If you’re vacationing in a relatively undeveloped country, do your stomach a favor and follow these tips to keep your digestive system healthy.

1.     Skip the salad—and the fruit salad. Don’t eat vegetables that are not well cooked. Serve-yourself salad and food bars, in any country, are buffets of bacteria. The food sits out for hours. Dishes are often “married” together, meaning that restaurant workers combine leftover, potentially already-spoiling food with fresh hot food in a continual round robin of bacteria.

2.     Dust your food with powdered charcoal from activated charcoal capsules.

3.     Avoid consuming drinks or food bought from street vendors. These products are often contaminated with pathogens.

4.     Choose specific ethnic foods. The safest restaurants to frequent are Italian, Greek, Moroccan, Turkish, Lebanese, and Indian because of the use of pathogen-fighting garlic, oregano, and cayenne in these cuisines.

5.     Eat before a plane flight. Research shows that eating a snack before take off raises blood volume and helps keep you from feeling light headed or having circulatory problems while airborne. Try pumpkin seeds, which will not only parasite-proof your body but contain fats, protein, and carbs for blood sugar regulation. Don’t assume that water and food on a commercial airliner is safe to consume. Those items may have originated in the country from which a flight takes off.

Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author of 30 books on health and healing.