According to Popular Science China, under the triple squeeze of huge work pressure, health anxiety that is difficult to dispel, and excess health knowledge, contemporary young people are living a pretending to be a very healthy life:
outsourcing dietary nutrition to a variety of vitamin supplements;
outsource the old accounts of staying up late to liver protection tablets;
Outsource skin health to internal beauty serums;
outsourcing cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health to deep-sea fish oil;
......
The main one is that health products can be responsible, and never through a healthy lifestyle:
Image source: Xiaohongshu
While eating a single diet high in oil and salt, I eat a lot of health products. In the face of this extremely perfunctory and serious life style for health, even the dietitian has to say a word:
Compared with the uncertain time of work, the health products that are clearly eaten in the mouth are providing a new sense of certainty for contemporary young people.
Health
The "life-saving elixir" of contemporary young people
In many science fiction works, there is an imagination about the future of diet - cooking and eating are too inefficient and eliminated, and human beings only need to eat/drink some different flavors of "nutrients" to meet the body's needs for energy and nutrition. The young man's workstation is full of bottles and cans, and it feels like the future has come.
In 2023, CCTV, the National Bureau of Statistics, and China Post jointly launched the "China Better Life Survey", and the results show that health care consumption has entered the top three of the young people's consumption list, accounting for 31.04%, second only to tourism and digital.
Health supplements can be broadly divided into two categories: nutritional supplements and specific health functional foods. Unlike their parents, who were looking for non-essential, high-end supplements, young people are turning to a variety of essential nutrient supplements. Young people are keen to eat health products, and in the final analysis, it is because they really don't eat enough.
The regular takeaway of migrant workers, not to mention high oil and salt, even if you eat green leafy vegetables with a little green onion and coriander, many netizens jokingly claim that they can't even afford to eat "vital signs maintenance meals". Image source: Xiaohongshu
Take the huge B vitamin family as an example, they help with cell metabolism and energy production, and are essential for nervous system health, but they are distributed in a variety of foods: vitamin B1 is widely found in unrefined cereals such as whole wheat bread, brown rice, etc., vitamin B2 is mostly derived from animal liver, shiitake mushrooms, eggs, etc., and vitamins B6 and B12 are mostly found in animal liver, meat, milk, fish, nuts, various vegetables, cheese, etc.
For migrant workers who rely on takeaway to make a living, and want to eat natural food every day to supplement the B family, the cost of time and money is quite high, in contrast, "takeaway + a few cents a piece of complex B vitamin tablets" can be said to be a high-quality and inexpensive life maintenance package. According to the survey, 49% of Gen Zers maintain daily consumption of dietary supplements. Eating some corresponding supplements after eating takeaway has become a routine operation for young people, and it is a simple effort for young people to pursue a balanced diet.
Under the pressure of heavy work, young people who are worried about sudden death are especially concerned about cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health. In the past 2023 "Double 11" shopping festival, sales data of a mainstream shopping platform showed that deep-sea fish oil, probiotics, coenzyme Q10 and other products were the most popular health care products on the first day of pre-sale. In the list of overseas health care products, cardiovascular nutritional supplements represented by fish oil and deep-sea fish oil are still in the forefront, with sales reaching 355 million yuan.
Outrageously, there is also a set of anti-sudden death packages, which have been passed down from Koreans who don't sleep: fish oil + VB + VD + magnesium tablets + coenzyme Q10. In Korea, the status of nutraceuticals is greatly overestimated and is widely used in the field of health care and medical treatment. This phenomenon has even formed the so-called "health supplement disease", which makes some consumers overly dependent on health care products.
Someone shared their experience of eating this set of health products on Chinese social networks: question Koreans, understand Koreans, and become Koreans!
Image source: Xiaohongshu
Of course, don't worry! Planting any grass will only hurt you. After careful evaluation by clinical dietitians, some of the ingredients in the "Sudden Death Prevention Package" do have certain benefits for cardiovascular health, but the causes of sudden death are complex, including severe heart structural problems, electrophysiological abnormalities, acute myocardial infarction, and so on. You can't simply use a few supplements to avoid sudden death, and you can't stay up late and eat irregularly just because you take supplements. "Preventing sudden death" is a bit exaggerated, at best it is just an "anti-sub-health package", and it provides more psychological comfort: since staying up late is unavoidable, swallow a few small pills to make your body and yourself feel at ease.
Eating too many health supplements,
What could be the problem?
Modern nutrition is a young discipline established in 1934 that allows humans to see and understand food through its ingredients and dosages. Health foods and nutritional supplements containing specific ingredients have since come to the market. But reliable dietitians will emphasize one point: nutritional supplements are not a substitute for natural foods. In the textbooks of nutrition, whether it is health food or dietary supplements, the scope of use is always the following: when natural foods cannot meet our body's needs, or our body's consumption exceeds the intake, and there is no way to meet the needs of natural foods, we can use them selectively, targetedly, guidedly, and in moderation. The role of nutritional supplements is to "replenish food".
