Excellent site, long overdue.

Fruit has a high water content, so you would not really need to have water or fruit juices with the fruit.

You should also limit water during meals. Excess amounts can reduce the concentration of enzymes and thus affect the efficiency of digestion, especially ice-cold water or drinks.

If you eat a well-balanced diet consisting of a high amount of vegetables and fresh fruits, you will have a good enough water content in your diet already and will not need to drink excessive amounts of water whilst you are eating.

What should we drink with a meal?

With iron, both deficiency and excess lead to free-radical generation (the things that damage your cells). So you need to make absolutely sure that you are low in iron before using Vitamin C to increase the amount of iron absorbed in your diet.

Your body has a system that regulates iron absorption anyway. If you are deficient it will absorb more, if there is excess, it will prevent excessive absorption.

So what you need to do is get an iron test done to see if you really are deficient. bacteria, viruses, cancer all make use of iron, and excessive iron can be detrimental to you.

So regarding iron, check with your physician, nutritionist etc. that you really do need more iron. You can get tests done to ascertain this.

If you are iron-deficient and your body has problems absorbing iron from the diet, then you can make use of Vitamin C. You can get vitamin c powder that you can add to your meals, or just get Vitamin C tablets and take with your meal.

Further, many vegetables have a large amount of Vitamin C content, so you should formulate a meal that provides Vitamin C along with iron-containing foods. For example, carrot and lentil soup would be a good combination.

Other vegetables such as artichoke, broccoli, peppers (red and green), chives, coriander, cauliflower, spinach, tomatoes all have good levels of Vitamin C. So if you combine your meal properly, you would not need to take fruit after it.

Also bear in mind that cooking food leads to a loss in the amount of Vitamin C available. Steaming vegetables is better than cooking them.

I like eating dates (3) dipped in a little honey or raisins (7) first thing in the morning and then have a fruit. I also do this when I break my fast. Is this ok?

Is it true that citrus fruits and apples have high acid content and should not be taken on an empty stomach? Please comment.

Tx

Is there any Sunnah references as to eating fruit separate from a meal?

From what I know, this is greatly underestimating the digestive power of the human body. This concept of eating fruit separate from other meals is called food combining (should be called food separation). Fruits are a high source of sugar and some fruits like dates and mangoes have so much sugar, that they need some other sources like protein and fat to slow down the sugar spike that comes from eating such fruits. People who don't do well with carbs and diabetics, like many of us Muslims today, don't do that well with so much sugar.

As for the issue of food combining and food separation this is known from the Sunnah - Ibn al-Qayyim has some good speech in this regard from the practice of the Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wasallam) and we shall cover this in a separate article inshaa'Allaah.