Food combining

(M) #1

I mostly eat OMAD but I have a snack as well. According to the internet I should not eat nuts with avocado. Something about the raw fat making the protein of the nuts hard to digest. I would then think it would do the same to the salmon since that is protein. I do suffer from bloating but it’s mostly been since a major surgery I had. Should I just ignore all the food combining stuff on the internet or is there any truth to it?

#2

YUP!

Both fats and proteins are both slow to digest either way, as far as it being raw, that’s the only type of food our bodies are designed to digest in the first place.

Have you ever looked into the bloating? I’ve had major bloating issues, not something fun to deal with at all. Took a lot of snooping around to start tracking it all down.

(M) #3

do you eat your protein raw? Some people say we evolved and our brains got bigger with fire and cooking.

#4

Nope, because it’s 2023, but completely irrelevant as from an evolutionary viewpoint we’re still very much the same.

Plus those things about our brains getting bigger / smaller etc are all nonsense. If you notice they say “Human”, which ones? Most people reserve the term Human for us, Homo Sapiens, but when an article wants to claim something “we” did a 3 million years ago, then all of a sudden we’re all the same thing, totally ignoring that we’re not the same species they were.

You brought up fire, which was around 2 million years ago per the guesses? That wasn’t us, we didn’t exist yet. That was Homo Erectus. So that totally skips over the Neanderthals and somehow we get linked to that? Nope! It’s likely we’ve been the same the whole time. Just been getting smarter.

(M) #5

why does 2023 have anything to do with cooking your protein?

#6

Nope, because it’s 2023, but completely irrelevant as from an evolutionary viewpoint we’re still very much the same.

Plus those things about our brains getting bigger / smaller etc are all nonsense. If you notice they say “Human”, which ones? Most people reserve the term Human for us, Homo Sapiens, but when an article wants to claim something “we” did a 3 million years ago, then all of a sudden we’re all the same thing, totally ignoring that we’re not the same species they were.

You brought up fire, which was around 2 million years ago per the guesses? That wasn’t us, we didn’t exist yet. That was Homo Erectus. So that totally skips over the Neanderthals and somehow we get linked to that? Nope! It’s likely we’ve been the same the whole time. Just been getting smarter.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

I don’t. Meat and fish are actually more nutritious when cooked. Even carpaccio and steak tartare are “cooked” by being marinated in an acid (lemon juice, or whatever), and lutefisk is soaked in lye to break it down.

Fire was being used by modern human beings for somewhere between 100,000 years and almost two million years, depending on whose estimates you consider reliable.

As for human brain size, it is larger, proportionally, than the brains of other primates. It is also much more metabolically expensive, consuming something like 25% of our daily energy expenditure. The speculation is that our brains began to enlarge and become more metabolically expensive as our diet shifted from herbivorous (as our closest primate relatives still are) to carnivorous. It is believed that we started by scavenging the carcases of animals killed by lions and hyaenas in the veldt, only learning to hunt for ourselves later on. It would seem likely that the early scavengers did not cook their food, but at some point the discovery of cooking improved our ability to derive nutrition from our food.

While we could probably get by on raw meat and fish, it would be very difficult to feed our brains on uncooked plant foods. Unlike our primate cousins, we no longer have the long intestines required by hind-gut fermenters.to extract nutrition from raw leaves and stalks. Cooking is a form of “pre-digestion” that makes life easier, and that eliminates a lot of tedious chewing.

A point that may also be relevant is that our brain is made up mostly of fatty acids and cholesterol. Cholesterol, which appears only in animal foods, is essential to the transmission of nerve impulses. Plant sterols do not do nearly as good a job as cholesterol of meeting our bodily needs. They are similar compounds, but just enough different to cause problems. The body synthesises the cholesterol it needs, of course (which is why dietary cholesterol intake is irrelevant to serum cholesterol levels), but plant sterols can block some of the absorption of cholesterol for certain purposes, and this can throw off certain bodily processes.

#9

I only can say how I see it. It would be way too complicated to worry about these things and as I can’t help eating bigger meals, I eat things at once anyway.

I eat a significant amount of raw protein myself (but way more cooked. very well cooked. for hours if it’s a roast), many of us do on keto. I never noticed any problem with it. My raw protein is mostly egg, by the way, little smoked pork (but it’s not the same as raw fresh, at all), dairy is mixed but a big part of it must be raw… On my original keto I had plenty of veggie and oily seed protein, that was partially raw.

My brain stays big even if I start to eat raw protein only :smiley: I never particularly cared about how my ancient anchestors ate when I made my decisions about how I eat. It matters to some extent, sure but there are individual things too and I am mostly interested in what is good for me and it might not be the same as what my ancient anchestors ate for survival, averaging them all.
But as most of my achestors did, I do eat my meat cooked. For various reasons.

#10

I suspect after surgery you gut biome would have been put under a lot of stress. Recolonizing the gut biome is possible. Food combining is nothing new. Try and figure out (food journal) what foods or combinations of foods bloat. Look at the previous meal as well. Lots of decent information on the net. Focus on Pre-biotics (food sources) not pro-biotics(supplements).
By the way, if I know I am going to have a big meal, I will preload with a handful of walnuts about 45 minutes before hand. This reduces how much I eat.
Good luck!

(Bob M) #11

Hmmm…a handful of walnuts for me leads to eating an entire bag.

#12

Not everyone has a bag. I need to crack my walnuts :slight_smile:
They merely would make me hungry (not like I could easily eat so many walnuts, I only use them in dishes. but they are tasty so I suppose I could do it). Every small but not insignicantly small meal does that to me (at least before I had enough food for the day).
But of course, it works for some. That’s why such tips are good. They may not work - but they may work…