For 36-year-old Jiang Luxiang, every trip to the grocery store involves a lot of counting. “If there are more than three additives [in the ingredient list], then don’t buy it,” the Zhejiang-based health blogger tells TWOC, quoting a teacher from her college nutrition course whose rule for healthy eating she has followed scrupulously for the past 15 years, and even improved on: “Nowadays, I sometimes won’t buy products with more than one kind of additive.”

About five years ago, Jiang also stopped using soy sauce, vinegar, and other condiments with artificial additives, as she believes these products are bad for her health. “Humans should eat foods that occur in nature; that’s the rule of the universe and of nature,” she declares. To her 18,000 followers on lifestyle app Xiaohongshu (RED), Jiang advocates a natural diet consisting of vegetables she picks fresh from farms and cooks in simple ways (such as by steaming or frying in olive oil), coarse cereals like quinoa and yams, and natural condiments like rosemary, cinnamon, and mint. “You eat in order to make your body healthy,” she believes.

Jiang’s methods may be unorthodox, yet the concerns driving them are decidedly mainstream. Last month, well-known soy sauce brand Haitian faced public backlash for allegedly using “inferior” ingredients in its domestic products, compared to those it sells overseas. Customers alleged that the company’s soy sauce sold in Japan only contained natural ingredients, while the same product in China has numerous artificial additives, such as preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and flavor enhancers. At least one of these ingredients, sodium benzoate, has been linked to cancer, reviving public concerns over food safety.