Food is the best health care doctor, and there is much to pay attention to in daily dietary health care.
Every time I talk about my troublesome allergy-prone constitution, I always feel a deep sense of gratitude. The idiom "a blessing in disguise" fits my experience of fighting illness very well.
More than ten years ago, I suffered a severe immune disorder triggered by allergies, and a relative who does medical research warned me that I needed to properly adjust my diet and daily routine. So began my anti-allergy journey. For all these years, eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods has been a basic daily principle.
To have a quality breakfast, for nearly ten years now my family has eaten a Chinese-style meal of at least three dishes plus fruit in the morning, and we pack a lunchbox for noon at the same time. The advantage is that breakfast alone provides ample nutrition, with enough calories, fiber, protein and fats. Because the lunchbox holds fresh dishes made that morning, I am used to eating it directly without reheating.
Because breakfast and lunch are so satisfying, I have almost no urge to snack between meals, and I do not feel hungry at night, so my family naturally developed the habit of not eating dinner. Simply by adjusting our mealtime habits, I brought my severe allergy-prone constitution under control by about seventy percent. Along with enough sleep and a clean living environment, I hardly ever take allergy medication anymore; only occasionally, when I am too tired or accidentally eat the wrong food and trigger an allergic reaction, do I need a light dose of medication to control it.
In this long battle against allergies, I have kept reading books on diet and nutrition. In addition, several doctors and relatives with medical backgrounds in my family have always been able to offer a certain degree of professional advice. But interestingly, I have found that nutrition theories are sometimes contradictory, and even doctors' views can conflict. What exactly is right? Which approach suits me best? The conclusion is that using your own body as a guinea pig is the dumbest yet also the most effective method. If your body reacts as if something is wrong, stop; if it seems to work, continue.
In the past, some people suggested I take Chinese herbal medicine to treat my allergies. I saw several traditional Chinese medicine doctors, including some famous ones you had to book several months in advance. But in the end I found that the herbal medicine also made me allergic, and since Chinese herbal medicine is a compound formula, it was impossible to tell which herb triggered the allergy.
Even allergy testing could not specifically or effectively improve my allergic condition.
After running to so many hospitals and seeing so many doctors, and taking all kinds of Chinese and Western medicine, I finally realized that eating well is truly the most important thing. When we return to the most basic act of eating well, perhaps we have a chance to prevent many diseases in advance.
Recently I read Mr. Hsieh Chung-tao's book "After Slow Food," which mentions dietary education in French kindergartens: for example, children cannot bring any drinks and may only carry water in their own bottles. For afternoon tea, different parents take turns preparing fresh fruit and dried fruit, and fruit and dried fruit are the only afternoon snacks the children may eat. I very much agree with this kind of dietary education. Before rushing to let children taste all kinds of fine foods, adults should have the responsibility to help children understand the true and wonderful flavors of food.
Once I bought a well-known snack at Lane 30, Yongji Road. After just one bite, I could feel that a lot of MSG and seasonings had been added to the food, and I simply could not keep eating it. As someone who rarely wastes food, I had no choice but to give up the entire bowl of snack. Later I asked a friend who worked nearby why that snack shop could do such good business. After thinking about it, my friend said that most people who eat out have had their sense of taste ruined by heavy seasoning. He himself occasionally ate at that snack shop and knew a lot of MSG was added, but he still ate it anyway. I reminded my friend that perhaps the fatigue and headaches he often felt were actually caused by processed foods.
In the past two years, I visited organic trade shows abroad and noticed that many foods emphasized being gluten-free. After returning to Taiwan, I spent time researching this topic and found that wheat products might be the main cause of my own skin allergy symptoms. I decided to use myself as a guinea pig and test going two weeks without eating any wheat products, including bread, noodles, crackers and so on. After about ten days, the hand eczema that had troubled me for a year was nearly healed, and the acne on my face was much less than before. The color of the marks left on my legs by pityriasis rosea also faded. To confirm whether wheat products were the cause, I decided to eat wheat again, and that night my hand eczema became severe again. At the same time, without deliberately eating less or exercising, I lost four kilograms over about three months.
In addition, a single knuckle on my left hand had been swollen and painful for almost a year. Since my right hand showed no pain and other joints had no similar symptoms, it was inferred that it was probably not an immune problem or arthritis. Later, after reading a book, I felt it might be an allergy caused by meat. These past two weeks I have been experimenting with an elimination diet, not eating any meat except seafood for one month. So far in the experiment, I have found that the originally swollen knuckle on my left hand has actually begun to go down, and touching the knuckle no longer causes the former pain. After completing the one month without meat, I will reintroduce foods by eating only a single type of meat each week, and that should make it clearer which kind of meat causes the knuckle pain.
My various anti-allergy experiments come from years of concern about ingredients and nutrition, as well as observation and understanding of my own body, and behind them is also a lot of reading and seeking relevant professional advice. Perhaps they do not apply to everyone, but simply distinguishing the "eat and do not eat" or the "how to eat" among foods can achieve effective health maintenance for one's own health. Is that not better than relying entirely on seeing doctors and taking medicine?
For people who have never cooked, hearing about cooking often fills them with fear. I often encourage friends around me to bring their own lunchboxes and reduce the chance of eating out. Learning to shop for groceries and cook is actually the best gift you can give your own health.
You will come to like the original taste of food more and more, and naturally you will not want to eat many heavily seasoned foods. Some people worry that cooking for themselves costs too much. Take my own household as an example: the monthly grocery budget cannot buy expensive organic products, and the places we shop most often are the ordinary traditional markets and supermarkets. But even with just ordinary vegetables and fruits, once you start choosing to eat "whole foods," you will feel clearer-headed and more energetic, and to some degree it is easier to maintain an ideal weight. Facts have proven that cooking for yourself really does make you healthier. As for whether it saves money, the key lies in how much of a budget you choose to spend on food.
As someone who loves good food, enjoys drinking and loves to cook, I have never believed that healthy food equals tasteless, flavorless food. Nor do I think eating is only for health. When we sit at the table with family and friends, learning not to use the TV and phone as side dishes, and simply keeping each other company while enjoying a meal, being able to eat at the same table is a flow of beautiful relationships and memories. This is what is more appealing than the food on the table, and it is also a wonderful recipe for keeping us healthy.
[The anti-allergy dietary experiments in this article are personal experience for reference only. If you have major allergy symptoms, please seek professional medical diagnosis and do not delay medical treatment.]