Every time I consume something whilst in sight of a Chinese person, they very kindly point out all the health benefits / detrimints inherent in that consumable. It seems that nearly everything there is to eat or drink will somehow influence my balance, complexion, virility, or even possibly lifespan.

I must be coincidentally balancing all of these counterforces perfectly, because I never notice a thing.

Chinese people are obsessed with assigning attributes to the stuff we eat or drink. Which may explain why the health food market is so huge. When it comes to health food, Taobao is loaded to the nines with all sorts of pills tonics and powders for every ailment and every aspiration.

That might explain their latest move, another one of their ballsy power-plays to take over the world:  Taobao has partnered with a province-level government agency to help set up some regulatory oversight for healthfoods. This partnership will cover areas similar to what the FDA does in the US: initiate standards for what vitamins and other health foods can contain, and require that producers make ingredient information available.

But I know what this is all about. I don’t know if you have seen the movie Idiocracy (required viewing), but this is similar to what the Brawndo megacorporation did. They bought the FDA and changed every piece of the food pyramid into a Brawndo product. Here dramatized in Taobao-vision:

Sort of. It seems that they just want to wash out some of the bad stuff from their listings to limit their liability if some kid drops dead after eating some bad brain-growth pills. But it also seems like the regulations will not be Taobao-only, but will cover all health food sold in Zhejiang Province. So that’s good for everybody. 

Thanks, Taobao!

Related: Learn more about China’s Possibly-Fake Health Supplement Market