It’s summertime, so that means the best thing about the season has arrived: the food! This time of the year is when the best fruits are in season to grow. Strawberries, oranges, watermelons, mangos, and more, are summer staples that everyone uses for all sorts of concoctions. You can make smoothies, fruit salads, pies, and cobblers, and even add them to your other foods. These sweet, and juicy foods are the perfect way to enjoy your summer fun but there is something you need to be aware of when consuming all these fruits at the same time. They may taste good and make the perfect combinations, but these perfect combinations can be deadly, especially for your health.
Why You Shouldn’t Mix Your Fruit
Again, summertime is all about what you can make with the different types of fruit the season has to offer and as tasty and fulfilling as some of these creations might be, they can also be extremely dangerous overtime. As nutritious and beneficial as fruit can be, there are a few reasons why you should not mix your fruits.
The first reason is that combining fruits can be harmful and have a huge impact on your digestive system and other parts of your health as well. Fruits fall into four different classes: neutral, sweet, high water content and acidic. Since different fruits are categorized in these different classes, mixing these classes can cause serious and chronic damage to your body.
Fruit with high water content, will not digest properly with other fruits categorized in the other classes. Mixing starchy fruits (bananas) with high protein fruits(avocado, kiwi, etc.) is also a deadly combination because the body needs an acidic base to digest protein and an alkaline base to break down the starches. Fruits like these, combined together, do not allow the body to break down the food the way it needs to. This includes simply eating fruits like these together in something as a fruit salad or acai bowl.
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How Too Many Acidic Fruits Can Lead To Heart Failure
Not only are certain fruit combinations bad for your digestive system, but they can lead to heart failure as well. This is due to these fruits having high levels of acidity in them.
The body has and needs a regulated pH balance in order to function properly, and consuming foods with high acidity levels will throw off the body’s pH.
Acidic fruits obviously have high acidity levels and when they are consumed and begin to decompose in your body, these foods start to alkalinize in your body. Once fruits begin to alkalinize in your body, that means that they are helping your body regulate its acidity levels, which is a good thing and expected of fruit. That’s how they benefit you.
Here’s the catch, even though some fruits have high acidity levels and they are considered alkalizing (a good thing for your body), the initial acidity levels from these fruits can cause symptoms such as ulcers and reflux or worsen your symptoms of a preexisting disease or medical issue. Too much acidic fruit and these symptoms can later lead to heart disease.
4 Fruit Combinations You Should Not Recreate
Now that you know you’re not supposed to mix fruits, it’s time to learn which fruit combos you should steer clear of. Here are 4 fruit combinations you should not recreate:
1. Mixing any type of melon with other fruits
Melons are high in water content so mixing them with other fruits won’t allow the other fruits to digest properly and as fast as melons do.
2. Strawberries and bananas
High acidic fruits such as strawberries, grapefruits, apples, etc should not be mixed with sweet fruits such as bananas because it leads to digestive problems, acidosis and more.
3. Papaya and lemon
Mixing papaya and lemon is dangerous and can lead to anemia and can be deadly for children.
4. Mixing fruits and vegetables together
Combining vegetables and fruits is also not good for the body because the high sugar contents of fruits can affect the digestive process of vegetables, so try not to eat them at the same time.
Low Acidic Fruits And How To Incorporate Them Into Your Diet
Mangos, avocados, dates, and even papayas are all fruits with low acidic levels that you can eat to lower the risk of future medical problems. The easiest way to incorporate them into your diet is simply by eating them how they come instead of mixing them together.
Using this article as a guide is helpful as well because now that you know the basis of what fruits you should lower your intake of and which ones shouldn’t be mixed together, you can begin to make your own recipes of smoothies and fruit bowls that are safer for your body.
As good as some common fruit combos are, they can be very dangerous and cause future health problems, so make sure you’re still getting your daily fruit intake, just be more mindful about what you’re putting together.