This article is not about the last dinner for a man scheduled for execution on “Death Row” nor is it about “The Last Supper” of Jesus Christ and his apostles the night before his crucifixion. This is about how many people, elderly men in particular invite their own death by the choices they made on the last meal of their life and how you can avoid this personal tragedy.

Junk food

The American diet is notorious for being too high in salt or sodium, too high in saturated fat, replete with modified food starch, hydrogenated vegetable oils, sugar, corn sweetener, adulterants, and flavoring. Even though in the “Land of Plenty” Americans can eat enough to get over weight it is that very diet that kills them. However, it is possible to bypass many of these problems with not only with proper diet but proper food combining which I will demonstrate here as being perhaps one of the biggest causes of the “Fatal Last Meal Syndrome”.

Prone to distress

Aging Americans are the most vulnerable to the fatal last meal syndrome due to their deteriorating digestive tracts, accumulations of undigested food in their intestines, and pre-existing conditions they may or may not be taking prescriptions for, not to mention the side effects of those medications. So, is it surprising that a large number of elderly men have succumbed to that fatal last meal when it didn’t have to be that way?

It begins

You are an elderly man in your late 60’s and you’ve come from that generation of meat and potatoes eaters. Never was much emphasis on fiber, cholesterol reduction, introducing natural food into the diet, hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, steak, macaroni and cheese, are probably your mainstay preferences. You’re wondering why you are getting heart burn or acid reflux more regularly forcing you to take antacids or other symptom relievers that further compromise your digestive tract.

Ignorance is not bliss

You’ve never even heard of proper food combining which many doctors have observed that if foods were taken in the proper order or combinations a human could extend his or her life expectancy 20 years. The truth is that the human digestive system can only secrete one digestive enzyme at a time and eating a mixture of different proteins, sugars, fats, carbohydrates, and liquor can cause putrefaction, or rot of the food emitting toxins into the digestive system when these wrong combined foods delayed from being processed by the stomach and intestinal tract. In an elderly person suffering from digestive deficiency this can lead to death and the sudden end of life from that last fatally destructive meal.

How the body works

Your saliva contains an enzyme know as ptyalin. It works on sugars and carbohydrates. To digest meat, cheese, fish, poultry, the body must secrete another digestive enzyme, proteinase. Other supporting enzymes can only be released singularly, so you can see why that the proper introduction of the right food at the right time is essential in getting a timely digestive process in order.

https://youtu.be/eHlyjSm0eR4

Without it as in the words of George Harrison in the song “Savoy Truffle” singing “You might not feel it now but, when the pain cuts through You're going to know and how
The sweat is going to fill your head
When it becomes too much
You're going to shout aloud”

What is sweet now turns so sour.

Here’s the scenario re-enacted so many times willingly by an older man or woman with a compromised digestive system who played a part in their own demise by the very food choices they made. You went to the Steak House where you ordered your favorite sirloin or Porter House cut, you got a baked potato with all the trimmings sour cream, cheddar cheese, bacon bits, and chives. You also got a side salad with a creamy dressing like blue cheese or buttermilk dressing, then came the two preceding alcohol drinks before eating either wine or mixed alcohol “High Balls”. Of course you ordered a desert. Perhaps, key lime pie, cream cheese cake, or a fudge volcano, all rich in fats and concentrated sugars.

Culinary suicide

Alcohol suppresses digestion for a period of time and you had that first if not another drink during the meal, which only prolonged digestion. Then came the salad with creamy fat laden dressing. Then came the main plate, your saturated fat cut of steak with plenty of marbling for juicy tenderness and you ate this along with your fattening and carbohydrate filled baked potato. To top it all off you finished up with that sugary fattening desert which once again stopped digestion of the protein and carbohydrates already delayed by the alcohol consumption. When you went home, tired for the toll taken upon you by your weakened digestive tract you felt sleepy.

The midnight siege

Suddenly, you were awakened that night with digestive distress! You had heart burn and acid reflux throwing digestive acid into your esophagus and nostrils. You sit upright choking and run to the toilet as you feel as though you are about to vomit. The strain of vomiting is one of the worst stressors you can put on every organ in the thoracic cavity, it strains the heart, lungs, and stomach among other organs. As you painfully expel everything you ate for dinner you have just unleashed enough trauma upon your upper chest to kick off a heart attack. After relief from the vomiting you might not even know that you had a heart attack until later on when you go back to sleep and die while unconscious. This is all too familiar a scenario in American life where we have many nutrient dense choices to eat, but little knowledge of how to safely consume it!

Better choices

These are the rules of proper food combining and how you should have eaten your last meal though you could have made much better choices such as broiled fish and green vegetables, or chicken and rice, maybe even a turkey dish with steamed vegetables not to mention a chef salad because at your age, you should eat accordingly.

The proper order of food combining

Since your saliva contains ptyalin, the alcohol should have been consumed first. Allowing time to assimilate then your desert should have been the next thing to be eaten, allowing time for that to digest. The baked potato would have come next requiring proteinase and lipase in order to be digested properly. Once again allowing time for this food to be processed. The last thing, the main course, should have been eaten last the steak and salad. This would have been the proper order in which to eat the variety of different foods that made up the meal, and even this would not totally ensure that some digestive distress could have resulted because of an aging digestive system weakened by a lifetime of poor eating habits, but it would have been the proper order with which to eat all of the ingredients of the meal. But, had you eaten this meal in the proper order it might have saved your life.

Final thoughts

Personally, I have found that I sleep much better and don’t get acid reflux when I have a big salad for dinner with romaine lettuce, avocado, shredded cheese, some low fat meat like turkey, bell pepper, tomato, and celery. You can even make your own fresh salad dressing such as honey and mustard, both good for the digestive system. Not only the fresh enzymes of the vegetables but the fiber make the perfect combination of digestible elements to a meal that will precede 8 or more hours of fasting. If people ate more like this there would be less casualties associated with improper diet and the discomfort and digestive stress that accompany poor diet and food combining. Other options before bedtime could have been fruit, oatmeal, cream of wheat, or other bland and simple forms of food, easy to digest, easy to stomach without creating acid reflux or heart burn.