Military doctor explains： Eat Lantern Festival ＂healthily＂

????Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, also known as Shangyuan Festival, Shangyuan Festival, Xiaoyuan Festival, Yuanxi Festival or Lantern Festival, is the first important festival after the Spring Festival, and it is also one of the traditional festivals in China, as well as in the Chinese character cultural circle and overseas Chinese. The first month is the first month of the lunar calendar. The ancients called the night "Xiao", so the fifteenth day of the first full moon in a year is called the Lantern Festival.

????Why do you eat Yuanxiao on Lantern Festival?

????According to written records, there was no Lantern Festival before the Song Dynasty. At that time, people ate rice porridge or bean porridge with gravy during the Lantern Festival. In the Tang Dynasty, there was a saying that "porridge was made on the fifteenth day of the first month, and the temple was the gateway". In the Song Dynasty, a novel food "floating dumplings", which means a full moon in the sky, dumplings in a bowl and family reunion, became popular among the people. By the Ming Dynasty, there were more names for "Yuanxiao". After the Revolution of 1911, Yuan Shikai stole the post of president. He was afraid of the homophonic "Yuanxiao" and ordered the change of Yuanxiao to "Tangyuan" before the Lantern Festival in 1913.

????What’s the difference between Yuanxiao and Tangyuan?

????Generally speaking, it is called Yuanxiao in the north and Tangyuan in the south. The biggest difference between them is the different production methods. The dumplings in the south are made of glutinous rice flour, mixed with water, and then wrapped with stuffing, while the Yuanxiao in the north is directly rolled out of glutinous rice flour layer by layer. In terms of taste, Yuanxiao is more chewy when cooked and eaten now, with thin skin and big stuffing, which is more sticky and softer.

????How to eat Yuanxiao to be healthy?

????1 It is not advisable to eat too much at one time.

????The outer skin of Yuanxiao is made of glutinous rice flour. Glutinous rice itself is a very difficult food to digest, even if it is ground into powder, it is still the same. Never measure the number of Yuanxiao by how many dumplings you can eat at a meal. Dumpling skins are made of flour ground from wheat, and they are different. Therefore, it is suggested that friends with moderate appetite only need to eat three or four (referring to stuffing). If you eat too much, it will easily increase the burden on the gastrointestinal tract and cause discomfort such as bloating and heartburn.

????No need to eat staple food.

????Yuanxiao looks just like table tennis, but it contains a lot of heat. Especially for sweet stuffing, some people will mix a lot of white sugar and lard into sesame stuffing or bean paste stuffing when they make their own bags, which will taste sweet and delicious, but the corresponding monosaccharides and oils will increase. After eating three or four sweet dumplings, you have basically absorbed the calories of a normal meal of rice, so there is no need to supplement other staple foods.

????3 Choose the products of regular manufacturers

????Now on the market, all kinds of additives are flying all over the sky. Although some of them are edible essences, there are still many unscrupulous manufacturers who are just a sham. If you eat toxic and harmful additives by mistake, the harm to human body is incalculable. Therefore, when you buy, you must carefully check the labeling, ingredients, production date, etc. It is best to choose a big manufacturer who knows better and trusts more. Don’t be greedy for cheap and buy some three-no products. Recently, a kind of colored Lantern Festival has begun to appear. We must carefully distinguish whether it is a dyed Lantern Festival. If it is found to fade when cooking, we must resolutely not eat it.

????4 diabetic patients should avoid eating.

????Friends with diabetes should avoid eating items containing sugar as much as possible in their diet. Sweet Yuanxiao is needless to say, and salty Yuanxiao is also avoided as much as possible. Peel is made of glutinous rice flour, which contains a lot of starch, which belongs to polysaccharide; Although the stuffing is salty, it contains oil, so to be on the safe side, it is recommended that diabetics should not eat Yuanxiao.

????Young children and the elderly should eat under supervision.

????It’s like the precautions you see on the packaging bag of jelly. When children under three years old eat Yuanxiao, they may eat the whole Yuanxiao at once because their chewing and swallowing functions are not perfect, and glutinous rice flour is extremely sticky, so it will stick to the esophagus and trachea if it is not careful, blocking the respiratory tract and causing life-threatening. The elderly are also, because the function of teeth is not as good as before, and they accidentally swallow the whole Yuanxiao without chewing slowly, causing suffocation. Therefore, for children, it is best for parents to take a small bite first and then feed it to their children; When the old people are eating, don’t talk to them or make them laugh. Let them chew carefully and swallow slowly.

????6 Asthma patients should not eat five kernel stuffing.

????Peanut is one of the main ingredients in glutinous rice balls (Yuanxiao) filled with five kernels, and some allergic asthma patients may have allergic reactions to peanuts, which can easily induce asthma attacks, so they must pay special attention before buying and eating.

????It is best to eat boiled or steamed dumplings (Yuanxiao).

????Some people like to eat fried Yuanxiao, which adds a lot of calories to the greasy Yuanxiao. It is not recommended to eat more. When you eat the leftover Yuanxiao, you should heat it thoroughly. When friends with dentures eat Yuanxiao, it is best to remove their dentures.

????When eating Yuanxiao, you can match some foods that are helpful for digestion, such as celery, hawthorn, barley wort, dried tangerine peel, raw radish, etc. Raw radish contains crude fiber, which can promote gastrointestinal peristalsis and reduce the absorption of oil. Don’t give up the soup either. There are many water-soluble vitamins in glutinous rice, such as vitamins B1 and B2. About half of them will stay in the soup during the cooking of Yuanxiao, so drinking soup is also a good habit to promote digestion. (Tang Honghao, You Xiangmei)