glucose in the body, and estimates the amount of insulin needed to balance it out.) This means no sugar, no honey, no white flour, no whole grains sweetened with honey, no sweet fruits such as watermelons, bananas, raisins, dates or figs. Potatoes are too readily converted into sugar. Jerusalem artichokes are a good substitute.

Glycemic Index (compared to glucose, which is 100)

Grains		Fruits		Vegetables
all bran	51	apples	39	baked beans	40
brown rice	66	bananas	62	beets	64
buckwheat	54	cherries	23	black-eyed peas	33
cornflakes	80	grapefruit	26	carrots	92
oatmeal	49	grapes	45	chic peas	36
shred. wheat	67	orange juice	46	parsnips	97
muesli	66	peach	29	potato chips	51
white rice	72	orange	40	baked potato	98
white spagetti	50	pear	34	sweet potato	48
whole wheat spagetti	42	plum	25	yams	51
sweet corn	59	raisins	64	peas	51
Nuts		Baked Goods		Sugars
peanuts	13	pastry	59	fructose	20
		sponge cake	46	glucose	100
Meats		white bread	69	honey	87
sausage	28	w/w bread	72	maltose	110
fish sticks	38	whole rye bread	42	sucrose	59
Dairy Products
yogurt	36	whole milk	34	skim milk	32

Fresh Produce.

Vegetables, especially leafy vegetables, deteriorate much like radioactive material; they have a sort of half-life. The mineral content is stable, but in respect to the vitamins and enzymes and other complex organic components, each time period or “half life” results in the loss of half the nutrition. Suppose a lettuce has a half life of 48 hours, two days after harvest only 50 percent of the original nutrition remains. After two more days, half the remaining half is gone and only 25 percent is left. After two more days half of that 25 percent is lost. Thus six days after harvest and a lettuce contains only bout 12 percent of its original nutrition. A two day half-life is only hypothetical. Those types of produce I classify as very perishable probably do have a half-life of from 36 to 48 hours. Moderately perishable produce has a half life of about 72 hours; durable types of produce have half lives of 96 hours or longer.

Vegetable Storage Potential

Very Perishable	Moderately Perishable	Durable
lettuce	zucchini	apple
spinach	eggplant	squash
Chinese cabbage	sweet peppers	oranges
kale	broccoli	cabbage
endive	cauliflower	carrot
peaches	apricots	lemons
parsley		beets

The half life of produce can be lengthened by lowering its temperature. For that reason, sophisticated produce growers usually use hydrocooling. This process dumps a just-cut vegetable into icy water within minutes of being harvested, lowering core temperature to a few degrees above freezing almost immediately. When cut vegetables are crated up at field temperatures, and stacks of those crates are put in a cooler, it can take the inside of the stack 24 hours, or longer, to become chilled. Home gardeners should also practice hydrocooling. Fill your sink with cold water and wash/soak your harvest until it is thoroughly chilled before draining and refrigerating it. Or, harvest your garden early in the morning when temperatures are lowest.

Still, when you buy produce in the store it may have been sitting at room temperature for hours or possibly days.

Fats and Oil.

The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated vegetable oils that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals–like virgin olive oil. Use small quantities of olive oil for salad dressing.

Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go rancid than any other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions of unsaturated fats, the kind that all the authorities push because they contain no cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief exposure to air. The danger here is that rancidity in vegetable oil is virtually unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other hand, smells “off.” Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire way to accelerate aging, invite degenerative conditions in general, and enhance the likelihood of cancer.

I recommend that you use only high-quality virgin olive oil, the only generally-available fat that is largely monosaturated. (Pearson and Shaw, 1983)

When you buy vegetable oil, even olive oil, get small bottles so you use them up before the oil has much time being exposed to air (as you use the oil air fills the bottle) or, if you buy olive oil in a large can to save money, immediately upon opening it, transfer the oil to pint jars filled to the very brim to exclude virtually all air, and seal the jars securely. In either case, keep now-opened, in-use small bottles of oil in the refrigerator because rancidity is simply the combination of oil with oxygen from the air and this chemical reaction is accelerated at warmer temperatures and slowed greatly at cold ones.

Chemical reactions typically double in speed with every 10 degrees C. increase in temperature. So oil goes rancid about six times faster at normal room temperature than it does in the fridge. If you’ll think about the implications of this data you’ll see there are two powerful reasons not to fry food. One, the food is coated with oil and gains in satiety value at the expense of becoming relatively indigestible and productive of toxemia. Secondly, if frying occurs at 150 degrees Centigrade and normal room temperature is 20 degrees Centigrade, then oil goes rancid 2 to the 13th power faster in the frying pan, or about 8,200 times faster. Heating oil for only ten minutes in a hot skillet induces as much rancidity as about 6 weeks of sitting open and exposed to air at room temperature. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to eat something from a fast food restaurant where the hot fat in the deep fryer has been reacting with oxygen all day, or even for several days.

Quote [6]

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

(Albert Einstein)