A common misconception about a healthy diet is that it consists solely of eating healthy foods. But there is perhaps an even more important aspect of our diet than what we eat: what we eat it with.

Anyone who has had an elementary course in chemistry will know what happens when certain compounds are mixed together in an aqueous solution. If a reaction occurs it is because the elements are mixing and matching, breaking apart and forming new compounds. The same thing happens inside our stomachs; the only thing is we cannot see what is going on… or can we?

Sure science may catch up, and there is a branch of it called “trophology” or the study of food combinations, but it is mostly ignored by the mainstream anything; you kind of have to stumble upon it in order to learn about it. But perhaps there is another way to get insight into proper food combination: through the spiritual work.

One such person who could seemingly pierce the veil of the physical form without using a scalpel was a man named Edgar Cayce. Often called the “sleeping prophet” or the “father of holistic medicine”, Cayce was a man who, growing up in Kentucky, U.S.A. in the late 19th/early 20th centuries discovered (kind of haphazardly over a series of events) that he could put himself into a trance and when he was ready a person present in the room could ask him questions about just about anything. His work began by helping people physically with health problems, but he began to dig into their past lives, talk about Atlantis, and after a while people began to ask him about many things from the pyramids to future events to many other vast areas, and they found no matter what they asked him, he would have keen knowledge on it–and all this from a farm boy with an 8th grade education! He gave over 15,000 of these “readings” by the time he died in 1945, and left a legacy into which many have been studying to this day. I myself have been studying his well-documented readings on and off for about 17 years.

The focus of this article is on his health advice. When he would advise on diet, of course he advised plenty of fruits and vegetables, and against things such as fried foods, pork, red meat in excess, and so on–all things we are pretty aware of these days. But more importantly, almost always he would remind the reading recipient of proper food combinations. The mixing of certain foods he said was often more detrimental than just eating poorly to begin with. Some of the primary combinations he advised us to avoid are so common in modern diets that it is no wonder people have such unhealthy gastrointestinal tracts. What happens when we eat poor food combinations is that they don’t really digest properly, and when these formed toxins hit the intestines, there is a defense mechanism which blocks the toxins from being reabsorbed into the body: a mucous that lines the walls of the large intestines. After some time of eating poorly, this mucous builds up layer over layer and the old mucous doesn’t get washed out, it hardens… successfully blocking both toxins AND nutrients. This would result in improper assimilation. At that point even eating well would do little for us as we can’t even absorb the nutrients. Therefore, food combination is extremely important. It may not seem as though we are affected by some of the following food combination no-no’s but if they have been common in our diets it could just be that we are used to them and have a nice thick wall of mucous tar in our intestines. Seriously, this is a known fact. Years ago, Oprah even had some doctor peeling this tar away from an unhealthy intestinal wall of a cadaver on television to show the seriousness of it.

Some of the huge combination no-no’s according to Cayce are:

• Citrus + cereal
• Citrus + dairy
• Meat + starch   (huge no-no! meat and taters anyone?!)
• Meat + dairy (didn’t harp on this as much as meat+starch)
• Raw apples + anything (raw apples only to be taken if the only source of food for 2 or 3 days as part of the apple diet)

Of course, there are many things which seem to mix well with almost anything, such as most vegetables. Also note that high quality whole grain breads are similar to light proteins in digestion, so they do not fall under the meat+starch category as much as something like potatoes, white bread, etc. Raw pears mix with most foods and are much better than apples and were often recommended by Cayce as an easy way to alkalize the system. Bananas were only recommended if very ripe. Tomatoes which are not vine ripened are said to be toxic, while tomatoes which are vine ripened are very good. Of course lettuce, celery, and carrots are the dietary staple which if eaten daily in generous amounts will, according to Cayce, make us virtually immune to most illnesses.