How many calories that Chinese food really has? I saw these figures and it really gave me a wake up call. Even the vegetable dishes are bad!!!

Stir-fried vegetables - 750 calories, 19 g fat, 2150 mg sodium

Szechuan Shrimp - 950 calories, 20 g fat, 2460 mg sodium

Shrimp with Garlic Sauce - 950 cal, 30 g fat, 2950 mg sodium

Beef w/Broccoli - 1180 cal, 46 g fat, 3150 sodium

Chicken Chow Mein - 1000 cal, 32 g fat, 2450 mg sodium

General Tso's Chicken - 1600 cal, 60 g fat, 3200 mg sodium

Wow! That's insane! Not too mention the amount of sodium. Salt retains water, but those meals have enough to retain a river!! Thanks for the heads up.

And, of course, my favorite is General Tso's chicken!

Lynn

Omg!!!!

It really depends on what you order, and the serving size. Like in most sit down restaurants, the portions are double what they should be...so if you ate an actual correct portion of stir fried vegetables for dinner at 450 calories...you are not doing too bad.

The main reason for the calories is that they stir fry in oil. You can always ask the server or cook (if you are not doing the buffet) to cook them with less oil. Also, in the chinese places in my area, they have a special section on the menu of diet entrees-made with no MSG, and less oil so they are low calorie. Just the mountain of rice.

Also, chinese buffets are tailored to "American" tastes. They don't really eat it over there doused in sodium and that much oil, with deep fried chicken pieces, and in a quadruple portion.

OOOOMMMMMGGGGGGG..MY MOUTH IS ON THE FLOOR!! Its a wonder I lost anything this week. Had Chinese for the first time in probably a year..General Tso's Chicken....AHHHHHHHH!!

My dh is Chinese-from China- and yes, they do eat their food with a lot of sodium and fried in oil. It's a misnomer that the traditional Chinese diet is so much healthier then ours. I believed it for the longest time, but it's just not true.

They do use salt but not as much as we do but they use a lot more "seasoning" which is MSG. Traditional foods don't have the heavy sauces that Amercian Chinese foods has, but they use the fattier cuts of meat-"because that's where the flavor is" (If I here that one more time from my dh, I'll throw the meat at him and tell him to cook it)-, and fried most of the time, seldom with a thick coating like ours. Theirs is more likely to be a little cornstarch, salt, pepper and egg, to give it a little crunch and flavor.

Maybe in the past when there were food shortages they might have done the small amounts of meat as a garnish with mostly steamed vegetables and rice.

My dh talks about when he was in boarding school-25 years ago- they didn't feed them meat, he had to bring it from home. Shoot, I was greatly astonished about the amounts of fatty meat/fried foods (deep fat fried and pan fried) my dh and Chinese family inhaled when we visited them in China. We would get up in the morning, walk to the corner stand and get deep fat fried bread sticks for breakfast and warm soy milk.

My mil came to visit and we went through a gallon of oil in the 3 weeks she was visiting. And that's with re-using the oil in the pot for deep frying. I had to scrub my kitchen every night because she fried everything in very hot oil that left a thin layer of grease over everything.

And how do they stay so tiny? They walk everywhere! They walkup stairs, only the newest buildings have elevators. They do their food shopping every day, they ride their bikes every day. It's amazing how much physical activity they get in a day.

MIL hated my cooking because I steamed and broiled alot of foods. She thought I was mistreating her son.


Sarah

Sarah:

Very enlighting indeed. I always thought the Chinese food here in the states was a lot different from what they eat in China. I am shocked to learn that they use so much oil in their diets. I will have to talk to my neighbors about this as they are from China. Their whole family is very thin.

