Dietary taboos include

Individualized taboos for people with specific diseases, targeted taboos at special physiological stages, general taboos caused by improper handling of food ingredients, and most of the rest of the so-called "taboos" with dozens or hundreds of items are mostly rumors without scientific basis.

To be honest, I accompanied my uncle, who has been suffering from gout for almost 10 years, for a check-up. The doctor repeatedly warned him not to touch thick broth, animal offal, and high-sugar drinks. He always didn’t believe it before. He thought that slow-cooked soup was the most nourishing, so he secretly drank it several times. As a result, when the gout attack occurred, his feet were so swollen that he couldn’t even put on slippers, and he went to the hospital on crutches. Dietary taboos for chronic diseases are actually the most individualized and the most controversial. For example, can diabetics eat watermelon? Some doctors advocate not taking one bite at all. The risk of raising blood sugar too quickly is high. Some nutritionists think that as long as the blood sugar is stable recently, it is okay to eat one or two small pieces two hours after a meal. Even now, the old and new guidelines have different opinions on whether soy products can be eaten with high uric acid: the old version requires strict food restriction, but new research has found that the purine content of processed tofu and soy milk is already very low. Eating it normally can supplement high-quality protein. There is no absolute right or wrong, it all depends on individual tolerance. Of course, there is also a type of disease taboo that is not controversial. For example, people who are lactose intolerant should not drink ordinary milk, people who are allergic to gluten should not touch wheat products, and people who are allergic to mango and peanuts may have problems even if they smell it. This kind of red line is carved into the body and cannot be touched at all.

In addition to patients with chronic diseases, people in special physiological stages are also the group most bound by various dietary taboos. When my best friend was pregnant, her mother-in-law listed a sheet full of taboos: not eating crabs will cause miscarriage, not eating watermelon will cause uterine cold, not eating peppers will cause the child to develop eczema, but she secretly ate half of an iced watermelon and nothing happened. During the prenatal check-up, the doctor specifically ordered the things that everyone usually Don’t pay too much attention to it: don’t touch any alcoholic food, even home-brewed rice wine and sake lees balls, don’t touch sashimi, soft-boiled eggs and other ingredients that are not fully cooked, and avoid deep-sea fish such as swordfish and shark with excessive mercury content. These are real risks that may affect fetal development. For example, children under three years old should not feed whole peanuts and jelly, as they can easily cause choking in the trachea. Patients who have just undergone gastrointestinal surgery should avoid celery and leeks with crude fiber to reduce the burden on the gastrointestinal tract. These are targeted taboos that do not hold true outside of the current physiological stage, and there is no need to remember them for a lifetime.

Compared with the above two types of taboos that vary from person to person, there is one type of red line that everyone must abide by - the risks caused by improper handling of the ingredients themselves. Last year, my mother was reluctant to throw away the sprouted potatoes from the balcony, so she dug out the sprouts and green parts and fried the spicy and sour potato shreds. As a result, we both had vomiting and diarrhea and ended up in the emergency room. The doctor said that the solanine in the sprouted potatoes had already spread to the entire potato, and even digging out the sprouts was useless. There are also saponins and phytohemagglutinins in uncooked green beans, colchicine in fresh day lilies, moldy nuts, and aflatoxin in grains. These can really cause poisoning and even cancer. Anyone who eats them may have problems regardless of their physical constitution. When I was in college, the chef in the cafeteria fried the green beans undercooked, and half of the class had diarrhea all afternoon. Now that I think about it, I am still impressed. As for the rumors posted on the Internet that "eating persimmons and yogurt together will kill you" and "eating shrimps and VC together is equivalent to eating arsenic", they are all nonsense. As long as you don't eat a dozen raw persimmons on an empty stomach that have not been deastringent, or eat dozens of kilograms of shrimp at a time and then drink several bottles of VC tablets, it is basically impossible to eat them normally. There won't be any problem. In the past, the so-called "food conflict" cases were either because the ingredients themselves were not fresh, or the people eating them had underlying diseases.

To put it bluntly, there is never a unified standard answer to dietary taboos. Someone else’s honey may be your arsenic. Instead of keeping those messy lists, pay more attention to your body’s reaction and ask your doctor if you are not sure. It will be more effective than watching ten health videos. If you really want to remember, just remember those general red lines, and do the rest as you feel comfortable. Eating is a happy thing in the first place, so don’t be bound by the messy taboos.