Jaime E Dy-Liacco. Trustee, Philippine College for the Advancement in Medicine
Former Director General, Philippine Institute of Traditional & Alternative Health Care, DOH
Tel. 632-924-2487, Fax 632-929-9173, email: mito@pacific.net.ph

 
Eating fruits for dessert is good, not bad for the digestion, depending on the fruit. Do not eat fruits that make the stomach alkaline because an alkaline stomach cannot digest food, and undigested food ferments and generates gas.

The stomach must be acidic, with a pH of 5.5, to digest food. That's why God made our stomachs secrete hydrochloric acid and pepsin which are digestive enzymes that make the stomach acidic.

Not for dessert. What are the fresh fruits (not cooked) that make the stomach alkaline? All citrus fruits, durian, pineapples, lanzones, lakatan bananas, cavendish bananas, green mangoes, unripe papayas, pears, langka or jackfruit, atis, just to name the more popular ones, and all canned fruits. Avoid them for dessert. They can bloat your stomach with gas from the fermenting undigested food.

OK for dessert. What are the fresh fruits (not cooked) that make the stomach acidic? Ripe, sweet mangoes, water melons, all other melons, raw ripe sabas, latondan bananas, grapes both green and red, mangosteen, santol, sampaloc, strawberries, guavas, chico, rambutan, pineapples sprinkled with rock salt (not table-refined salt which is synthetic and which will make the stomach even more alkaline than with pineapples alone), prunes both fresh and dried, ripe papayas, raw peaches, all kinds of apples, just to name the more popular ones. Eat these fruits for dessert. They will aid the digestion. Now you know why an apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Not all ice creams. There's another food, not a fruit, which makes the stomach acidic and therefore good for dessert, to aid the digestion. That's dark chocolate ice cream, like Selecta's Super Chocolate, Hagen Daz's Choco Chip and Belgian Chocolate, frozen yogurt's Black Forest.

Beware of sweeteners. All other ice cream flavors and all sugarless flavors with Nutrasweet like sugarfree frozen yogurt will make the stomach alkaline, so avoid them for dessert. In fact, avoid anything with Nutrasweet or aspartame, like diet soft drinks and Equal. The body converts aspartame into formaldehyde which is used for embalming corpses. It aggravates diabetes and can cause brain tumors.