Ethnic Eats: How Healthy Are They?

Photo: stevendepolo

Remember how back in the nineties, the Center for Science in the Public Interest took on Chinese food? There were headlines in all the papers exposing the fact that the kind of Chinese food Americans were eating was shockingly high in calories and fat and sodium.

So did people get mad at the Chinese restaurants for not trying to make dishes healthier? Or, did they get mad at themselves for ordering the least healthy options? No, neither of those. As I recall, they mostly got mad at CSPI for reporting on the issue at all. CSPI was accused of being a nagging whiny cranky spoilsport for dissing stuff like egg rolls, fried rice and chow mein.

And I remember thinking at the time: duh! Stupid people, don't shoot the messenger! Did you really think the presence of a few chopped up vegetables in your deep fried carbs would magically transform the whole greasy mess into something healthy? But many people thought this was unfair, because clearly they were taking the high road by going to Chinese restaurants, and eating in close proximity to vegetables. So what if they weren't actually putting many in their mouths?

(And when CSPI revisited Chinese food a couple years ago, they found more healthy options. But still, there is a shocking amount of sodium, fat and calories in a lot of these dishes. Like, sometimes 2 days worth of sodium in a single dish. Also, you can end up eating 900 calories in something that sounds light, like an order of stir fried greens.)

Anyway, so here's my problem, and it's one I hope y'all can help me with. I love Chinese food, as well as Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Ethiopian, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, Italian, Mexican... and all kinds of other foods from faraway places. (Though for some reason, not a big fan of Japanese. Sorry, sushi!)

And luckily, lots of these food contain very healthy ingredients. Like fresh exotic veggies and nuts and olive oil and healthy spices like curry and a variety of whole grains I don't usually get around to eating.

But... when I go out to eat, I have the same problem I do at most "American" restaurants: it's often hard to avoid a lot of ingredients I don't want to eat much of: like sodium and white rice and white flour, butter, cured and fatty meats, and many vegetable oils that may not contain transfats but are high in Omega 6's rather than Omega 3's.

(Huh? What's wrong with corn, sunflower, safflower, soy, and cottonseed oils? The tedious explanation is back here in this Omega 3 and Omega 6 post).

So I obviously have a few options here:

1. I can go to ethnic restaurants infrequently and order very carefully;

2. I can do takeout from these restaurants a little more often if I healthify the meals a bit when I get home; or,

3. I can cook more ethnic dishes from scratch so I can control the ingredients and make it as healthy as I want, and eat it every damn day if I feel like it!

So far, I've been doing mostly #2 (and I have some suggestions I can pass along on that). But I'm figuring if there's anyone can help me on #3, it would be clever Cranky Fitness readers.

Can you help a cooking-impaired Crab with some healthy international ideas?

First, a few tricks for healthifying Ethnic Take Out:

1. Swap out White for Brown: many Asian restaurants don't offer brown rice; many Mediterranean restaurants don't offer whole grain breads, wraps or pasta; many Indian Restaurants have the white Naan but not the whole grain Roti. If this is the case at your local joint, try to remember to stock your freezer with some whole wheat pita or already cooked and frozen nukable brown rice (Trader Joe's is a good source). Or, many grocery stores now have little plastic bowls of pre-cooked brown rice that sits in your cupboard. (It's not as good as the frozen kind or the real kind but it's easier to find).

2. Spare that Sauce! Often what's wonderful about Indian or Thai or whatever are the wonderful rich spicy curries and oils and gravies. However, these are often full of sodium, drawn butter, cheese, suspicious oils, lard, or who knows what. In my opinion, life's too short to skip these! But often restaurants send you home with far more sauce than you need to douse the other ingredients. So don't mindlessly pour it all on your plate; pick out extra vegetables and meat and use the sauce more sparingly. Then you can often make another meal the next day with the addition of more nuked chopped vegetables, some more brown rice or bread, and an easy protein source like frozen cooked shrimp or tofu or leftover chicken or chickpeas or whatever the heck you keep around.

3. Be a pain in the ass when ordering! (Always fun when the person taking your order is speaking English as a second language). Sometimes, especially if you're a regular, you can get them to go easy on oil, add more of your favorite veggies and go easier on the meat, replace butter with olive oil, etc. Dr. J has a helpful post on how to do this.

