▲ Kim Na Young (nykim1226@korea.ac.kr), Senior Reporter, The Granite Tower (GT)

After the boom in well-being products, television broadcasters have been busy producing informational programs that deal with health. From Vitamin on Korean Broadcasting System 2 (KBS2) to Emperor of the Thumb on Maeil Broadcasting Network (MBN), many programs are highlighting various foods, both healthy and unhealthy. Nonetheless, they are not helping the audience much, as they show troubling twists in healthy and unhealthy food.

Milk has been recognized as being good for our bones because it is high in calcium, and we have been persuaded to drink regularly since we were children. However, some recent studies, including a Harvard Nurses’ Health Study based on 77,761 women, have suggested that it actually depletes calcium from our bones and that drinking it may cause osteoporosis. They found that the participants who consumed more dairy products had weaker bones than the others.

There is the reverse twist of monosodium glutamate (MSG) which has always been considered a harmful food additive. Nonetheless, recent research argues that MSG does not cause any harm to the human body. Last March, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety even officially stated that eating MSG is safe.

If you are a regular viewer of health-related programs, you would know that there are many common beliefs about foods. However, does that mean that we should stop eating food that has been recently classified as unhealthy and eat only the ones that have been newly found healthy?

The answer is no. There is no need to follow everything that the programs recommend since people may react to foods differently. For example, although vitamin pills do help people fulfill their daily consumption of essential vitamins and minerals, it may make some people dizzy. In addition, some people cannot digest the vitamins from the pills completely, which leads to inefficacy. Therefore, the effect of healthy products can differ from person to person.

In addition, one reason why the findings of different studies are not the same is that the research often has dissimilar focuses and purposes. For instance, the research that was conducted in 1960s in Korea suggested that MSG was indeed harmful simply because it contains many chemical substances.

Yet, more recent research conducted in the U.S. has focused more individually by analyzing the substance in MSG. They, therefore, claim that they are not at all harmful because glutamic acid, which is a large proportion of MSG, can be found naturally in kelp or oysters, even though it is artificially added to MSG. Change in research findings such as this show we cannot put 100 percent of our trust in them.

A better way to keep your body healthy seems to be to not regularly view such health-related programs but simply to eat whatever you like. There is even a common saying, “Stress is the cause of every disease.” By making sure to be optimistic and happy and release as much stress as possible, people can stay fit as they age and even cure possible illnesses they might have.

Therefore, rather than watching and following everything that the television programs advise, it seems wiser to simply keep your mind healthy, since every food and every product may have a twist. So do not get too stressed out about eating healthy food and finding out what would be best for you. Just keep eating whatever you like!

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