Diet taboo books

More than 70% of the dietary taboo books on the market are a mixture of experience summaries, traffic gimmicks and commercial marketing, and less than 30% of the contents have been rigorously verified by traditional medicine systems or modern evidence-based nutrition.； Ordinary people should first check the clinical/nutrition professional background of the author when purchasing, and avoid publications with extreme statements such as "absolutely not" and "eating together will cause poisoning" throughout the article. All content must be combined with their own physical reference and must not be copied blindly.

A while ago, I was helping my mother organize the bookshelf on the balcony, and I found three books on dietary taboos with wrinkled covers. The answers to the same question were very different: one said that eating seafood and vitamin C together is equivalent to swallowing arsenic, one said that as long as you don’t eat dozens of kilograms of seafood + more than ten kilograms of pure vitamin C, you can’t reach the toxic dose at all, and another one didn’t mention this topic at all. Last time, my mother believed the story in the first book and on the day she bought two kilograms of prawns, she gave all the five kilograms of navel oranges I had just stocked up to the neighbor across the street. When she found out the truth, she regretted it for several days, complaining that the sweet oranges she had spent a long time picking out were in vain.

What’s interesting is that the dietary taboo books currently circulating on the market can actually clearly distinguish three different sources of content, and their opinions sometimes even conflict.

Most of the taboos written by authors who follow the traditional Chinese medicine route are supported by classics. For example, in "Synopsis of the Golden Chamber", there are long-standing sayings such as "eating cold food with ice on human teeth" and "crabs should not be eaten with persimmons". These are essentially reminders corresponding to specific physical constitutions: People with a weak spleen and stomach digest their food by themselves. Eating persimmons with weak energy and high tannic acid content and cold crabs together can easily cause abdominal pain and diarrhea. However, many books directly cut off the premise and turned it into "everyone must not eat this way", forcibly turning the summary of syndrome differentiation experience into a one-size-fits-all iron rule.

The reliable contents of books that follow the modern nutrition route are basically supported by experimental data. For example, during an acute attack of gout, high-purine foods should be avoided, and diabetics should strictly control their refined sugar intake. These are clinically proven taboos. However, many popular publications will directly change "not recommended for high-risk groups" to "not recommended for everyone." In order to attract attention, the scope of application is infinitely expanded, but it misleads people.

Nearly half of the remaining books are basically manuscripts saved by traffic accounts. They copied bits and pieces here and there, and even tied the zodiac metaphysics and diet together. Last time I read a book that said, "People born in the year of the horse cannot eat donkey meat, and people born in the year of the rat should not eat crabs."

A young girl who had just graduated previously sent me a private message, saying that she had read a book on dietary taboos written by an Internet celebrity, saying that eating beans and meat together would increase the burden on the gastrointestinal tract and induce obesity. She gave up meat for half a year and only ate vegetables and grains. As a result, her physical examination revealed that she was moderately anemic, and her face was so sallow that her colleagues thought she was seriously ill. I went to the nutrition department for consultation and found out that the author of that book had no relevant professional background at all. He was just a cross-border blogger who gained followers by selling anxiety, and he didn’t even have a public nutritionist certificate.

When I help my friends choose this kind of book, I usually turn to the reference column behind the copyright page first. If even the core journal articles and classic medical classics cited are not listed, and the whole article is full of "expert opinions" and "research confirmation" and I can't tell which expert and which study, I just put it back on the bookshelf. If you flip through a few pages of the text, if the words "carcinogenic", "poisoning" and "fatal" are not mentioned in a single sentence, and if there is no mention of the target group and conditions, then it is basically a leek-cutting publication. Buying it back will do nothing but add anxiety to yourself. On the contrary, those books that clearly state at the beginning that "the following taboos are only for people with weak spleen and stomach" and "the standards can be appropriately relaxed during the remission period of gout" are often much more reliable.

To put it bluntly, when it comes to diet, your body's reaction will always be more reliable than what is written in the book. If you have been eating a certain combination for 20 or 30 years without any problems, don’t suddenly stop trying it because of a sentence in a certain book. ； If you really have a basic disease, it is much better to ask your attending doctor with a book than to figure it out at home. After all, you buy books to eat well, not to burden yourself with a bunch of rules and regulations, right?