If you’re a meat and potatoes kind of person, get some vegetables and fruit into your diet. An exclusively protein and starch diet will cause an unhealthy mix of bacteria in your bowels to flourish.If you like to have a big, cold glass of milk with every meal, including your steak and potatoes… don’t. Dairy products and meat protein are digested differently. Meat relies heavily on acid hydrolysis, that is, stomach acids break down protein into small pieces that can be further digested by enzymes. Dairy—milk—is alkaline. It neutralizes the acid in the stomach. While the stomach can fight back by producing more acid, sipping that cold milkshake while eating your triple-decker hamburger turns out to be a losing battle for meat-protein digestion. Meanwhile, the over-production of acid interferes with the enzymatic digestion of the milk products. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
There are those, even in the medical community, that might dispute some of the fine points of this analysis. Again, as stated early on in this book, we’re trying to avoid too much of the biology and chemistry except where little smatterings give you some perspective. If you doubt, conduct a poll. Next Christmas, when you walk into the bathroom after Cousin Harry has used it and you find the wallpaper peeling off, watch how he’s the one sipping the glass of milk while enjoying the spiral-cut ham.
Rather than belabor this point, the main message you should glean from this discussion is that horrid bathroom smell is not normal. It is a sign of digestive issues that, if left unresolved for long periods of time, can cause you to “suddenly” get a serious disease later in life.