4. And don't order stupid things! Sometimes people take a perfectly sensible choice about cuisine "I feel like Chinese," or "Let's do Italian" and then use that as an excuse to eat junky stuff because it's "traditional." A fried doughball is a fried doughball, whether you get it from an Indian restaurant or a Chinese restaurant or Dunkin' Donuts. And even if the "Mediterranean diet" is generally good for you, fettucine alfredo is not a health food.

Okay, so that wasn't very many tips. Whatever. Perhaps you folks have some more good ones!

But What About Cooking Ethnic Food at Home?

Here's why I don't do it enough:

Most recipes you get from American sources, especially "light" cookbooks or cooking magazines, don't end up tasting all that much like real ethnic cuisine. (Premade sauces from the grocery store are even worse). But if you find a more authentic recipe, it often calls for tons of exotic oils and herbs and vinegars and spices that are either hard to find or really expensive. Plus there's usually something Evil in there that makes it taste good, and if you try to modify that too much it doesn't taste nearly as good as it does in a restaurant.

Do you guys have any good suggestions? I suspect there might be some good healthy international type recipes that require just a few non-standard ingredients, not 87.

Like Camevil's awesome lentil salad, which besides the basic ingredients required only the purchase of garam masala. And garam masala turns out to be a lovely spice that I wouldn't have known about otherwise! (The dish turned out to be quite tasty and I'd definitely make it again. And the second day I added some chopped nuts and dried fruit to it cause I'm weird that way, and it was really good that way too.)

So what sort of ethnic/international food do you guys eat? Do you go to restaurants, modify take out, or make it from scratch?

Fatty Fish, Obesity, and More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Omega 3's

So it's not exactly news that Omega 3's are a "good" fat.

Health benefits? Oh yeah. Consumption of Omega 3's has been linked to a reduced risk of lots of bad things, like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, certain kinds of cancer, diabetes, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, Alzheimer's, and spontaneous combustion.

OK, so I just made that last one up to see if you were paying attention. Come to think of it, all that extra oil would probably make you MORE combustible, not less.

Always good to have handy.

Anyway.

Omega 3 fatty acids are also awesome because they reduce inflammation, and because of their high concentration in the brain, they help cognitive functioning. Not getting enough Omega 3's? Symptoms of a deficiency include extreme fatigue, crappy memory, dry skin, heart problems, mood swings or depression, and poor circulation.

The American Heart Association, for example, recommends a couple of servings of fatty fish a week for most adults.

And now there's some new research on even more benefits you can get from Omega 3's if you are overweight or obese. I'll have additional info on that in a moment.

But here's the tricky part: Omega-3 isn't a food itself, like a watermelon. You can't just go to the grocery store an throw a big ol' Omega-3 in your shopping cart. You get it in something, like a bottle of supplements or a can of tuna or a bag of walnuts.


And that's where it starts to get complicated. Some experts say Omega 3 fatty acids aren't all created equal.

There's a helpful article about the the best sources of Omega 3's over at US News and World Report. And by helpful I mean the "Oh crap, why did I have to read this and get all confused?" kind of helpful.

Because apparently there is some disagreement about whether fish omega 3's and plant omega 3's are equally beneficial.


EPA, DHA, and ALA and Blah blah blah blah

On the one hand, you got your oily cold-water fish kind of Omega 3's. These are the long chain fatty acids, DHA and EPA. You get these from fish like salmon, mackerel, halibut, sardines, tuna, and herring.

And then there's the plant kind of Omega 3's (the short chain one, ALA), like in walnuts, canola oil, flax seeds, and ch-ch-ch-chia seeds.

Also, there's algae! These contain the long chain type like fish. (But hang on, it gets more complicated).

And finally we have the Great American Marketing kind of Omega 3, which comes in supplement bottles or appears in all kinds of processed food with cheerful labels saying "Now with Omega-3's!" What are these? Well, they could be DHA or EPA or ALA, it depends. You have to look at the label, if it's a supplement, or the ingredients if it's a processed food to see what's in there. If there are anchovies in your orange juice, for example, it's probably DHA and EPA.

Now after you eat ALA (the plant kind), the body converts it to EPA and DHA, which are more readily used by the body. So why does it matter if you're getting DHA, EPA, or ALA?

Well, according to the US News article above, and a bunch of other random experts I've come across recently but don't feel like chasing down right now, it's not clear you really get the same benefits from ALA (plant-based Omega 3's) that you do from DHA and EPA. More and more I'm seeing the recommendation to make sure some of your Omega 3's are from marine sources too, not just plants.

