Naturally it depends on what you eat, or if in a restaurant what you order etc but I am in two minds if I am eating healthier or worse than at home. But my post is to gauge where you are gereally eating better or worse than your own country.
Some observations on my limited experience compared to the average UK diet
- People fry far too much here. Note the absence of a oven in Chinese apartments
- I find I that I am eating a lot more vegetables here and actually kind of like them!
- Fruit: hit or miss, I think in general, UK is better noting cost.
- Dairy products, not existent, only a bad thing in my view.
- Eggs, noticeable difference, can't find 'true' free range eggs.
- Sweets, I don't snack as much here on chocolate, biscuits etc A snack seems to be nuts, dried fruit.
- Cakes / pastries, No where near as good as UK France etc Much more artificial here. French style patisserie are a long way from France
- Wheat products, I miss good whole meal bread. Not good. Standard supermarket bread here is awful
- Salt: hard to tell, on one hand soya sauce is abundant but in UK processed food is notoriously full of salt
- Meat: No comparison in quality. UK better.
- Fish: I eat a lot more here, good
In a few weeks I have noticed my skin has improved so gotta be a good thing but energy levels dropped. Maybe due to lack of red meat. In the gym I have dropped in strength significantly.
Other aspect is I never know what I eating as always in a sauce or coating with something.
Chinese is definitely healthier than American cooking. Well, if we assume that it's not been contaminated by anything during production, but I think factoring that out would render this meaningless.
The amount of frying they do is definitely a plus. As far as I could tell they don't actually use as much oil when they fry as we do, so you get a bit of extra fat rather than a ton. And there's a much better balance of meat and vegetables in the areas I was visiting. In most cases you can even taste all of the ingredients, rather than have a couple extremely strong tastes overpowering everything.
And lastly, they still every part of the animal. One of the biggest mistakes that we made in America was when we started to think of muscle meat as the meat to eat. It's backwards, if you're only going to eat one type of meat, it should be organ meat.
Thank you!
When I look at the pictures of people who lived in America about 50 years ago, I notice the significantly lower percentage of overweight people. I believe the main reason is when people consume meat of artificially fattened animals, they too would look like artificially fattened people.
Chinese in contrast consume a lot of vegetables and soy protein. I would say Chinese cooking is among the best in the world.
One more thing: Regular consumption of soybean milk in China prevents prostate enlargement in elderly men and menopause-induced facial aging in women. Sometimes it is very difficult to guess the biological age of a Chinese lady.