Healthy eating myths

90% of the "healthy eating pitfalls" you have stepped on are not about eating the wrong food, but about taking fragmented conclusions from extreme scenarios as universal rules and applying them to your own individual situation.

Last week, I accompanied a 23-year-old girl to the nutrition department for a follow-up consultation. She ate boiled vegetables and boiled chicken breasts for four months in order to lose weight. Her aunt postponed it for three months, and her hair fell so wide that she could insert a finger in it. She still blamed herself for being "not self-disciplined enough and couldn't help but occasionally drink milk tea to keep me from losing weight." When you say this is a loss, you are stepping on the misunderstanding that "healthy diet must be extremely light and reject all happy foods."

The most controversial topic on the Internet right now is "Is carbohydrates the culprit of gaining weight?" In fact, both sides are right. The cases cited by supporters of ketogenic and low-carb diets are indeed true: many people lose body fat quickly after short-term carbon control and feel energetic. For some people with severe obesity and insulin resistance, doctors will also use extremely low-carb programs to assist with adjustments in the short term. But if you ask clinical nutritionists in public tertiary hospitals, nine out of ten would not recommend that ordinary people maintain a very low-carbohydrate state with a daily carbohydrate intake of less than 50g for a long time. I met a young man who worked on an algorithm before. He followed the trend of ketosis for three months, lost 20 pounds, and his uric acid soared to 580 μmol/L. He had gout in the middle of the night and was taken to the hospital by his roommate. He thought that as long as he persisted, he could have the "perfect body with a body fat rate of 10%" like the ones online.

What is more unfair than refusing to eat certain types of food across the board is to impose dietary rules specifically for specific groups of people on ourselves. Let’s just talk about the “eight glasses of water a day” that everyone has heard of. This standard was originally set for adult men who weigh about 70kg and engage in light physical labor at room temperature. If you have chronic kidney disease, or you have drank two large cups of milk tea, eaten hot pot with soup and water, and still drank 2000ml, it would be strange if you don’t get edema. Last month, my mother listened to a health program that said "eight glasses of water a day to detoxify" and drank it for a week. Her face was swollen like a freshly steamed custard bun. After going to the hospital for a checkup, it was found that her metabolism was slow, and drinking too much water increased the burden on her kidneys.

There is also the "drinking porridge to nourish the stomach" that has been passed down for decades and is also popular. Gastroenterologists do ask patients after gastric ulcers and gastrectomy to drink white porridge and rice soup for a period of time during the recovery period to reduce the digestive burden on the gastrointestinal tract. However, if you have gastroesophageal reflux or are diabetic, drinking pulpy white porridge every day will not be worth the candle. The GI value of this kind of porridge can reach over 80, which is similar to drinking sugar water. Drinking it will increase the blood sugar level, and it will also stimulate gastric acid secretion and aggravate reflux. In the past two years, my grandma always complained of stomach discomfort, so she made plain porridge every day. As a result, she woke up in the middle of the night after drinking acid reflux water. When she went to see a doctor, she found out that she had reflux esophagitis. Drinking too much porridge actually slowed down her recovery.

By the way, there is also the rumored "food conflict". Eating crabs and persimmons together will cause poisoning, and eating spinach and tofu together will cause stones. I was greedy last autumn. After eating two hairy crabs, I gnawed on a frozen persimmon. Nothing happened. Most of the so-called "mutual conflict" cases were caused by poor food storage conditions in the past, and eating spoiled food caused stomach upset, so they were given the name of "mutual conflict". Now anyone with some knowledge of food hygiene will not believe this.

I have been doing nutritional consulting for almost six years, and I have met too many people who use the "healthy eating schedule" and "perfect meal ratio chart" on the Internet to stop eating. After eating one more biscuit, they become extremely anxious and feel that all their previous efforts have been wasted. In fact, there is really no need. Healthy eating is a long-term general direction, not a mathematical problem accurate to the gram. If you work overtime every day this week and eat high-fat takeaways, cook vegetables and stew pork ribs soup at home on the weekends, it will be good to supplement some dietary fiber and high-quality protein. ； Occasionally having a hot pot or a cup of iced milk tea at a gathering with friends will not have any impact on your health at all as long as it is not done every day. On the contrary, if you blame yourself for taking a sip of milk tea and spend half a day emotionally drained, the harm to your body will be much greater than that cup of milk tea.

To put it bluntly, there is no one-size-fits-all template for healthy eating. Someone else’s effective prescription may be a trap for you. Instead of reading various health posts every day and following the trend and changing recipes, it is better to have a serious physical examination every year to check your blood lipids, blood sugar, and uric acid indicators, and adjust your diet according to your physical condition. If you eat comfortably and have normal indicators, it will be more effective than any "Internet celebrity healthy recipes".