The importance of dietary health science popularization

The core value of food and health science popularization is to help ordinary people avoid the trap of information gap and reduce the risk of common chronic diseases by more than 80% at the lowest cost in the small matter of "eating", while avoiding being harvested by pseudo-health marketing.

Last week, I met a 52-year-old Aunt Zhang at a community free clinic. She said that she believed in the saying in the live broadcast that "acid-alkaline constitution fights cancer". She drank soda water for half a year, ate alkaline vegetables, and dared not touch a bite of meat. She originally wanted to reduce uric acid, but the uric acid did not go down. Instead, she was hospitalized for a week because of acid reflux. Don't tell me, this kind of thing is really not an exception. I have been doing front-line diet science popularization for three years. I have met old people who take cactus as a hypoglycemic medicine, and I have also met young girls who eat boiled vegetables every day to lose weight and have amenorrhea. They have fallen into all kinds of pitfalls. Essentially, they are all missing some "reliable dietary common sense" that can be implemented.

Nowadays, there is a lot of confusion about diet on the Internet. Different factions have their own reasons: those who advocate vegetarianism will say that animal protein is the source of all diseases, those who insist on ketosis will give examples and say that they cured diabetes by cutting off carbon dioxide, and health accounts post "detox meals" and "intestinal cleansing recipes" every day. Ordinary people can't tell the truth from the false. In fact, from the perspective of clinical nutrition, no dietary pattern is suitable for everyone: a completely vegetarian diet can indeed reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, but if you do not eat animal foods at all, it is easy to suffer from B12 deficiency and iron deficiency anemia, which has a particularly great impact on the elderly and pregnant women. ； The ketogenic diet is indeed effective in the short-term weight loss intervention for severely obese people, but long-term adherence will increase the level of low-density lipoprotein and increase the metabolic burden on the kidneys. Ordinary people who try it blindly can easily cause problems.

We previously did targeted science popularization in an old community for half a year. We did not hold any complicated lectures. We just posted a small poster on the community bulletin board every week. We usually answered questions in the owner group when we had nothing to do, and talked about "the salt in a beer cap is just enough for a day" and "eating white rice". According to the common sense that "mixing grains with grains will increase blood sugar slowly", at the end of the year, the community's compliance rate for high blood pressure control rose directly from 42% to 67%. Many uncles and aunts said that their old problem of dizziness was relieved a lot after adding less salt. This kind of real change is more convincing than any number of paper data.

Of course, some people say that the current diet science popularization is just creating anxiety. One person says that drinking milk tea makes you fat, and the other person says that eating pickles causes cancer, which makes people feel uncomfortable eating. This complaint is actually correct. Nowadays, there are indeed many bloggers who rely on blog traffic to deliberately magnify small risks into "fatal hazards" and tout ordinary food into "panacea." They are essentially selling goods under the banner of popular science. But formal diet science is never meant to put shackles on everyone. It doesn’t mean that you can’t touch milk tea or eat pickles, but it tells you where the “degree” is: you have no problem drinking one cup of milk tea a week, but drinking three cups a day can easily lead to obesity and blood sugar problems. ； There is no harm in eating pickles twice during the Chinese New Year, but eating them every time will increase the risk of gastric cancer. To put it bluntly, popular science is to give you a yardstick for judgment, not to give you a ban.

A while ago, a friend of mine who loves beauty bought imported blueberries and ate them every day in order to fight aging. She lost one pound a day and had diarrhea for half a month. After going to the hospital to see a doctor, she found out that the recommended daily intake of fruit for adults is only 200-350g. No matter how good it is, excessive intake is a burden. She later told me that if she had known this common sense earlier, she would not have spent thousands of dollars buying blueberries and suffered such a big mistake. In fact, this is the meaning of popular science. You don’t need to take the nutritionist certificate. As long as you know the most basic knowledge, you can avoid many unnecessary pitfalls and save a lot of wasted money.

After all, eating is one of the most important things in life. Popular science is not to make everyone live cautiously, but to make everyone understand eating more clearly - not only can you enjoy the happiness of hot pot milk tea, but also keep your body comfortable. This is the most real value.