Survival Guide
Being here, the odds are that you belong to the lost-in-the-kitchen circle. I remembered part of a TV ad in which a disheveled guy looking at potatoes in a supermarket wondered how he was going to eat.
At college, I got my first taste of independence with survival on my mind. Instant ramen were cherished by roommates and stashed out of sight. It wasn’t easy to have back in those days, and were offered sometimes to impress friends.
It’s quite different now, instant noodles are common comfort foods. Too much of a good thing will lead to problems of course, being cheap, quick and filling, some will eat it too often in place of a balance diet. It is best that you get to know it better as it is getting very popular with more exciting new savory varieties from Asia.
There is a different between Asian style noodle in a soup and what is thought of as a “noodle soup” with some noodles in it. In Asian instant noodles the “soup” is a very savory sauce for flavoring the large portion of noodle and its made with lot of salt and flavorings. The so-called soup itself normally has little nutrient value unless you add something else.
Asian instant noodles are generally made mostly of wheat flour and its yellow color is traditionally due to the use of a natural alkaline water called “kansui” and not eggs. It has a long shelf life due to how it is made with a low moisture content and not due to preservatives.
Amid the confusions dissembled by bad media, many of us lose sight of the basics about food. Many elements of health are viewed as combatives rather than essentials to the body.
There are nothings about ramen that make it any less heatlhy than most foods that we eat. True, it’s not a completely nutritious meal, then again, what is? Most foods are not balanced anyway, so why are we blaming ramen?
Ramen packs a lot of calories, it’s a concentrated food source in a very economical package. Sure it has high Daily Values of calories, fat and salt, but you can expect nothing less from other non-sweet foods for the same amount calories per serving or equivalent serving because one way or another you have to eat enough calories for the whole day to stay healthy.
Whether you eat a meat/fat or carbohydrate diet, if the body burns up the calories, you are not going to gain weight to develop health problems. Traditional eskimos eat a diet that has over 80 percent of the calories from fat, yet they were very healthy. The classic image of a fat eskimo was from the bulky clothings worn, they were very trim and fit, despite the rounder face which is a cultural feature.
While carbohydrates are just a source of calories, fat is also vital to the body and many essential nutrients are only in fat, all our major hormones are made from cholesterol, and even the brain requires about 25 percent of the body’s cholesterol to function.
A friend in the farmer market joked about selling a new fangle health food item that will not make you fat and has lot of fibers - hay. That is just what I think of those ridiculous healthy portion items with meager amount of calories so that it can claim low sodium, low fat, etc. Come off it, it’s just giving us a spoonful at a time!
Asian instant noodle is a source of good carbs with a low glycemic index. We need a lot more calories than a pack of instant noodle per day and it meets the Federal Dietary Guideline for fat in food. For comparison, fish and meat has much higher fats. Reference: Percent of calories as fat in meats, fish - FatFreeKitchen.com
While you might think that fried type of instant noodle has a lot of fat, it’s actually relatively low compared to many common foods for percent of calories from fats:
- fried instant noodle - 30%
- doughnut - 55%
- boiled egg - 60%
- beef frank - 80%
These numbers seem high, but that because you’re used to seeing the Daily Value’s only - the plain truth is that the typical diets of Americans already have more than 30% of calories from fat and it’s hard to do even a little less than this without a very restricted diets!
The percent of calories is computed by dividing the calories from fat by the total calories in the serving times 100. This is a more practical value to compare as it tell the real story. The food industry likes to use the Daily Value which is very deceiving as it can not be used for direct comparison between products (since serving sizes are baseless, a common misconception!)
Sodium from salts is essential to life and there is so much of it in today diets that it has risen to the level of concern. However, there is no evidence that reduced dietary sodium intake has any benefits for the general population and in fact, salt deficiency can cause serious problems. The body easily removes excess salts by drinking water. So the remedy for too much salt is to drink plenty of water, as simple as that.
As for ramen noodle soups, they have about as much salts as a typical restaurant soup served in the same portion size anywhere you go. Try making your own soup from scratch…the first time I did it, it tasted really bland until I added more salt than I though it needed!
More…Our Health And Salts
My dad was quite fit up to about 82 until he had an illness from a heat stroke. In America since the late 1950’s, he neither see a doctor regularly or take vitamins. While his typical diet is high in carbs, meats, fats and salt, he always kept fit and his weight constant.
I guess in the end, it is not so much as what you eat as how you live that is more important.
In writing this survival guide, I was reminded of a game at party where a dozen peoples or so are selected and beginning with one, something is whispered and in turn it get whispered to the next person and so on until the last person. The last person repeat it out loud and it always get a laugh for being way off base.
Public media is often quite like this, otherwise intelligent writers embellish something reported elsewhere and so on. A long-time nurse confided to me about public health notices on diet: she is caught up with it and is also bewildered by it, seeing each new studies come and go, in apparent contradiction through the years.
So, given the choice between a 7 oz bag of barbarque flavored potato chips or ramen, I would rather eat a pack or two of ramen any day - without drinking up all the soup of course.
More…Healthwise
