Be Food Pairing Aware!

Here's a groovy little excerpt in Mother Earth News from a new book called The Happiness Diet. While the premise of the diet seem pretty boilerplate (eliminate refined crap from your diet and you'll feel better), the excerpt focuses on food pairing - the notion that nutrients in certain foods work better when paired with the nutrients in other foods. For example...

Eggs and Cheese:  The vitamin D found in egg yolks makes the calcium in dairy more available to your body — important not only for bones, but for heart health as well. 

Rosemary and Steak:  Marinate your steak with rosemary before cooking: The herb is rich in antioxidants such as rosmarinic acid and carnosic acid that help neutralize carcinogenic compounds known as heterocyclic amines (HCAs) that form when steak reaches a temperature of 325 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. 

The idea that mixing foods can make them exponentially better for you is nothing new. The most obvious example of this is good ol' rice and beans, something cultures the world over have been dining on for centuries, completely unaware that this combo provides all nine essential amino acids.

While it's almost always better to seek nutrition from whole foods, you can get similar benefits trying this trick with supplementation. I've been having a lot of luck lately with magnesium for neural/muscular tension issues. I take the sups along with a B complex as to help absorbability. Recently, I ran out of the B complex and, being the cheapskate that I am, I put off heading down to the vitamin store. The difference was astonishing, not to mention gross and inappropriate. (If you want to know why, I'll leave it up to you to research the side effects of poorly-absorbed magnesium. Hint: It rhymes with "pliarrhea." I, personally, also experience "banal stitching.")

If you want to start pairing foods, I'd suggest breaking it down into nutrients. If you feel there's a specific vitamin or mineral that would benefit you, look into other micronutrients that work well with it. Then, either invest in some quality sups or look for foods that contain the two. A couple of my favorite resources for this are The Real Vitamin and Mineral Book by Nancy Pauling Bruning and Shari Lieberman; and The World's Healthiest Foods, by George Mateljan.

But be careful. The concept has been fairly perverted by some seriously lame hippy science. Generally speaking, you want to avoid anything that'll promote weight loss via pairing. Also the word "combining" tends to be a red flag. For example, one system that I'm not a fan of is Body Ecology, which does a great job of sounding super scientific despite completely misrepresenting the human digestive system. To wit:

When you eat proteins like poultry, fish, meat, and eggs, your stomach secretes hydrochloric acid and the enzyme pepsin to break down the food in a highly acidic environment. When you eat starches like potatoes or bread, your stomach secretes the enzyme ptyalin to create an alkaline condition.  

If you eat proteins and starches together, they tend to neutralize each other and inhibit digestion. The poorly-digested food travels through the digestive tract reaching the intestines where it putrefies and causes your blood to become acidic. It also provides a welcome environment for disease-causing pathogens!

I could write a nine episode, HBO miniseries on why these two paragraphs are ridiculous, but really quickly, ptyalin is an amylase (digestive enzyme) found in saliva (like, in your mouth) and it's going to by wiped out by the hydrochloric acid in your stomach whether you're eating a water chestnut or a water buffalo. That's your stomach's job, to be acidic. The digestive system doesn't so much shift to accommodate the macronutrients you're eating as much as it deals with them in different organs with different enzymes as they travel down.

So, in other words, pairing foods can be a great way to maximize your nutrition, but do your homework because there are a lot of "authorities" out there that are completely full of poorly-absorbed magnesium, if you catch my drift.