After That Lunchtime Comment, I Went Through Every Secondhand Claim About Japanese Tengsu One by One

My lunchbox was still unopened when the colleague at the next table tossed out a joke: "You've been looking so well lately—did you sneak some Japanese Tengsu?" The whole table laughed and then dispersed, leaving me with a question mark in my head. The comment itself was nothing, but over the next two days, I noticed I kept hearing the same phrase in different settings, and everyone's version was different.

The first to speak up was Lao Chen, who sits across from me—in his fifties and always speaks with absolute certainty. He said this kind of thing is "from Japan, so it must be purer," and added that when he traveled to Japan when he was younger, the shelves in drugstores were packed with it. I asked him what exactly was on the shelves and what the packaging said, and he paused for a few seconds before saying it was just that category of stuff. Lao Chen's claim was really an impression: equating place of origin with quality. But origin never guarantees anything—Taiwan also has plenty of things labeled as imported whose sources are just as unclear.

The second was a young colleague who had just finished his military service. He scrolled through his phone and said that online everyone says "if you take it, such-and-such happens," and some people had even compiled lists comparing them. I asked him to show me that page, and the whole thing was reposts of reposts, with no original source and no ingredient information at all. His version represents another common situation: treating discussion heat as information quality. Lots of comments and lots of shares don't mean the content has been verified—often it's just the same sentence copied many times.

The third was the quietest team lead in our department. He only said one thing: "With this kind of thing, you first need to figure out what status it has." He explained that even if they're all on the same shelf, some are foods, some are health foods, and some are actually classified as drugs in Taiwan. Whether you can buy it, bring it in, or take it yourself—the answers are completely different. That comment made me actually sit down when I got home and take apart the three claims I'd heard during the day, one by one.

First, I separated what was "hearsay" from what was "verifiable." The hearsay included: things bought in Japan must be better, taking it will make you more energetic, and a friend of a friend said it works well. None of these had a source, and there was no packaging or labeling to compare against, so I set them aside for now. The verifiable parts were: what product this name actually corresponds to, what category it falls under in our country, whether the packaging has ingredients and warnings, and whether a professional needs to evaluate it. I realized that as long as I changed the question from "does it work" to "what is it," a lot of the arguing disappeared on its own.

The third step was what really stumped me: I had no idea where to confirm which category it belonged to. Search results were mixed with forums, marketplaces, and content farms, and every page said something different. Later I switched to a more clumsy method: first confirm what I was actually looking for—for example, directly looking up product information corresponding to the name Japanese Tengsu—and then go back and compare whether the packaging labels and source were clearly stated, instead of first looking at how others described its effects. The advantage of doing this is that at least I knew I was comparing the same thing, rather than three people each talking about something different.

After comparing for a while, I worked out a repeatable order: first confirm the name and item, then confirm its classification in Taiwan, then look at the ingredients, warnings, and source labeling on the packaging, and only after that consider whether to ask a professional. In these four steps, if the information at any step is unclear, stop there first—don't skip over it with "it should be fine." I also reminded myself that if I'm already taking any medications or supplements, I should bring that list when asking, rather than piecing things together on my own.

The next day at noon, Lao Chen brought up the same thing again. This time I didn't respond directly—I just asked him back about the classification question I'd looked into the day before. He thought about it and said he actually hadn't looked at the packaging either. In that moment, I actually felt more grounded: turning a joke into a few verifiable questions is more useful than rushing to believe or rushing to deny. As for who it's actually suitable for, that's not something that can be decided at a lunch table. That's something to ask a professional, not the rumors from the next table.