Salad hard to digest?

[caity]

Hi! My dear friend in Santa Barbara recently had the stomach-stapling surgery. Yikes! Anyway, she told me that her doctor recommended that she not eat red meat since it's hard to digest (I could have told her that) and ditto about salad. She can't eat salad because it doesn't digest well????

I didn't question her, but I vowed to post this on GenerationV's board, since I think her doctor is wrong, wrong, wrong about salad. Someone please tell me I'm not going insane.

~Caity

[mike]

Perhaps it's because the cell walls of the raw salad ingredients are still somewhat whole and it take takes awhile for the proicess of digestion to break down the cell walls? But if you chewed your food well that would help in the digestion process no matter if its raw or cooked. That's my guess.

[tammy]

Gosh, I hope your friend has a speedy recovery. Do you think now is a good time to give her a great veg cookbook ?

[kooknotcook]

Caity-
Raw foods, incl. salad veggies are much easier to digest than cooked, as the enzymes do much of the digesting for you. One of the modern raw food movement's predecessors, Max Bircher-Benner,MD, got started after a raw diet saved a patient who was dying because they couldn't digest anything; cooked, that is. Oils people put on salads are another matter, as they are enzyme-less, hence hard to digest. High-fat foods are the hardest to digest, generally, raw or cooked-as well as the most fattening. Sometimes when people switch to a high-fiber diet (eg: plant-based, esp. raw) they get some gas for a while which they may misinterpret as "hard to digest" but it's just changes in gut flora, goes away.
-Jordan