Hi everyone this is Monica Reinagle and you're listening to the

nutrition diva quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Claudia writes I've heard a lot about food combining, for example,

that you should always eat certain types of foods together

and avoid certain combinations.

Will I lose weight or feel better if I follow these guidelines? There's an old but persistent idea

that combining certain types of foods at the same meal causes all kinds of bad things to happen to you,

everything from indigestion to fatigue to weight gain.

There are several variations on this theme but the most common one is that proteins and

starches should never be eaten together. As with so many of the nutrition myths I've talked about in this show, this

one has a very scientific sounding explanation, which goes like this. Starchies require an

alkaline environment for digestion. Proteins on the other hand require require an acidic

acidic environment for proper digestion.

When you eat these foods at the same time,

the digestive system, pulled in two opposite directions, sort of stalls.

Food then gets stuck in your system where the carbohydrates ferment and the proteins putrefy

or rot.

Now when this theory was first put forward at the end of the 19th century, we did completely understand how the human

digestive system worked.

So I guess we can cut the originators of this notion a little slack,

even though their theory was inherently illogical, for reasons we'll get to in a moment.

These days, we have a pretty solid understanding of how food gets digested,

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