Food Combining

Every food possesses its own taste (rasa), heating or cooling energy (virya), and post-digestive effect (vipaka), and some foods also possess prabhava, an unexplained specific action. When foods with different tastes, energies, or post-digestive effects are combined, agni can become overloaded. The enzyme system is inhibited, digestion falters, and toxins are produced. Yet the same foods eaten separately may stimulate agni and even help burn ama.

Poor food combining can produce indigestion, fermentation, putrefaction, and gas formation. Over time it can lead to toxemia and disease. Eating bananas with milk, for example, diminishes agni, alters intestinal flora, and can cause sinus congestion, cold, cough, and allergies. Although both foods are sweet in taste, milk has cooling energy while bananas are heating, and their vipaka differs as well. Milk and melons should also not be combined: both are cooling, but milk is laxative and melon is diuretic, and the stomach acid needed to digest melon causes milk to curdle.

Incompatible combinations disturb not only digestion but also the intelligence of the cells. Still, Ayurveda offers practical guidelines rather than rigid rules. Introducing change gradually, respecting one's own agni, and using antidotes such as cardamom in coffee or ghee and black pepper with potatoes can mitigate negative effects.

• Avoid mixing raw and cooked foods in the same meal as a general principle.
• Do not combine fresh foods with leftovers, and minimize the use of leftovers from the previous day.
• Cooking foods together in the same pot allows them to be predigested together, which helps agni handle foods with differing qualities.
• Use spices and herbs to balance incompatible foods, such as adding cooling cilantro to hot, spicy dishes.
• Consider proportions: equal weights of ghee and honey (roughly 3 parts ghee to 1 part honey by volume) are toxic, but other ratios are not.
• Eat fruit by itself, since many fruits ferment and produce a sour, indigestible wine when mixed with other foods.
• Occasional indulgence in a bad combination is usually not harmful if digestion is otherwise strong.