Sea cucumber dietary taboos

People with high uric acid/renal insufficiency/seafood allergies should eat with caution and do not eat a large amount of food with high tannic acid content at one time. Wrong cooking and storage methods will greatly lose nutrients and will not have any nutritional value.

The most outrageous thing is the "food mutual conflict" theory that has been circulating for almost ten years. As a kid who runs a Jiaodong seafood food stall, I encountered such an incident last summer: a family of three ordered braised sea cucumbers with green onions as the main course, and then turned around and ordered two boxes of frozen persimmons. The waiter kindly mentioned the sea cucumber as an after-dinner fruit, "It seems that the Internet says that these two cannot be eaten together." The father took out his mobile phone and looked up the popular science on the Internet. He said that eating them together will form stomach stones, and in severe cases, he will need surgery. He made a fuss about removing the sea cucumber. In the end, a master chef who had been cooking seafood for decades came out to explain. He said that when he went to sea, he ate two sea cucumbers and two persimmons at one meal, and he didn't see any stones for half his life, so the matter was over.

Later, I asked a clinical nutritionist I was familiar with. The so-called "tannic acid and protein combine to form a precipitate" does have a scientific basis, but the occurrence of this reaction depends on the dosage - you have to eat more than ten kilograms of high-tannic acid food at one time. Persimmons, hawthorns, and seven or eight pounds of sea cucumbers can reach the concentration that forms stones. The amount of intake for a normal person in one meal will at most cause indigestion and acid reflux in people with weak spleen and stomach, which is a long way from "poisoning" and "stones". Of course, there are also older generations of traditional Chinese medicine doctors who hold a different view. They believe that sea cucumbers are warm in nature, and eating them with extremely cold foods such as ice beer and ice watermelon can easily damage the spleen and stomach. People with weak constitutions are more likely to have diarrhea. This is not wrong. After all, there are differences in individual constitutions. There is really no need for people who are prone to stomach discomfort to eat together to make trouble.

Compared with these invisible taboos, what we should really pay attention to are the eating precautions for the three groups of people. Last month, after my aunt had minimally invasive surgery, she heard from a patient in the same ward that she ate two sea cucumbers in the morning and evening to repair the wound. After five days of eating, her nose started to bleed. When she went to the hospital to check her uric acid level, it spiked to 480. She already had mildly high uric acid, which almost caused gout. The purine content of sea cucumbers is not the highest among seafood, but it is about 50 mg per 100 grams. It is a medium-purine food. Eating large amounts for a long time is indeed not friendly to people with high uric acid. And if you are allergic to seafood, don’t take chances. My cousin secretly took a sip of the family’s sea cucumber soup when he was a child. He broke out in hives all over his body. He still walks away from sea cucumbers when he sees them. Sea cucumbers themselves are seafood proteins, and the probability of allergies is no lower than that of shrimps and crabs.

Of course, there is also controversy about the consumption of special groups. For example, a popular science article in the Department of Nephrology mentioned that patients with compensated kidney function should eat 1/3 of soaked sea cucumbers every day. The burden of supplementing high-quality protein is smaller than that of eating soy protein. It is not completely forbidden. Just follow the doctor's advice for the specific amount. Don't listen to the false claims of sea cucumber sellers that "everyone can supplement it", and don't dare to use it at all and delay nutritional supplements.

In addition to those who eat it, be careful. Many people eat sea cucumbers in the wrong way, which is equivalent to wasting a good thing. My mother once heard someone say that sea cucumbers need to be cooked for a long time to become soft. They have to be simmered in a pot for more than half an hour each time. When they are taken out, they are soft and like rubber. In fact, the active polysaccharides and polypeptides in sea cucumbers are easily deactivated by long-term high-temperature cooking. Generally, boil them in cold water for 8 to 10 minutes. If you bite them without a hard core, it will be just right. Some people soak sea cucumbers and then freeze them in the refrigerator for three to four months before eating them slowly. In fact, soaked sea cucumbers can be frozen for up to one month. Over time, the nutrients will be lost, and eating them is no different than chewing tasteless rubber. There are also many people who like to dip sea cucumbers in a lot of light soy sauce and mustard, or use heavy oil and heavy sauce to make sea cucumbers roasted with green onions. Sea cucumbers are originally low-fat and low-calorie ingredients. However, if they are high in salt and oil, people with high blood pressure will end up losing more than they gain.

In fact, after all, there are so many mysterious taboos about eating sea cucumbers. Most of them are gimmicks created by merchants to sell goods and Internet celebrities to gain traffic. If an ordinary person has a normal physique, he can eat two or three times a week, one stick at a time, and there will be no problem no matter what. If you really have underlying medical conditions and you are unsure, asking the attending doctor before eating is more reliable than reading ten "fatal contraindications" on the Internet. Oh, by the way, if you really feel acid reflux after eating sea cucumbers, just don’t eat them with the cold grapes and cold beer you just took out of the refrigerator next time. Don’t be too nervous.