For example, if you do not have the opportunity to consume abundant vegetables on a business trip, consider supplementing with dietary fiber powder, and in areas where it is inconvenient to buy marine fish, you can switch to fish oil instead. But nutrients are not always better. Smoking people with additional high doses of β-carotene is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. Water-soluble vitamin C, which is excreted in the urine in excess of it, is not easily toxic, but high-dose supplementation can also cause poor gastrointestinal reactions and may even increase the risk of urinary stones. In recent years, more and more studies have shown that supplementing too many nutrients is not a good thing.
Young people, while eating a lot of various supplements, are worried about whether there will be harm Image source: Xiaohongshu
1
Change your body's ability to adapt
Our body is very smart, when a certain nutrient is lacking, the gut will actively increase the absorption rate and reduce waste, and when one or several single nutrients are exceeded, it will also make some adjustments to adapt to this excess. But there are still limits to this "smartness". Once it is too hard, or this superscalar amount for a period of time, when it suddenly falls off, some side effects may occur. These side effects may not be apparent immediately, but may become a hidden deficiency over time, or the body may not be able to adapt to the sudden "barrenness" after stopping taking it suddenly, and nutrient deficiencies may occur.
2
Increases the burden on the liver
Health products are not more relaxed than drugs, and there may be more impurities. Different brands and even the same product contain different ingredients. The liver is the body's detoxification factory, and some harmful components may accumulate in the liver if they are ingested in excess, increasing the metabolic burden. In addition, some health products may also increase the activity of drug-metabolizing enzymes, which can affect the efficacy of the drug.
3
Risk of unknown additives
The products on the market are uneven, if you buy overseas health products without the blue hat logo, or without the Chinese label, it is not excluded that they contain some unknown additives. For example, some weight loss drugs may be mixed with "sibutramine", which is harmful to the central nervous system and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems, which will bring serious consequences. For health supplements, you need to be especially cautious when choosing health supplements, we recommend:
(1) Consult a clinical dietitian in advance;
(2) Follow the directions for use and use in accordance with the recommended intake dose.
(3) Choose credible and reliable brands, identify "blue hats" for domestic health care products, give priority to big brands for functional foods, and preferably have formal third-party test reports, so as to avoid purchasing overseas health care products from informal channels.
(4) For people who have been taking health supplements for a long time, it is necessary to check liver function regularly.
In addition to buying the right regular products, choosing what to supplement is also very particular, different groups of people have different needs, and copying other people's "prescriptions" cannot help health.
Three situations that require nutrient supplementation
circumstance
It is recommended to add
I often eat takeaway, and I don't have enough vegetables
Multivitamin, mineral supplement, dietary fiber supplement
Stay up late often
Complex B vitamins
Lose weight, especially in women
Don't eat or eat less meat: Iron supplements, don't drink milk: calcium + vitamin D Eat everything: multivitamin-minerals
Eating as well as possible is always fundamental, and health supplements are used to improve or make up for deficiencies. If priorities are reversed, the "health" pursued is only a psychological comfort.
Nutraceuticals provide nutrients
But it can't bring the joy of food
There are some objective reasons for the boom in the health care products market in Japan and South Korea. The natural food resources of the two countries are not particularly abundant and expensive, and young people have to rely on various health supplements. For example, in Japan, where vegetables are insufficient, green juice made from barley seedlings has been developed to replace vegetables, which is more unpalatable than gnawing on the green belt, and has become a popular health product in East Asia for more than ten years.
How hard the green juice is, friends who have drunk it know it. The same is to eat vegetables, a bottle of expensive green juice is just to live, and a plate of boiled cabbage heart is to enjoy life. Image Credit: Xiaohongshu When health supplements overtake food and become a trend, an issue that is often overlooked becomes serious _The more dependent on health supplements, the worse the diet may be.
If you don't have enough fruits and vegetables, it's okay, let's make up for it with a multivitamin;
I didn't eat milk tofu? It's okay, I took a calcium tablet and it was solved;
It's okay to eat too much dessert milk tea, probiotics, white kidney beans or something;
……
The small pills in bottles and cans have become the health support for more and more young people. And the bottom gives more confidence to indulgence. But again, supplements are no substitute for real food. For example, in addition to some common minerals and vitamins, plants also have a large number of phytochemicals, which can synergize with each other to provide antioxidant and other functions for the human body. A small multivitamin pill can indeed supplement several ingredients, but it cannot solve the problem of insufficient intake of vegetables, fruits or grains.
Similarly, dietary fiber cannot replace vegetable intake, and fish oil cannot completely replace deep-sea fish. In addition to nutrition, food carries happiness and joy. Eating well is never just about maintaining vital signs. Since you are human, why bother to make food like feed. Perhaps one day in the future, human technology will really realize that you can live healthily by eating small pills, but animal foods are rich in oil, vegetables bring fresh aroma of herbs and trees, and the sweetness of seasonal melons and fruits...... The rich feelings and pleasures when tasting food, as well as the memories evoked by taste and smell, are all things that a cold supplement can't bring~
Image source: Zhihu screenshot
Health supplements provide a shortcut and hope for young people to live a fast-food life, swallowing a small pill, as if they are a little closer to health. But whether this life is really healthy or not, only we know.
bibliography
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https://m.21jingji.com/article/20231115/c8cb45de0e75d40443a425ad47cb4957.html