Nutritional diet structure

There is no 100% universal perfect nutritional diet structure. A truly scientific diet plan must be a personalized combination that matches an individual's age, underlying diseases, living habits and even dietary cultural background. There is no template that everyone can follow.

To be honest, I have seen too many Internet celebrity diet templates fall into the trap. A while ago, I helped a girl who works in cross-border operations adjust her diet. In order to maintain her skin, she copied the blogger's Mediterranean diet plan. She drank olive oil mixed with warm water on an empty stomach every morning, and ate ice lettuce salad at noon. She suffered from stomachache in half a month and broke into cold sweats. Even her aunt postponed it for ten days. She grew up in Sichuan and couldn't live without hot food. Her spleen and stomach were weak and cold, and she had adopted the eating habits of Europeans and Americans. It would be strange if she didn't cause problems.

Nowadays, there are many highly recognized dietary frameworks on the market. First, let’s talk about the most authoritative Dietary Guidelines for Residents - the dietary pagoda we often see. It is essentially a "safety baseline" for ordinary healthy people of all ages: Gu Eat 250-400g of potatoes, 300-500g of vegetables, 200-350g of fruits, 120-200g of fish, poultry, meat and eggs, 300g of milk and dairy products every day, and control oil and salt within 25g and 5g. Ordinary people who have no special diseases and do not need to control weight and gain muscle will basically not make any big mistakes when eating according to this framework. It is a universal model with extremely high error tolerance. But don’t take it as a bible. For example, for people who go to the gym all year round to build muscle, the recommended amount of protein is far from enough. Even if you practice hard for half a year, you may not gain much muscle.

On the other side are the low-carb and ketogenic diets that have become very popular in the fitness and weight loss circles in recent years. The core is very low carbohydrate intake, high fat and moderate protein. It is true that the scale will fall off quickly in the short term. Many diabetics will also use this plan to control blood sugar. But the controversy is not small. An endocrinologist I know said that many young girls who have been in ketosis for more than 3 months have clinically seen hormonal disorders and amenorrhea. People with high uric acid and gallstones can easily induce gout and biliary colic when using this program. It is not a "magic formula for weight loss that everyone can use."

There is also a traditional Chinese medicine dietary therapy framework that many people think is "metaphysical" but is increasingly used in clinical practice. The core is to adjust the diet according to the body's constitution. For example, people with severe dampness and heat should eat less spicy, sweet and iced drinks, and people with qi deficiency should eat more yams and millet and don't eat cold salads. I used to help a 60-year-old man with high blood pressure adjust his diet. At first, I only asked him to eat less salt, but his blood pressure did not drop significantly. Later, I asked a friend who is a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and found out that he has a phlegm-dampness constitution. I specifically told him to stop drinking ice milk every morning and replace it with warm millet porridge. Within a month, his blood pressure stabilized a lot. Now the nutritional community is also doing controlled research in this area, which is not necessarily unscientific than the Western nutritional system.

In fact, matching food with food is like matching clothes. If someone else wears a good-looking oversize, you may look short in it, so there is no need to follow the trend. Why do ordinary office workers need to use a food scale to calculate grams every day? When ordering takeout at noon, just roughly divide the plate into four portions: two portions are stir-fried vegetables of green leafy vegetables or melons and eggplants, one portion is staple foods such as rice and grains, one portion is non-flour fried proteins such as steamed fish, boiled chicken, and fried eggs, and less braised and fried vegetables with thick oily red sauce, which is basically enough. I usually don’t bother cooking much, so I grab a handful of multi-grain rice, stir-fry a large plate of green vegetables, and fry a piece of chicken breast or steam a fish. On weekends, when I’m hungry, I’ll go out to eat butter hot pot with friends. Over the years, all my physical examination indicators have been normal, and I’m much more energetic than before when I ate salad every day.

Oh, by the way, don’t believe the absolute words on the Internet that “whole grains are definitely better than polished rice and white flour.” People with irritable bowel syndrome will suffer from gas and abdominal pain if they eat too much whole grains. Patients who have just had gastrointestinal surgery must eat polished rice and white flour that are easy to digest. Holding on to the so-called “health” will only harm the body.

To put it bluntly, a nutritious diet is never about completely breaking off your relationship with your favorite foods, nor is it about worrying about how many calories you want to eat. After eating, your stomach will not be bloated or acid refluxed, you will not feel sleepy at work during the day, and your blood lipids, blood sugar, and uric acid will be within the normal range during the physical examination. Even if you eat hot pot twice a week and drink a cup of iced milk tea, this is your healthiest nutritional structure.