Plus, a further complication: some sources of Omega 3's like tilapia or soybean oil are also high in Omega 6's.


What's Wrong With Omega 6's?

Nothing, if we ate the amounts we used to back in the olden days--more like a 1/1 ratio with Omega 3's. But in modern diets, we eat too damn much, like 16 to 1. Excess Omega 6 compared to Omega 3 has serious health consequences. Dr. Weil, for example, suggests cutting down on cut down on consumption of "processed and fast foods and polyunsaturated vegetable oils (corn, sunflower, safflower, soy, and cottonseed)."

The bottom line recommendation seemed to be: get lots of different sources of Omega 3's, both plant and fish-based, but watch out you don't overdo the Omega 6's.


Good Foods for Omega 3's:

Here's one compilation of good omega 3 sources; google will probably find you lots more:

Seafood: Salmon, bluefin tuna, mackerel, herring, rainbow trout, anchovies and sardines, shrimp, mollusks, and Alaskan king crab.

Oils: flaxseed oil and canola oil. (Other vegetable oils like soybean, corn, and cottonseed oils have lots of omega-6).

Beans: Kidney, pinto, and mungo beans especially. (Anyone know what the hell a mungo bean is?) Chickpeas--not so much.

Nuts and seeds: Walnuts and flaxseed particularly rock.

Spinach, winter squash, broccoli, cauliflower, and papaya. Who knew?


So what if I Hate Fish or I'm Freaked Out by Mercury or I'm a Vegetarian?

Hate Fish? I don't personally hate all fish, but I'm not crazy about the oily kind except for every now and them. So I'm not confident I'm getting all the EPA and DHA awesomeness that my body would appreciate. So I go the fish oil capsule route. I buy the enteric kind, if I can find them, to minimize the dreaded fish burps. (One expert suggested that freezing the capsules first will also help with this). The experts in the US News article felt that fish oil capsules were generally safe when it came to mercury and pcb's, noting a Consumer Reports survey that tested various store-bought brands and found they were cool.

Concern about Mercury in Fish: There are some kinds of fish known to be high in mercury which you should probably not eat a lot of, and may want to avoid entirely if you are pregnant. Beware of shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish. The American Heart Association has some recommendations for fish high in Omega 3 but generally low in mercury.

Also, you might want to check out Safe Harbor, which tests fish for mercury and has a seal indicating it's been tested--if you're lucky enough to have a store that sells their stuff in your area.

What About Vegetarians? Well, there are other experts who don't think failing to eat fish or fish oil is any big deal. And there are algae supplements, and algae has long chain Omega 3's.

However, these algae-based supplements tend to contain DHA but not EPA. So one of the expert recommendations was to combine algae supplements with plant-based Omega 3's for better health benefits.


Don't Take Too Much Though

If you're using supplements, you should probably stay under 3 grams of omega-3 fatty acids from capsules per day, unless you're being supervised by a doctor. Otherwise they're an increased risk of bleeding and possibly even hemorrhagic stroke. (That's where an artery in the brain ruptures. You don't want that). However, research is mixed on whether/how much Omega-3's increase this risk. Taking lots of omega 3's can also interfere with certain medications; another reason to check with your doctor if you want to take a bunch of the stuff.


New Studies on Omega 3's and Obesity

I did mention something about that at the beginning, didn't I? That was before I decided to write such a long-ass blog post on Omega 3's.

So I'll make it quick, in case you all are getting as bored of this dang topic as I am.

That'sFit has a good summary of the Omega 3 and obesity studies. One of them, on mice, suggested that "diets rich in omega-3 fatty acids protect the liver from damage caused by obesity and the insulin resistance it provokes." The editor and chief of the journal it was published in said "it's not unlikely that eating lots more fish or a simple switch to canola oil will make a difference," so I'm guessing it included both kinds of Omegas. But I couldn't tell for sure from the abstract.

And the other Omega 3 study, this one on actual overweight and obese people, indicated that eating long-chain (fishy) omega 3's helped those who were losing weight feel fuller after a meal.

Whew! So do you all get your Omega 3's? How? And do you watch your Omega 6's? Or do you just say "screw it" and figure if you're generally eating healthy you're probably OK?