The relationship between nutritious diet and health and disease recovery

Nutritious diet is the basic support for maintaining the basic health of the human body. It is also an irreplaceable auxiliary intervention in the recovery process of diseases. It can even play a core role in the treatment of some nutritional and metabolic diseases. There is no myth that "eating well and drinking well will eliminate all diseases", and dietary adjustment must not be regarded as an optional "icing on the cake".

You have most likely heard two extreme sayings: one is "all illness depends on nourishment, and eating is better than medicine"; the other is "just listen to the doctor's advice when treating illness, and it doesn't matter what you eat." Both of these are actually wrong. When I was rotating in the clinical nutrition department of a tertiary hospital two years ago, I managed a 72-year-old diabetic foot patient. When he was first admitted to the hospital, there was a two-centimeter-deep wound on the outside of his left foot. The exudate kept flowing. He changed two or three types of antibiotics, but there was no improvement for half a month. After asking his family, I found out that the old man believed that the treatment was all about taking medicine. He sneaked out of the hospital every day to buy fried dough sticks and eat polished rice and white noodles. His protein intake was less than half of the recommended amount. Later, we ordered a customized diet for him, with low GI staple food accounting for half of it, and ensuring a sufficient amount of high-quality protein such as fish, eggs, and soy products every day, plus additional B vitamins and zinc supplements. In just three weeks, the wound dried up, and the new granulation grew very well, and he was discharged from the hospital in two weeks. Do you think this is all due to the medicine? In fact, the role of rice is not small at all. If you don’t even provide enough raw materials to repair tissues, how can your body grow wounds?

Speaking of which, I have to mention several mainstream intervention ideas in the nutrition circle. No one can convince anyone, but each has its own applicable scenarios. The logic of traditional clinical nutrition is to give priority to universality. According to the framework of the Dietary Guidelines for Residents, the macronutrient ratio should be stuck within a reasonable range, giving priority to ensuring the basic needs of most people. The evidence-based evidence is the most sufficient and basically error-free. However, the disadvantage is that it is not precise enough. For those with chronic inflammation and food intolerance, they may still feel uncomfortable repeatedly even if they eat according to the guidelines. Functional medicine, which has become popular in recent years, has a different approach to diet. It emphasizes doing individual tests first, such as food intolerance and intestinal flora testing, eliminating foods that trigger your body's immune response, and then supplementing the missing nutrients in a targeted manner. I have met a little girl who suffered from Hashimoto's thyroiditis before. After taking medicine for two years, her thyroglobulin antibodies could not be reduced, and she was later diagnosed. She was severely intolerant to the fresh milk she drank every day. After she stopped and adjusted to a high-selenium diet, her antibodies dropped by almost half in half a year. The effect was indeed obvious, but the problem is that this type of test is not cheap, and there are also cases of over-interpretation. I have seen patients who received the test report and found that they were intolerant to more than 20 kinds of food. There are also dietary remedies that have been passed down among the people for many years, many of which are based on the experience passed down from generation to generation. For example, eating light porridge and noodles when you have a cold, or eating steamed apples when you have diarrhea are all reasonable. However, there are also many misunderstandings that are spread widely. For example, eating red dates cannot supplement much iron, and drinking bone soup cannot supplement calcium. You cannot believe them all.

The claim that the ketogenic diet is anti-cancer has been particularly hotly debated online, but the industry has yet to come to a unified conclusion. Experiments at the cellular level have indeed proven that tumor cells mainly rely on glucose for energy. In the ketogenic state, the body uses ketone bodies for energy, which cannot be used by tumor cells and may indeed inhibit proliferation. I have also seen clinical cases in a small sample of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer who followed a ketogenic diet and their survival was more than half a year longer than expected. However, the current evidence-based evidence in large samples is insufficient. Moreover, for patients with abnormal liver function and lipodystrophy, blindly following the trend of ketosis will increase the metabolic burden and even induce ketoacidosis, which is not worth the gain.

Interestingly, many people have misunderstandings about nutritional supplements, thinking that the more expensive they are, the more useful they are. I used to take care of a patient after surgery, and his family members gave him cordyceps and bird's nests every day. It was found that the albumin was only 28g/L, which was too low to remove the sutures. Later, we asked the family members to stop giving them. We gave the patient two more boiled egg whites, two cups of warm sugar-free milk, and a small bowl of steamed fish every day. In just one week, the albumin rose to 35g/L, and the sutures were successfully removed. Why do you think this is? Because the content of high-quality protein needed for human body repair is much higher in eggs and milk than in those sky-high-priced health products, and it is easier to absorb. Many people spend a lot of money, but they actually do not understand the essence of nutrition.

After all, there is never a one-size-fits-all standard answer to the matter of nutritional diet. If you eat well and have balanced nutrition, you will lay the foundation for your body and avoid getting sick less often. ； If you are really sick, adjusting your diet on the basis of standardized treatment is to give your body "repair tools" and get better faster. Don’t regard eating as your only hope for healing, and don’t think that eating is unimportant. After all, every bite of food you eat will eventually become a part of your body. This is really not chicken soup. Oh, by the way, if you really need to adjust your diet, it's best to find a regular clinical nutritionist. Don't just search for recipes online and just use them. Everyone's physical condition is different, and what works for others may not be suitable for you.