Karen

Sarah,

That was extremely interesting! I think their thinness must also be in their genes!

sarahyu
I think it depends on the region of China people are from. I have had several Chinese friends cook for me/teach me to make dishes and they relied heavily on things like steamed vegetables, seafood/fish and generally lighter fare. These were family recipes that they were preparing. I even asked about the fried and sodium heavy foods (and the thick sauces) and they said that they didn't grow up eating that kind of food at all. A lot of the recipes were spicy but none of them used very much fat or oil at all! So, in the case of my friends, the diet that was typical for them WAS much healthier than Western food. (unfortunately I can't remember where in China they were from).

China is a big country so regional cuisine varies, just as it does anywhere else.

Looking at the calories for "American" chinese food though is pretty scary! I'm sure it is less in appropriate portions but still daunting numbers!

When I was in France, I couldn't get over what the people ate and how thin they were. Butter, chocolate, sweet-sweet-sweet desserts were everyday things. However, Lots of walking & small portions.

I agree 100%. You also have to take in consideration again, the portion sizes. In many countries, a serving bowl for the meal is what Americans would consider a "dessert" sized bowl. American restaurants serve a ton of food-often double or triple what a serving size would be, and it has gotten extremely worse in my lifetime alone.
I remember as a kid, a large drink at McDonalds is what is now a "medium". What a small fry was when I was a child is now the size they put in the kids meals.
It reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is at the snack bar in the movie theatre-and asks for a small something or other (drink or popcorn) and the worker tells her they don't have small, they have medium. She asks if the medium is the smallest size they have, and she says yes, the small is a medium...and so on.

Very true, China is a huge country, plus you have Hong Kong and Taiwan with multiple styles of food. The people who are health conscious do the steamed veggies and lots of fish. DH's family are in Shanghai and Bejing, both huge cities. I expected them to be much more health minded being in Shanghai-close to the ocean.

In years past, their apartment was supplied by their employer and you could either cook your own food or buy something from the company cafeteria for lunch and dinner. DH's parents were always busy and mil wasn't that good of a cook so she would always pick up dinner at the cafeteria for the family. She would cook some rice and fry up some vegetables to finish up the meal. (It's changing a lot now, they had to buy their apartment a few years ago and meals are much more expensive at the cafeteria, so they are cooking more themselves.)

Dinner is served with the small bowls of rice and you add your meat and veggies on top of the rice, depending on how you want to eat. Even now, after 20 years of being in this country, my dh eats at least 2-3 cups of rice a day. Yeah for rice cookers.

It depends on where you go for your Chinese food. I live in an area that has a huge Asian poplulation. If you have an Asian looking person in your party, they give you the Chinese menu. I've gone into resteraunts while my dh was parking the car, ordered our meal got it at the table and when they noticed my dh, they took it away because they made it the American way and brought it made the Chinese way. So it's been awhile since I've been to a regular American Chinese restaraunt. They (the Chinese people I hang out with) don't do the heavy sauces and 1 American serving is really enough to feed 4 people with your rice and vegetables.

My in-laws were not impressed with resteraunts here in the US. They didn't understand why there was so much food and felt they had to finish it all. They thought it was tacky to take the leftovers home. They didn't understand leftovers at all, I always made enough so we could have it for lunch the following day and they would stuff themselves because leftovers are bad, not fresh, you should make fresh food for lunch (I understand that, they don't have refrigerators, so they weren't used to being able to store food).....ugh...ok, don't go there, they have gone home...calm down...It was not a pleasant visit...between them telling me I was a bad cook for not cooking the way their son was used to, and eating us out of house and home and complaining how lazy I was for not being pregnant and having several childen by now....stop, deep breath, think calming thoughts, blue skys, puppy dogs, kittens...

Thanks for reminding me about generalizing. That's like saying everyone in the US eats a certain way and we don't.

Sarah

i was talking to dh about this last night. he said he had terriaki chicken for lunch and i was telling him how much fat was in it and he said "no way, it's just chicken". what about the fried rice i'm sure he had with it LOL.

by the way, what was that website that tells you the calories in food again.

also, the asians don't eat the asian food we eat, theirs is a lot healthyier.

My in laws sometimes make me feel the same way...