Prevent Travelers' Diarrhea

If ever there was a food fit for a wanderer dead set on avoiding travelers' diarrhea, it would be fruit.

Take a beautiful nam dok mai mango. It's outer skin protects it from contamination, and inside it's 83 percent water. That water has been purified by the roots of the the mango tree as well as the thousands of soil microorganisms and other plants inside the tree's interconnected root network exchange.

Rather than eating dry meat or grains, which make you thirsty, why not eat a food that contributes to your hydration? By eating water-rich fruit, and avoiding the many dry foods that suck water from your body during their rehydration and digestion, you'll need to drink less water eating raw foods, meaning you don't need to worry as much about having pure drinking water on hand at all times.

For the purposes of honesty, I should note I once feasted almost entirely on dragon fruit for several weeks when they came into season, which was my first large-scale exposure to them. I had a very minor bit of diarrhea after a few days of eating them by the bagful, and I actually wondered if my no-sickness streak had come to an end because I'd just drank some sketchy water. After awhile It became apparent I was just eating way too many dragon fruit. I cut back on them and the diarrhea disappeared. Because it was so minor a case and didn't cause me to curtail my activities, I don't consider it worthy of classification as a sickness.

The skin of a fruit offers good protection (although not complete. Animal waste carrying ecoli sometimes gets on fruit), and some have very thick rinds like watermelon. While I'm a bit more careful with fruits which have skin you traditionally eat, like apples, I have so far proven impossible to sicken via fruit.

I've eaten some very ripe nam wa bananas in Cambodia with their skins partially knocked off and fruit flies buzzing about them lustfully. They were also sitting on the dirt floor in a rather smelly and unsanitary market.

After cutting off a few of the more questionable areas, I dove right in, and suffered no ill effects. I'm pretty convinced that as long as I avoid the fermented and dirty stuff, I'll be fine, and I've had plenty of dodgy-looking fruits that turned out to be amazing.

Besides being free of contamination in most instances, fruit also doesn't need to be cooked, which damages food. Human processing is where people are most likely to pick up sicknesses, as even vegan food can be chopped on dirty surfaces or cooked (and undercooked, for that matter) in contaminated pots.

However, the important idea is that raw food is healthy food, and it's going to leave your system healthier and better able to deal with any issues that come up than if you're eating cooked junk from a stall.

Travelers' Diarrhea: Eat Smart