Busy city dwellers often have casual breakfasts and lunches, making up for it all at dinner. Over time, dinner has become the main meal in people's eyes, with many business dinners, meetings, and gatherings scheduled for this time. However, nutritionists are deeply concerned about this phenomenon of excessive dinners.
Dinner should be moderate
As night falls, Guijie Street is illuminated by a sea of red lanterns. This is the most prosperous time of the day for this famous dining street. It is considered a paradise for many for business dinners and gatherings, with a continuous stream of people coming for dinner. Such frequent dinners inevitably lead to a significant increase in dinner intake. Yu Kang, Deputy Chief Physician of the Clinical Nutrition Department at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, said: "Dinner must be in small quantities." Otherwise, excessive energy intake can lead to obesity, and subsequently, other related health problems.
Due to busy work schedules, many people don't have a fixed dinner time, eating either early or late, and some even go to sleep on an empty stomach. On this, Yu Kang says: "Dinner should not be skipped, but it should consist mainly of light food."
If dinner is too greasy, excess fat intake can cause blood lipids to rise, leading to atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease. Excess protein intake can increase the metabolic burden on the gastrointestinal tract, liver, and kidneys, which is particularly harmful to patients with liver or kidney diseases.
Dinner should not be rushed
As work becomes more irregular, more people are opting for takeout boxes for dinner. Those who often have to work overtime can't go home for a meal and can only buy a takeout box from a small restaurant or fast food shop near the office, hastily finishing it in a short fifteen minutes. After getting home, they have no appetite other than for sleep.
Relevant experts believe that these small restaurants often use heavy seasonings, and frequently eating this kind of takeout can easily lead to "heatiness" (a concept in traditional Chinese medicine), resulting in symptoms like a sore throat, mouth ulcers, toothaches, bloating, and constipation. Furthermore, a "quick and decisive" dinner is not conducive to digestion. Going back to work immediately after eating加重 the burden on the gastrointestinal tract.
Dinner often lacks staple foods
China's traditional dietary structure places grains as the staple food. However, the status of staple foods on today's dining tables is increasingly being weakened.
Yu Kang says that staple foods are essential. In fact, no meal should be without them. For dinner, the staple food can be mainly in the form of soft or liquid foods. He says that a man's dinner portion of staple food should be about 2-3 liang (raw weight), while for a woman, it should be about 1-2 liang. The elderly are best off eating some congee (rice porridge).
Carbohydrate foods such as rice, noodles, and potatoes, which serve as staple foods, should be the main source of energy for the human body (accounting for 60% of total energy). They are also the most economical, have the simplest metabolic process, produce harmless and easily excretable metabolic byproducts. If staple food intake is insufficient, the body has to use fat and protein for energy. The breakdown of fat produces more harmful organic acids, and using protein as an energy source is a more complex metabolic process, with metabolic byproducts like urea nitrogen being toxic to the body. This not only increases the body's metabolic burden but also damages the structure and function of important organs like the liver and kidneys.
Dinner is often too late
Today's dinner is increasingly becoming a "late" dinner. If it's for a business dinner or a party, it can often last until midnight. Yu Kang says that a normal dinner should be between 6:00 PM and 7:00 PM, but this is not absolute and can be adjusted according to personal habits. Generally, it should be about 6 hours after lunch.
The peak time for calcium excretion in the human body is often 4-5 hours after a meal. If dinner is too late, when the peak calcium excretion period arrives, the person is already asleep. Urine then remains in the ureter, bladder, and other urinary tracts, unable to be excreted in time. This causes calcium in the urine to continuously increase, which can easily deposit to form small crystals, and over time, gradually grow into stones. In addition, if the meal time is too late, while the person is resting, blood sugar levels are still high. The body has to store the excess energy, which can easily lead to obesity and hyperlipidemia.