I have also read many times that it's best to never drink liquids and eat at the same time and also to separate your foods. Think of your digestive as what it basically is, a complex chemical machine...
First lets start with why you should not drink liquids while eating. The reason being is, as you eat you start to fill your stomach with chewed macerated food particulates and the enzymes from your saliva. This is the first part of the process and the enzymes from the saliva begin to breakdown the food as well as chewing sends signals to your gut to start an increased amount of acid production as to further breakdown the incoming food. When you drink liquids at the same time, you begin to not only fill your stomach, which in turn raises the food contents further up towards the esophagus but you are also beginning to dilute the acid content the body is producing to break down your meal.
As for separating your foods, think of each food items as a chemical compound just like in science class. Every food has a complex molecular structure that needs certain biochemicals to breakdown. It's kind of like the process used in chemistry to separate things into like materials. The process for stripping gold leaf off of a computer memory chip for example, requires specific chemicals in a particular order to target each element for separation, as to end up with nothing but the gold leaf separated from the rest of the material. Our digestion is kind of the same process. The more complex the food molecules, the more complex the bio chemicals are needed to separate each food type properly as to break it down into the form the body can absorb, which in turn puts a larger strain on the digestive tract at any given time. By separating your food groups and eating them at separate times for example, you are creating less work for your body to break that one specific type of food down at any given time. This is also why you will hear people say to eat smaller more frequent meals throughout the day rather than 3 big meals. You may have also heard people refer to a Low FODMAP diet. What this diet is basically, are foods that have the simplest molecular structure which make it much easier for digestion as it requires less work to break down. Hope this helps explain things a little more. It's obviously all way much more complicated than this including many other factors but this should give you a basic idea of the overall process and some little things can really make a difference overall in our digestive health.
Post Edited (OrangeStarburst) : 11/1/2017 4:52:14 AM (GMT-6)