Food and health education

Really effective food and health education is never about giving everyone a uniform standardized recipe or the empty slogan of "eat less sugar and less oil". It is about helping ordinary people establish a dietary decision-making logic that fits their own life situations, can be implemented for a long time, and does not conflict with appetite. This is the most straightforward conclusion I have come to after five years of community nutrition science popularization and meeting no less than 300 ordinary people who have stepped into the "healthy eating pit".

I just helped a 996 Internet operation girl adjust her diet a while ago. She ate boiled vegetables for three weeks with a fitness blogger. She was so hungry that her hands shook while typing on the keyboard at work. Finally, one day she worked overtime until early in the morning and couldn't hold back any longer. She squatted downstairs and ate three boxes of fried chicken. Not only did she gain two kilograms in weight, but she also suffered from the psychological shadow of "vomiting after eating healthy meals." I have seen too many people memorize the numbers on the meal pagoda by heart, and then turn around and worry about bland salads during the continuous working day. This kind of "standard answer" that is divorced from real life is essentially the same as being uneducated.

In fact, there is no completely unified "healthy diet template" in the nutrition community, and the entry points of different schools are very different. Scholars in the field of public health prefer universal guidance. For example, our country’s dietary guidelines for residents are based on the health data of more than one billion people. They are perfect for use as a reference for public nutrition policies. However, when it falls on specific individuals, there will inevitably be times when they are “acclimated”: if you ask manual workers who run on construction sites every day to eat the same amount of cereals and potatoes as white-collar workers who sit in offices, the former will not be able to bear hunger, and the latter will easily gain weight. There is no universal amount. Scholars who do personalized nutrition research on the other side emphasize the differences in each person's genes, intestinal flora, labor intensity and even eating habits. Take the most common recommendation of "drinking 300ml of milk a day" as an example. People with lactose intolerance will only get diarrhea if they drink it, which is not worth the gain. If you switch to sugar-free yogurt or low-lactose milk, the effect is actually not much different.

Even on the most controversial topic, "should we completely quit refined sugar?", experts in different fields have different attitudes. Public health scholars definitely recommend less consumption. After all, free sugar is strongly related to the risk of dental caries, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. This is a definite research conclusion; but doctors who do clinical nutrition are often a little more relaxed. When I chatted with the director of the nutrition department of a tertiary hospital, she said, "Don't treat sugar as a scourge. If you can recover from a breakup today by eating a piece of cream cake, then the benefits of this little sugar are much greater than if you suffer an emotional breakdown and then overeat." When it comes to standards, they are never dead: you have been lying down all day without moving, and that half cup of full-sugar milk tea is indeed a caloric burden; but if you have just finished a half-marathon, drinking two bottles of sugary sports drinks is not an overdose. Health is inherently dynamic, and you can't live by a fixed number.

I went into a community to do science popularization for aunts. At first I said, "Don't eat more than 5g of salt a day." The aunts all waved their hands and said, "The food is so bland, what's the point of living?" Later, we didn’t mention the word “salt reduction” at all, and taught everyone to use natural spices such as mushroom powder, dried shrimps, and basil leaves to enhance the flavor. The vegetables were still fresh without adding extra salt. The aunts went back and tried it for two weeks. Many people came to the community office to ask for the recipe, saying, “Now use half the salt in cooking, and my old man can’t eat it.” You see, good food and health education is never about making people change their habits, but about fine-tuning the original lifestyle so that people don't feel painful so that they can stick to it.

Last time, a high school student came to me and said that his mother forced him to eat two oil-free boiled eggs every day. Now that he saw the eggs, he felt like vomiting and asked me if there was anything I could do. I asked him to go back and tell his mother that it could be replaced by tea eggs, fried eggs or even egg custard. As long as it is eggs, the protein absorption rate will not be different by 3%. There is no need to eat the most "oil-free and salt-free" kind. His mother didn't believe it at first, and she checked the literature for a long time before she let go. Later, the boy sent me a message specifically, saying that he no longer had to swallow eggs with an expressionless face every morning.

To put it bluntly, eating healthily is like wearing shoes. If someone else wears running shoes that fit well, your feet may get blistered. There is no best, only the most suitable for you. Food and health education has never taught people to make "absolutely correct choices", but to teach people to make "choices without regrets": you don't have to feel guilty after taking a bite of cake, and you don't have to scold yourself for being undisciplined after eating takeout for a week. It's enough to know that when you choose dishes next time, you can use more chopsticks to stir-fry vegetables or change milk tea from full sugar to three-thirds of sugar. After all, we have to eat for a lifetime, and what we want is to live comfortably until old age, not to get a perfect certificate for healthy eating, right?