Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone had any experience with Gironda’s food mixing ideas?
Basically, from what I understand, he advocated eating protein and fat together as they dissolved in an acid environment, and carbs separately as they digested in an alkali state (I’m sure this could be refuted). So an acid meal could be say steak and egs, and an alkali meal like milk and toast. Protein powder was to be eaten with cream (acidic). Anybody have any experience of this? Or any good sites about Gironda.
I recently bought an e-book about Gironda for $20 from www.criticalbench.com/Gironda - I would not reccomned this book.
There are four rules
1)Do not combine concentrated carbs and concentrated protein at the same meal.
2)Do not combine concentrated starch with concentrated protein. (I am aware this is the same as 1)
3)Do not combine concentrated starch with fruit, especially citrus fruit.
4)Do not combine concetrated protein (meat or powder) with milk.
I remember paul chek once saying that this principle is hogwash unless you have a severely compromised digestive system. I don’t mean to flame here, those are his words, not mine. he based he statement on the idea that early man did not have the luxury of worrying about food combining, that he had to eat what was ever available to him at the time.
my feelings on the subject are that given the poor quality of most of the food out there, there may be some value to this concept at certain times of the year. Remember, that Gironda talks in one of his books about eating a vegan type diet for a couple of weeks to detoxify the body from too much meat consumption and modern living. I don’t know how guys like berardi feel about this but it seems like it would be a good idea in order to give the digestive system a rest.
This sounds just like Don Lemmon’s book…His rule are the same basically but when you eat diary foods, you must eat zero percent fat cheese …milk etc so they are considered
a carb food. Remeber only protein and fats and carbs alone. I tried it and actually lost weight even though I was eating carbs alone…The good point about food seperation is that it gets people to consume more protein and fats in their diet…If you tell the average person to eat carbs and protein…they may pig out on the carbs and skimp on the protein…His way of eating has you eating at least 3 P+F meals a day…
Vince Gironda is old school… very old school. I would assume that some of his ideas are not… umm… current.
Like drinking protein shakes mixed with cream. Maybe okay if you’re a skinny bastard, but for everyone else it’s a lot of calories you probably don’t want.
Vince Gironda is from an era where weight trainers were “physical culturists” and they advocated stuff like supplementing with bee pollen and dessicated liver and brewers’ yeast and wheat germ.
Your Vince Gironda book is probably 30 to 40 years old, and while he had some interesting and unique training concepts, I’d bet that not everything in the book has stood the test of time.
If I were you, I’d try to look for the current wisdom in training, as a lot of advances in training and nutrition philosophy have been made since Vince Gironda’s heyday. I’m not dismissing everything Vince says out of hand, and you may even respond extremely well to his programs. The basics are still the basics, and so on, but my point is that we definitely know more about training and nutrition now, than we did back then.