Travel Health

There’s no point in eating refined foods. White sugar, white bread and white pasta are inventions that please the tongue at the expense of the rest of your stomach. They have no vitamins, they’re harder to digest and you need to eat more of then to feel full. It take some time to learn to love whole grain foods but you’ll be twice as healthy.

Whole wheat bread is the shit http://www.flickr.com/photos/9439733@N02/

Don’t overeat. Really, you don’t need to eat more than two good meals a day with some fruit and nuts as snacks in between. If you do overeat you end up with this long traffic jam of food trying to make its way through your digestive system.

When you eat chew your food. The smaller it gets then the more surface area it has and the easier your stomach can break it down.

Drink plenty of water but not with your meals. If you drown your food with a litre of drink while you eat the you’ll dilute the whole digestive process so that your meal won’t get broken down properly.

Learn which foods go together. In particular don’t eat lots of fruit with your meals. Fruit is excellent but is best eaten alone. It’s digested really fast whilst bread and meat take a long time so they shouldn’t both be in the stomach at the same time.

Chewing food helps digestion http://www.flickr.com/photos/feria/

You can go a bit crazy on the food-combining thing (remember the Atkins diet) but in general you don’t want to combine lots of meat and fish with dairy.

A popular theory is that of the stone age diet. When vegetables are cooked they lose their natural enzymes and so the idea is that you should eat only raw foods to stay healthy.

But faced with the choice during a blizzard of a carrot salad or a warm soup and your intuition will lead the way. Raw foods are very good for you but especially in the evening you should eat something warming.

Natural yogurt is good in moderation. It’s especially good if you’ve eaten something too spicy.

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