Steph: Hi Damo, and Welcome Back to the Show
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Steph: Hi Damo, and welcome back to the show. Damo: Thanks, Steph. Great to see you. Thanks for having me again. Steph: Very nice. Not that anyone can see us, but we are nice and snug today, recording- Damo: So close. So close. Steph: We're normally recording virtually, but today we are side by side in Sandringham. Damo: In the flesh. Steph: Absolutely. It's good to literally see you in the flesh. Damo: At the Natural Nutritionist headquarters, HQ. Steph: HQ. But a really cool topic for us today ... It's a topic that I actually get asked about a lot in clinic, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts. The discussion today is all about food combining. So where do you see it as a topic in general, and maybe what your experience was way back when you started practicing? Damo: Way back. Steph: Way back! Damo: You're so old, Damo! Steph: No, that's not what I mean. You're very experienced; you've been practicing such a long time. Damo: A long time. I know. Well, it's funny because in my talk, the Power of Food talk that I do, it's always a question that comes up. "What about food combining? What do you think?" And so then I try and break it down, but back when I first started practicing, it was the go. You always looked out for mixing your starches and your proteins, and your fruits and your proteins, and you were really cautious of doing that. And even when I first was exposed to naturopathy, probably because my mum went to see a naturopath, we did a fit for life program, which was fruit for breakfast, salad for lunch, and a meat meal in the evening. Steph: All separate? Damo: All separate. Steph: Wow. Damo: Never combining protein, fat, carbohydrates, because the body couldn't digest all those three things at the same time. The body got confused. So there's funny little assumptions about what the body can handle. And so when I studied naturopathy, one of my lecturers in nutrition was a vegan, a vegetarian, so all of our nutritional information was based on veganism and vegetarianism, and that meat was bad. And that if you ate cows, you would die. Steph: Heart disease. Damo: Well, you'd just die. I figured I was going to die one day, so I'd just be happy eating cows. I then went on to study nutrition, and really understood the ins and outs of what it really was. I went beyond the philosophy of what food was and how that helped the body, to then understanding how the body deals with nutrition, and that's what's probably helped me shape it. But we were originally told, "Don't combine certain foods," and also, "Combine certain foods to enhance absorption." Steph: Yes, both ways. Damo: Yeah. And so it becomes very, very confusing, but it's also a very simple and almost immature approach to understanding the way in which the body works, if we did food combining all of the time in the absence of infirmary or disease. Steph: Yeah. Yeah, I think you've got to think about how the body functions, the way we produce the right enzymes, our acid in the stomach which we speak about on the show quite a lot, how we're designed to digest and absorb food, especially if we're talking about someone that's really healthy. It really doesn't make sense that we'd have to separate out our macronutrients away from each other by certain times, and I think that probably the biggest culprit in this space is definitely fruit. A lot of people still feel like that they can't eat fruit with anything else because it will ferment in their gut and cause bloating or burping or gas, or all of the above. But you've got to ask yourself, if fruit is causing these symptoms, what really is going on from a root cause point of view? Damo: Yeah. Yeah, you really do. And I think that's a great point, because when you think about food, the body starts to digest the moment you start to think about food. You and I talking about food right now is making me really hungry, Steph. Steph: Yeah, salivary enzymes. Damo: It's all cranking. It's all cranking, but I can feel my tummy rumbling, and so I know that from a hydrochloric acid perspective, I'm secreting ... The thought of it means that the information traveling down from my brain through the spinal cord and out to my stomach, and then also to my pancreas, and also to my gall bladder, that information's not only occurring when I eat the food, it's when I'm thinking about the food. But it's not that if I think about an apple, I'm going to be sending out enzymes to break down an apple, you know what I mean? So oh my gosh, there's an apple coming; I better send out some enzyme for apples. Steph: Apple enzymes. Damo: Yeah. That's not the way it goes. And if I'm thinking about eating some fish, like if I'm thinking about salmon, a beautiful piece of salmon, wild caught, coarse, and lightly cooked, at a low heat- Steph: In olive oil. Damo: Low heat in coconut oil, then I would be ... it would be a very, very tasty meal, but I'm not going to wait until I eat it before I start to send out enzymes, because my body needs to be prepared to digest that food. Yes, I'll chew it, coat it in saliva. Yes, it's going to land in my stomach and get coated in hydrochloric acid. Then it's going to get through the duodenum and get smacked by some enzymes, and then bile's going to get there to help break down the fat. I've got all of those different things, stages of digestion taking place, and it's not salmon enzymes that are being secreted. It's protein, fat and carbohydrate: protease, lipase and- Steph: Amylase. Damo: Amylase. What's carbohydrate? Amylase. Steph: It doesn't start with "c". That's a tricky one. Damo: I've got those enzymes all being secreted by my pancreas, all blended in with hydrochloric acid, all coated with saliva. So all these things are taking place to digest it, not for a specific food group. It's for all of them. Steph: Yeah, so your body obviously understands macronutrients, micronutrients, not the specific food. I think it's really important to acknowledge that digestion starts before the mouth. A lot of the time, I say digestion starts in the mouth to emphasize the importance of chewing, but it actually starts before that, like you say, with the thought process. It's important to understand the intelligent mechanisms that our body has to digest food, and in a state of health, there really is no reason for you to be separating out your macros, so your fats and your proteins and your carbs. Damo: Totally, totally. And I think that's a great point that you make, that in a state of health, when your body is well, you remain asymptomatic when you're eating well, and maybe you get a bit of a burp because you ate your meal too fast, or maybe you might pass a little bit of wind because there's a bit of extra chili in your curry there or something. It shouldn't be profuse, and it shouldn't be offensive; that's I suppose the message that goes on there. And if you're in pain after meals, then maybe that's when we consider approaches that might enhance digestion or might enhance the ability to absorb certain nutrients, or maybe we'll look to eat more of a particular food than another type of food because that might actually assist us in healing. But keeping in mind that it's not the food that heals, it's the body that heals with the food, so we want the macronutrients and the micronutrients from the meal, but the body needs to be able to get access to that. Steph: Yeah, definitely. And the fruit conversation, I think needs to be discussed and separated out to someone who's healthy and can tolerate eating fruit with fats or proteins. But obviously if you are eating fruit, and you're reacting to the sugar, and that's possibly a signal that you shouldn't ignore. You might need to actually reduce your intake of fruit, because we know the sugar can ferment in the gut, and in some cases, contribute to dysbiosis or the overgrowth of the opportunistic bacteria. But then we're talking about someone who has a state of ill health for want of a better reason. We do need to be a little bit more precise with our prescription. I would probably say that you'd eat less fruit than going to say that you need to eat fruit on its own, regardless that myth, I don't believe to be true. Damo: Yeah, I'm with you. It's not about just moving it to a different place. Steph: time of day. Damo: you'll make it even worse. Steph: Potentially. Damo: You would make it worse, because it's unmatched, unbalanced, and so where you're creating imbalance, then things would be exaggerated.