Dietary taboos and food conflicts

99% of the "food conflict charts" circulated in your circle of friends and family groups have no scientific basis. The dietary taboos that really require vigilance are never the sensational combination of "eating shrimp and vitamin C together is equivalent to eating arsenic", but individualized principles that are strongly bound to your physical condition, food processing methods, and consumption.

In the photo album on my mother’s mobile phone, I still have a compatibility chart sent by a relative three years ago. The colorful grids are neatly arranged. One of them reads, “Potatoes + bananas will cause stains if eaten together.” I believed this for five or six years when I was a child. Until last summer, my aunt who set up a stall selling wolf-toothed potatoes gave me a banana. I squatted on the roadside and chewed potatoes and bananas. After eating for three days, I didn’t see many moles on my face. My mother even forgot that she had saved this chart.

What’s interesting is that most of these miraculous mutually exclusive combinations can be traced back to cases from early years that were infinitely amplified. The most famous "crab + persimmon = poisoning", if you really need to look into it carefully, nine times out of ten, either the crab was not steamed for 15 minutes, and the Vibrio parahaemolyticus was not killed, or the raw persimmon was eaten without deastringency, the tannic acid content is so high that it pricks the mouth, or the spleen and stomach are weak, and eating two cold foods on an empty stomach is easy to cause stomach upset, so if they are put together, they will be labeled as "compatible".

I would also like to talk about different viewpoints here. Many people who agree with the theory of traditional Chinese medicine will mention the idea that food has "opposite nature and taste". In fact, this is completely different from the "mutual conflict poisoning" spread on the Internet. The conflict of sex and flavor mentioned in Chinese medicine is a reminder for people with specific physical constitutions: For example, if you are a person with yang deficiency and are afraid of cold, and usually have diarrhea after eating something cold, you will definitely feel gastrointestinal discomfort if you drink half a bottle of cold beer after eating ice watermelon. This is not because watermelon and beer are incompatible, but because the two cold foods are piled together, which amplifies your own physical problems. If you eat like this for someone with a high internal heat, you may feel quite comfortable. As for some people moving the "eighteen anti-nineteen fears" in the compatibility of traditional Chinese medicine into daily diet, that is even more pretentious and is not an application scenario at all.

To tell the truth, a few years ago, the Chinese Nutrition Society conducted an experiment on 16 groups of "compatible foods" that were most popular on the Internet. They found 120 healthy volunteers who ate them for a week, from "crab + persimmon" to "spinach + tofu" to "shrimp + vitamin C". None of them had any abnormal reactions. Later, everyone discovered that the earliest batch of folk foods were mostly made up by small publishers in the 1980s and 1990s in order to sell low-cost health pamphlets. No matter how sensational they were, they were spread for decades and became the "health bible" of many people.

I have been through this trap myself before. Two years ago, before I was aware of my lactose intolerance, I drank iced milk and ate kiwi fruit just taken from the refrigerator. It lasted for two days. At that time, I took a photo and posted it on WeChat, saying that the two were incompatible. It was not until I drank iced milk alone that I also had diarrhea, and ate iced kiwi alone and sometimes got stomach upset. I realized that it was not a matter of combination at all - I just can't handle things that are too cold, and combined with lactose intolerance, it was just ice on top of ice. Now I warm the milk to 40 degrees, put the kiwi at room temperature, and then make a milkshake together. The milk is sour and sweet, and there are no problems.

If we really want to talk about food taboos worth remembering, they are not at all a general table with grids. Just like one-size-fits-all clothes cannot fit all body types, a universal compatibility chart cannot fit everyone's bodies: Gout patients cannot eat two kilograms of crayfish with beer, no matter what they wear, otherwise, no matter what you eat with cabbage or radish, your uric acid will spike. ； People who are allergic to mango will still get a rash even if they eat mango and tonics together. ； Sprouted potatoes, under-fried green beans, and fresh day lilies that have not been soaked. No matter what you eat, you may have a poisoning reaction. These are the things you really need to pay attention to.

Don’t think that saying this completely negates the rationality of diet. If you know that you will easily feel uncomfortable eating something, then try not to eat it together with foods that will increase the burden on your gastrointestinal tract. For example, if you eat glutinous food, it is easy to be indigestible. Don’t eat hard cold corn after eating rice dumplings. There is no need to carry it. As for those tables that say that eating a certain combination of two will immediately lead to poisoning or even death, just cross it out. If it were so dangerous, it would have been written into the food safety standards long ago. How could you get the gossip in the circle of friends to remind you.