Are there any chinese dishes that aren't so bad for you?

Question

I read the article on Yahoo yesterday about how it's so bad for you especially the sodium content. Also why is brown rice any better for you than just plain steamed white rice?? My fav dish is Chicken and Stringbeans which is chicken stir fried and green beans and 90% of any of the liquid drips off anyway how bad can that be?

Ok.......These are authentic chinese restaurants and the chicken is white meat and does NOT have the skin on it it's just chunks of white meat. Also do the chinese restaurants offer brown rice as an option? All i've ever seen is fried rice or steamed.

Answer 1

Whenever we order Chinese, I order mine food steamed with the sauce on the side. This way I can control the amount of stuff on my food. I also order brown rice as the fiber content is much higher and, IMO, white rice is really just junk food.

As for items to eat -- I usually order beef and broccoli or bean curd & veggies or broccoli with garlic sauce. All of these are pretty healthy with lots more veggies than meat.

You could see if the restaurant will steam your chicken & stringbeans & serve the sauce on the side. Most places are used to this type of request and it shouldn't be a problem.

Answer 2

By the way, I just bought a pizza from the supermarket today, and there is 33% sodium content in a quarter serving. What do you think?
The research is somewhat misleading and the there is a lot of misconceptions about how people interpret the articles yesterday from Yahoo. First, the types of dishes they show on the T.V. are Cantoese-style cusinie, which is only popular in the Cantonese region in Hong Kong and China. There are basically four main types of cusinies in China and every region has different types of dishes, snacks and so on just like Italy. To be fair, Cantonese cuisine tends to be more oily compared with other Chinese cusinie, which is true in general, but still you will be able to find healthier Cantonese cusinie in authentic Chinese restaurants. Second, the dishes tested were all "Northern American Chinese food," which are not cooked by professional trained cooks, not chefs. These cooks depend heavily on commerical condiments to endance the dishes mainly because two reasons:
1. They are not professional trained, and therefore most can be found in "takeout" and "food court" restauarants, which are the places most mainstream people love go when they think about Chinese food.
2. The mainstream people here in Northern America are only willing to pay for Chinese cusinies that are cheap and they love heavy flavor, which are what exactly these takeout and food court Chinese restaurants can offer. With that being said, if I were the owner of a takeout restuarant and my customers want heavy flavor without paying $30 bucks a dishes, then the only choice I have is to use cheap commerical condiments with high sodium and a lot of oil. At the end of the day, it's the customers who demand for change or restaurant owners will keep doing what they do to survive in the business. Look at Macdonald and KFC, if customers didn't demand for change, what make them change their menus or subsitute other oil for frying chicken!
A couple more things to clarify here:
1. The Chinese people tend to share a dish when they order, they don't eat the whole dish by themselves.
2. I have been to several Chinese friends; home for dinners, and I know that in homecooking, they tend to use less oil than they people working in the commerical kitchen. And Chinese homecooking use stemming a lot because they hate to use a lot of oil, which brings up the answer of your question. I see the Cinese use stemming on fish and chicken a lot. They add and stuff sprig onion, cilantro, and ginger with a little bit of oil and soy sauce, but they don't eat the leftover sauce in the dish. That's all I know.

Answer 3

Brown rice has more fiber and more vitamins are preserved. It is good for bowel motion. White rice raises the glycemic blood sugar level considerably. Many Chinese find white rice more palatable.

Health conscious folks usually take brown rice rather than white rice.

Chicken and stringbeans sound all right to me. Just remove the skin of the chicken. Too much fried food is not very good for health. Steamed or soup items are healthier.

There are many ways to cook healthy chinese dishes.

Restaurants serving Chinese dishes usually put lots of MSG (monosodium glutamate) which may cause adverse reactions in some consumers.

I'm afraid you may have to put a little more effort in crafting your question. It is not easy to answer it. :-)

Tofu, fish, vegetables, fruits are healthy.

Answer 4

brown rice is the best because it doesn't have as much starch or sodium, and it tastes the same as white rice. fried rice is the worst, but anyways. chicken with stringbeans are good, but don't always order stringbeans, because variety is key to getting the best out of your veggies. maybe try broccoli, and always ask for the sauce on the side, because you can control the amount. always avoid general tso's chicken, sesame chicken, or sweet and sour chicken, because they are the absolute worse choices! they are all deep fried and hard to digest.

Answer 5

You need to go to an authentic chinese restaurant to get the type of food that is not bad for you. The report that was made was based on "Americanized" chinese food. If you eat food that is not deep fried and that is not battered and that is not dripping in sauce then you're okay. But most dishes we americans eat are dripping in this sauce (whether it drips off or not, the sauce soaks into the food before we eat it.) And to top it all off, we add more soy sauce to the dish, making the sodium content sky high.

Answer 6

Brown rice is better because it maintains the bran. With white rice the bran is stripped off. Bran is good for you.

Cheese is good for you. A whole-cheese diet is bad for you.

Everything in moderation