Have you had your meal the right way?
Don’t combine two carbohydrates, two proteins or don’t combine carbohydrates and proteins…. So, do not eat chapattis with rice or yogurt with dal or do not combine roti with dal or non veg. and so on… Such novel
approaches to dieting also called combination diets, seem to have gained in popularity in the last few years. These are based on the principle of segregating macronutrients like proteins and carbohydrates.
They claim that when carbohydrates and proteins are eaten together, their enzymes cancel each other out, halting the digestive process and causing weight gain. Such an approach not only creates confusion with respect to healthy eating messages, but can also lead to compromised nutrition over a period of time.
While food combination diets may help you lose weight to some extent because of the reduction in your daily intake due to the elimination of numerous foods and food groups, they are based on non-scientific principles.
Foods are usually a combination of nutrients, including carbohydrates, proteins and fats in various proportions. For example, cereals, pulses, dairy and nuts are a combination of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that they cannot be digested successfully.
Combining different food groups and encouraging variety within each food group is one way of ensuring that your body gets all the nutrients it needs. For instance, having multigrain flour chapattis with vegetables, dal and yogurt is far superior nutritionally than just doing a wheat chapatti with vegetables within the same calories. Also, a combination of pulses or dals with chapatti helps make a complete protein as both are incomplete individually — a principle called the complementary value of protein.
Such diets thus neither encourage healthy eating nor establish safe and permanent weight loss. They are not easy to follow long-term and can be counterproductive, if followed for long durations. The key to healthy weight loss is to reduce calorie intake, eat less fat, control portion sizes, and be more physically active.
The writer is a well-known clinical nutritionist and Director, Whole Foods India
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