Culinary Coupling and Food Combining

Ever heard of the term culinary coupling? I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it seems to be based on the theory that you can continue to enjoy foods such as hamburger and bacon-n-eggs and still manage your weight and make the most of your meals. The trick lies in pairing food items that complement each other.

According to Kathryn Marsden, author of The Complete Book of Food Combining, it’s all about chemistry: different foods require different digestive enzymes—some acid, some alkaline. When you eat the 2 types together, they neutralize each other, thus preventing digestion.

Some key info on food combining from Wikipedia:

Food combining is the term for an unproven nutritional approach that focuses less upon the quantity and kind of food consumed, and more upon the timing of their consumption.

Advocates of such food combining believe that the result of too many “miscombined” meals is a backlog of undigested food in the stomach. They believe that this can lead to chronic conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, acne, and many other ailments believed to originate with an unclean colon.

And the most important:

Many of the assumptions used to justify food combining are not supported by biological and medical science, and there is currently little evidence supporting real-world success for these theories. One randomized controlled trial has been reported in the peer-reviewed medical literature, which found no evidence that food-combining principles were effective in promoting weight loss.

Food for thought.