Eating at Asian restaurants with their high-salt options — here’s some alternatives

Chinese food, more correctly old-fashioned Chinese-American restaurant offerings like fried rice, spare ribs, egg rolls and lobster-filled fried wontons, is perhaps the cuisine I miss the most since switching to a low-salt, low-fat, low-sugar diet after my 2012 angioplasty.

My Chinese birthday dinner, egg rolls, crab rangoon, Mongolian beef. Not shown was the fried rice.

I went back to it on a birthday in 2014, with unpleasant results. And I’ve found some ways to make Asian dishes at home with a salt-free teriyaki marinade.

So I was interested to read a post on former Biggest Loser trainer Jillian Michaels’ site headlined “Learn Healthy Options at Asian Restaurants.” I generally think there are none, but she started out with one that I can actually agree with — sashimi instead of sushi at a Japanese place. Continue reading “Eating at Asian restaurants with their high-salt options — here’s some alternatives” →

March 12, 2016 0

Salt-free teriyaki sauce — a taste test of three varieties

Asian food is notoriously high in sodium, thanks mainly to the presence of soy sauce and teriyaki sauce in many dishes, both Japanese and Chinese.

I dearly miss my Friday night Chinese food treat but haven’t had Asian food since my angioplasty in August 2012 on nutritionists’ orders. I have been searching for a way to make some of my own, however.

Salt in teriyaki sauce ranges from 600 mgs for regular, to 320 for reduced sodium, to none in salt-free teriyaki sauce options.

Reduced sodium teriyaki and soy sauce is sold in mainstream supermarkets but it still has too much sodium for someone on a low-salt diet such as me. Kikkoman’s less sodium teriyaki, for example, has 320 mgs of sodium per tablespoon compared to 600 mgs for regular teriyaki. My limit per day is 1,200-1,500 mgs of sodium, so two tablespoons of reduced-sodium teriyaki sauce would be half my daily requirement, too much to sacrifice in one dish of a multi-dish meal. Continue reading “Salt-free teriyaki sauce — a taste test of three varieties” →

September 5, 2013 19