In the scorching summer, if you're not careful with your diet, you can easily get sick and feel miserable.
Mistake #1: Quenching Thirst with Just Water
During the hot summer, you sweat a lot, leading to significant loss of body fluids. It's currently popular to drink purified water and mineral water, and many young people, especially children, teenagers, and office workers, only drink these when thirsty. While the wide variety of bottled waters in stores does make life more convenient to some extent, if you rely solely on large amounts of purified water, mineral water, or plain boiled water to replenish fluids after heavy sweating, you will experience symptoms like fatigue, weakness, and loss of appetite. Nutritionist's Comments:
In the summer, what you lose through sweat is not just water, but also inorganic salts and water-soluble vitamins such as sodium, potassium, calcium, zinc, copper, B vitamins, and vitamin C. The more you sweat, the more severe the loss. These inorganic salts and water-soluble vitamins play a huge role in maintaining human health. Failure to replenish them promptly after heavy sweating can lead to deficiencies in the body.
A lack of potassium in the body can cause symptoms like weakness in the limbs, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal bloating. A sodium deficiency can lead to listlessness, drowsiness, loss of appetite, nausea, and vomiting. A deficiency of B vitamins can affect the normal operation of the body's biochemical metabolism. Furthermore, drinking large amounts of water when thirsty, or even overhydrating, can dilute stomach acid, directly or indirectly affecting digestion and causing symptoms like decreased appetite, fatigue, lethargy, and stomach discomfort. Solution:
For summer fluid replenishment, the best choices are light tea, mung bean soup, plum soup, fruit juices, and sports drinks. You can also drink vegetable soups with meals, such as salted pork and winter melon soup, tomato, bamboo shoot, and winter melon soup, loofah and egg soup, seaweed and egg soup, tomato and egg soup, and hot and sour soup. These soups can provide us with rich inorganic salts like sodium, potassium, and magnesium. Fruits like watermelon not only provide water but also vitamin C.
In addition, milk, yogurt, and soy milk contain not only large amounts of water but also protein, calcium, and various nutrients, making them excellent foods to boost nutrition when your appetite is poor in the summer. As for how you drink water, remember to drink small amounts frequently. Don't gulp down large amounts of water at once, and avoid drinking too many iced beverages, including beer. Mistake #2: Eating Only Porridge for All Three Meals a Day
In the summer, water evaporation is high, and you can easily feel dry-mouthed, so it's common to eat porridge, soup, and other similar foods with meals to replenish fluids. Traditional Chinese wellness practices also recommend many medicinal porridges and medicinal meals suitable for cooling down and relieving summer heat, such as lotus seed porridge, almond porridge, lotus leaf porridge, winter melon and red bean porridge, and red date and mung bean porridge. Drinking porridge in the summer does indeed bring a sense of comfort.
Therefore, many families in the summer, especially those with elderly members, have porridge or soft noodles for every meal, served with pickles and preserved vegetables as side dishes. As a result, they often feel hungry before lunch, affecting their efficiency in studying and working. Nutritionist's Comments:
Thin porridge and soup are liquid foods, while thick porridge and soft noodles are semi-liquid foods. They both have the characteristics of being large in volume and low in calorie density. Therefore, you may feel full right after the meal, but you'll start to feel hungry before the next meal. Long-term habits like this can lead to weight loss and a decrease in body weight due to insufficient energy intake. Solution:
If you are using porridge as a staple food, it should be cooked thickly. You can also have snacks, pastries, or fruits between meals to supplement energy. If you don't have the option for extra meals, you should combine dry and wet foods. Cook the porridge thinner and add some dry staples like rice or steamed buns during the meal to increase satiety. Mistake #3: Pursuing an Excessively Light Diet
As the temperature rises and sweat evaporates, the body loses more water and needs constant replenishment. This dilutes stomach acid and digestive juices, leading to a decreased appetite and a decline in the gastrointestinal system's digestive and absorption functions. A light, low-oil diet is easier to digest and absorb. However, many people excessively pursue a light diet, reducing their intake of high-protein foods like fish, shrimp, and lean meat, and eating a vegetarian diet every day. In terms of cooking methods, they mainly use steaming, boiling, and cold salads. Over time, this can lower the body's resistance, making one prone to fatigue, anemia, colds, and other illnesses. Nutritionist's Comments:
In high-temperature environments, the body's energy consumption increases, with the basal metabolic rate rising by 5-10%. Heat energy intake should be slightly higher than usual. If you blindly pursue a light diet, you may end up with insufficient intake of heat energy and protein, which in turn affects the synthesis of immunoglobulins in the body. Insufficient intake of vegetable oil can also lead to a deficiency of essential fatty acids that the body cannot synthesize, affecting the structure and function of cell membranes. Solution:
First, ensure you have staple foods at every meal, with a quantity of no less than 50 grams. Staple foods are high in carbohydrates, providing energy quickly and easily, and place a small burden on digestion and absorption. If it's hard to increase your food intake, you can eat snacks, fruits, or pastries when hungry to increase your calorie intake. For protein supplementation, focus on milk, eggs, soy products, fish, shrimp, and lean meat.
