Seafood dietary taboos

Priority should be given to ensuring that the ingredients are fresh and fully cooked. Special groups of people have taboos based on their physical conditions. When pairing the same food, you only need to avoid combinations that will increase your metabolic burden. There is no need to be tied up by various taboo lists.

Not long ago, I went to visit the Shengsi Islands in Zhoushan. I just caught a basket of swimming crabs with the boss of a local fishing boat. I boiled them in plain water and was about to dip them in lemon vinegar to eat. The little girl who was traveling next to me quickly stopped me and said that I had just learned that eating seafood and vitamin C together will produce arsenic, which will cause poisoning. The boss of the boat laughed at that time and said that our ancestors have been eating from the sea for generations. When we eat fish, we like to squeeze some lemon juice to make it fresh. We have lived for most of our lives and have never seen anyone have any problems with eating. In fact, this rumor has long been debunked by the nutrition team: to generate enough arsenic trioxide to cause poisoning, one would have to eat more than 150 kilograms of low-quality seafood contaminated with arsenic at one time, and then eat dozens of kilograms of fruits with extremely high vitamin C content at the same time. It is impossible for people with normal appetites to reach this amount. Of course, this is not to say that this kind of statement is completely groundless. I had a friend who had diarrhea for two days after eating iced crayfish and eating iced oranges. It was not poisoning at all, but the combination of ice and ice irritated his fragile gastrointestinal tract. If he had eaten hot seafood with room temperature oranges, he would have been fine.

Let's be honest, among all seafood taboos, freshness always ranks first, and it is a hundred times more important than any matching taboos. Last year, we were having a late-night snack at a food stall in Qingdao. My friend was craving for spicy fried snails. After eating three or four of them, he felt bitter. We advised him not to eat it, but he insisted that he was fine. As a result, he went to the emergency room in the middle of the night and was diagnosed with Vibrio parahaemolyticus infection, which lasted for three days. Later, I found out that the snails at that food stall had been left for two days and were not sold out. They were not cooked thoroughly when fried, and the germs were not killed at all. Especially for shelled seafood such as crabs and prawns, the histamine content in the body can increase several times in a few hours after death, and even high-temperature cooking cannot destroy it. People with allergies may get rashes all over the body and have edema in the throat after eating half a crab. I once had a colleague who did not believe in evil. He picked up a discounted swimming crab that had just died on the market, cooked it and took a bite. The cost of going to the emergency room in the middle of the night was more than buying ten fresh crabs.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that as long as the ingredients are fresh, anyone can make it. Take the issue of whether pregnant women can eat seafood, for example. There is a lot of quarrel on the Internet. Some people say that pregnant women should not touch seafood, otherwise they will miscarry. Others say that eating more seafood to supplement DHA will make children smarter. In fact, both sides are too extreme. When my best friend was pregnant, I specifically asked the director of the obstetrics department. He said that as long as you avoid large deep-sea fish with excessive mercury content (such as swordfish and albacore tuna), don't eat raw food at all, and eat low-mercury seafood such as steamed sea bass and prawns 2-3 times a week, it will be better absorbed than taking supplements. My best friend ate boiled shrimp twice a week at that time, and the baby's eyes were very bright after birth. In addition, the taboos for gout patients are not one-size-fits-all. Many people think that gout requires complete isolation from seafood. In fact, this is not the case. High-purine seafood must be completely banned in the acute phase, but in the remission phase, it is perfectly fine to eat a small amount of sea cucumbers and jellyfish, which have lower purines than rice. As for the often ridiculed "beer with seafood is a gout meal", that is also for people with purine metabolism problems. Healthy people occasionally have grilled oysters with cold beer. As long as they don't do this every day, they don't have to worry at all.

As for those "seafood cannot be eaten with persimmons" and "seafood cannot be eaten with milk" posted on the Internet, most of them regard extreme situations as general taboos. Theoretically, the protein and calcium in seafood will indeed combine with tannic acid to form a precipitate that is not easy to digest, but you have to eat two or three kilograms of unripe astringent persimmons at one time, and then eat two or three kilograms of crabs to reach the amount that forms stomach stones. Who in the normal world eats like this? Last time I finished eating three steamed swimming crabs and gnawed on a soft-seeded pomegranate. Nothing happened. However, my mother has a weak stomach. She ate a persimmon on an empty stomach a few days ago and had diarrhea all afternoon without touching any seafood.

There is another pitfall that I have stepped on myself, and I would like to mention this to friends who love to eat raw pickles: Don’t buy raw pickles from private chefs or small workshops in your circle of friends. Last summer, I was craving for raw pickled shrimps. I saw someone in my circle of friends selling them for half the price in the store, so I bought two boxes. I had vomiting and diarrhea within two hours of eating. I went to the hospital to find out that the shrimps were infected with Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Later, I asked a seafood restaurant owner to find out that when making raw pickled shrimps, regular stores would put the seafood in an ultra-low temperature freezer of -35°C for more than 24 hours to kill parasites and pathogenic bacteria. Most small workshops pickle fresh products directly. It looks fresh, but the risk is very high.

In fact, eating seafood is just for fun. How can there be so many black and white rules? To put it bluntly, don’t eat bad food, don’t force yourself to eat what your body can’t bear, and don’t believe those baseless rumors. When you open up, you should eat according to your ability. The most important thing is that you can eat happily without getting upset.