Do you know that different types of foods digest at different rates? As such, food should be eaten in the correct order so that we do not encounter ineffective digestation. So what is the correct order?
For starters, better digestion can achieved by eating food which have roughly the same digestion time. Fruit digests the quickest, followed by greens, non-starchy vegetables, starches, then protein which digests the slowest.
Eating several food that digest at different rates together will compromise digestion as some foods start to rot and ferment in your body. Any quick-digesting food must wait until the slowest digesting food leave the stomach before they themselves can leave, a process which typically takes up to 6 to 8 hours. While waiting, the eaten food, which could be raw or/and cooked vegetables plus some of the starches undergo some decomposition and fermentation processes which produces gas, acid and some alcohol along with indigestion.
As such, our digestion will be smoother if we eat different food systematically. Eating the easiest or the quickest to digest food first before we go on to the more ‘complex’ ones would prevent a “food traffic jams” in our highway gut. Denser and less liquid food are harder to digest and take longer to pass completely through the digestive system. As a rule of thumb, it is advisable to eat the most ‘watery’ food first.