When cooking, try to minimize deep-frying, pan-frying, and frying. You can use more methods like stir-frying, quick-frying, stewing, braising, simmering, and steaming. If you use too little oil in your cooking and often feel unsatisfied after the meal, you can eat a few high-fat snacks like walnuts, peanuts, cashews, pistachios, and a small amount of sunflower seeds to meet your body's needs for fatty acids. Mistake #4: Daily Summer Night Snacks
During the hot summer days, appetite decreases, and food intake is low. After nightfall, the temperature drops, and the gentle evening breeze brings a sense of comfort. Enjoying the cool air of midsummer, gathering for meals, and meeting with friends are also popular choices for many office workers. When you're having a good time chatting and drinking with friends, it's easy to unconsciously consume large amounts of high-protein, high-calorie foods like fish, shrimp, and meat. Night after night of feasting can lead not only to a growing beer belly but also a series of abnormal health indicators, such as high blood pressure, high blood lipids, high blood sugar, hyperuricemia, and fatty liver. By then, it will be too late to regret it! Nutritionist's Comments:
Because there isn't much activity after dinner, the calories consumed are most likely to be stored. Typically, dinner should account for about 30% of the total daily calorie intake, which is what we often mean by "eat a light dinner." However, midnight snacks often involve large amounts of high-protein, high-fat foods like fish, shrimp, meat, and eggs. Coupled with the calories from alcohol and beverages, this often exceeds 30%. Over time, the beer belly grows larger.
Excessive fat intake at dinner can lead to elevated blood lipids, causing the liver to synthesize significantly more blood cholesterol and stimulating it to produce more low-density lipoprotein (LDL). This transports excessive cholesterol to the artery walls, where it accumulates, easily inducing atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease.
Furthermore, long-term overeating at night can repeatedly stimulate the pancreas, causing increased insulin secretion. Over time, this can lead to a decline in the function of the beta cells that secrete insulin, resulting in diabetes. Overeating at night can also cause the stomach to expand,压迫 surrounding organs,加重 the burden on the stomach, intestines, liver, gallbladder, and pancreas, and can also stimulate the cerebral cortex, inducing insomnia. Solution:
For a midnight snack, you can choose easily digestible foods like vegetables, fish, shrimp, and soy products. Cooking methods can include cold salads, steaming, boiling, and stewing. You can choose one dish that is braised, stir-fried, or deep-fried. Don't overindulge in alcohol. Before drinking, you can eat some foods rich in carbohydrates, like porridge, noodles, steamed buns, pastries, or corn, to protect the gastric mucosa. Avoid drinking on an empty stomach, and especially avoid drinking large amounts of iced beer to prevent stomach cramps. Also, try not to eat after 9 PM. After eating, don't go to sleep immediately; take a short walk and let your stomach digest the food before going to bed.