How to avoid dietary taboos

The core logic of avoiding dietary taboos is actually "not blindly following online rules, anchoring authoritative evidence first, and then matching personal physical conditions." This is not something that can be done by memorizing hundreds of mutual restraint tables.

Two years ago, my aunt got some food from some unknown place and put it in the middle of the refrigerator door. Even cucumber mixed with peanuts, a dish that has been passed down for decades, is not allowed to be made by the family because it hurts the spleen. Last time at the family dinner, the junior secretly mixed a plate, and she found out after eating two big chopsticks. She was so nervous. In the afternoon, I filled a thermos cup with hot water, but nothing happened. Later, I went to the nutrition department for a physical examination and asked the doctor specifically. I found out that only people who have a particularly weak spleen and stomach and have diarrhea when eating cold food may suffer from gastrointestinal discomfort if they eat a large amount of iced cucumbers and fried peanuts at the same time. It is not a taboo for ordinary people to eat normally. I used to help a friend who works in science popularization compile no less than 20 versions of dietary taboo lists posted online, and 90% of them found no rigorous academic support. Those messy taboo lists are like folk remedies that have not been clinically verified. They look logical, but in fact most of them are untenable. They are either made up by eye-catching marketing accounts, or they amplify someone's special reaction into rules that everyone must abide by.

In fact, many of the mythical dietary taboos are essentially treating extreme cases as universal rules, and many of them are even controversial. Let’s talk about whether spinach and tofu can be eaten together. Some people say that the oxalic acid in spinach will combine with the calcium in tofu to form calcium oxalate, which can easily induce stones. The opposing view is that blanching spinach for 1 minute in advance can remove more than 70% of the calcium oxalate. Even if there is a small amount of residual oxalic acid combined with calcium in the intestines and stomach, it will be excreted directly from the body with the feces. It has no chance of running into the kidneys to form stones. On the contrary, it can also reduce the body's absorption of oxalic acid, which is more friendly to people with high uric acid. If you really regard these controversial views as black and white taboos, you will miss out on many delicious and nutritious combinations.

In the past few years, the Chinese Nutrition Society has done special science on food interactions. Currently, there are no "universal dietary taboos" that have been verified through rigorous experiments. Most of the cases of combination poisoning reported online are either food poisoning caused by the food itself deteriorating or not being cleaned properly, or the eater himself has food allergies, underlying diseases, or ate too much at one time, which has nothing to do with the combination itself.

If we really talk about the taboos that need to be paid attention to, they are all personalized rules that "vary from person to person". For example, for people who are allergic to mangoes, they cannot touch mangoes, but for people who are not allergic, it is okay to eat half a day.； There is also the common problem of diarrhea after drinking milk. It is not because of the conflict with milk, but because of lactose intolerance. It can be solved by switching to zero lactose milk. Even the dietary requirements for basic diseases are not so absolute. For example, whether patients with gout can eat soy products has been debated for many years. Some people say that soybeans are high in purine and should not be eaten. Some studies say that after processing into tofu and soy milk, most of the purines have been lost. If you control the amount, you can eat it. For details about whether you can eat it and how much you can eat, it is better to ask the doctor with your own physical examination report, which is much more reliable than the general answers found on the Internet.

To be honest, those people around me who eat with the taboo list every day are not necessarily in better health than those who don’t look at the taboo list. If you are really afraid of stepping into pitfalls, why not pay more attention to your body’s reactions and write down anything you feel uncomfortable after eating. This is your own “diet pitfall guide”.