Sodium and Chinese Food

Chinese food, when authentic, is probably the healthiest food on the planet. Chinese cuisine emphasizes vegetables, uses no cheeses and makes use of a lot of seafood and lean poultry. Additionally, Chinese cooking uses vegetable oils, which, in moderation, has enough unsaturated fat to counteract the cholesterol-raising properties of the saturated fat they contain.

Unfortunately, local Chinese takeouts give Chinese cuisine a bad rep, health-wise. They don’t produce completely authentic Chinese dishes, but rather produce Americanized versions of dishes, more suited to the local palate and usually much higher in calories, saturated fat, and, especially, sodium. These dishes are typically prepared with foods swimming in lots of gravy-like sodium packed heavy sauces, while typical home-style Chinese stir-fry is intended to have only enough sauce in it to allow it to cling to the main ingredients.

Eating excess sodium is terribly unhealthy and can contribute to high blood pressure in some individuals, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Avoiding high sodium is probably a good idea for everyone, but especially so for people who are sensitive to it or who are on sodium restricted diets.

To illustrate the point, an average adult needs an intake of around 2,000 calories a day and of 2,300 milligrams of salt, which is about a single teaspoon of salt, according to government guidelines. Keeping these numbers in mind, a single tablespoon of soy sauce can easily amount to more than a half of an adult’s total recommended sodium intake for an entire day!

And chew on this- A typical plate of General Tso's chicken from your local take out, for example, is often loaded with about 40% more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day! That’s just plain crazy!

A battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables may have over 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat. That’s 140% more sodium than is recommended for an adult per day, packed into a single dish! And that's before the rice (at about 200 calories a cup), and before an egg roll (200 calories and 400 milligrams of sodium) or similar appetizer. This can easily add up to more than 3600 milligrams of sodium if you eat only the single appetizer and the main dish without adding any soy sauce at all!! That's almost 2 days worth of salt for a single meal!

Even the veggie dishes aren't immune, with a plate of stir-fried greens having around 900 calories and 2,200 milligrams of sodium, or eggplant in garlic sauce having about 1,000 calories and 2,000 milligrams of sodium!

  
If you are on a sodium restricted diet, there’s no getting around the necessity of needing to avoid soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce or other condiments that have high sodium.  

Surly a walk through the sauces isles at any Asian market will shock you with the amount of sodium in many of the products. But its not all bad news. By creatively using sodium friendly substitutes or by adding the proper aromatics, you can go a long way to avoiding the sodium trap. Vegetable stir-fries, or fried rice often use ginger or garlic to flavor the oil, after which the vegetables are added and stir-fried for a minute or two before a little broth, rice wine (or dry sherry) or even water is swirled in. Often added to stir fries, the holy trinity in Chinese cooking- ginger, spring onion (scallions) and garlic, or ginger, garlic and spicy hot peppers go a long way towards infusing great flavor in stir fried dishes. (The term “holy trinity“ is used to describe various “triples” of important ingredients in a variety of cuisines.)

You can even add a touch of salt along with a pinch of sugar to bring out the natural sweetness of the vegetable, or you can omit the salt entirely.

There is a great variety of herbs, spices and other ingredients that will punch up and boost the flavor of your dishes without resorting to the more usual sodium heavy sauces that most of us are accustomed to.

Naturally, the best way to avoid the entire sodium pitfall is to simply make your own Chinese food at home. This allows you to avoid adding salt, sodium rich sauces, and other ingredients high in sodium. A little bit of time spent at your local Asian grocery together with a touch of experimentation will allow you to find great substitutes to replace the more familiar super salty ones that are so unhealthy. Be sure not only to read the label looking at the sodium content, but note the serving size for that content. Some of these numbers may be deceiving. For example, a serving of sauce x might contain 350 mg of sodium. Not great, but not as horrible as it could be. But if that serving size is a tablespoon, you’ve got something to work with. You can use a teaspoon instead of a whole tablespoon and reduce your sodium intake from 350 mg to around 116 mg. However, if that sodium content corresponds to a serving size of say, a quarter teaspoon, that’s not too good. Using only a teaspoon of that ingredient will give you a sodium intake of 1400 mg or a tablespoon of it at 4200 mg!

Be aware that while “reduced sodium” on the label is encouraging, it may mean very little. So be sure to always read labels and note the serving sizes. A great example of how “reduced sodium” labels may be misleading is found in a popular soy sauce brand’s take on the whole low sodium matter. A tablespoon of Kikkoman’s “low sodium” soy sauce weighs in at a hefty 575 mg of sodium. Sure, that’s an improvement over their regular soy sauce’s 920 mg for the same tablespoon, but 575mg is a lot by any measure. That tablespoon of soy sauce is ¼ of an adult’s entire recommended daily dose of sodium!!! Outch!

I have found some fish sauces with lower sodium content. And I hear that a company in Japan has developed a soy sauce that actually has no sodium at all in it! Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out much more than that with regards to this product. But at least there’s a little hope as far as those two sauces are concerned. So far though, I haven’t found any oyster sauce product that is  within acceptable limits with regards to sodium. Regardless, there are plenty of other “sauces” that are sodium friendly and make for good substitutions. Simply put, its a matter of discovering and experimenting with the whole world of alternatives to obtain tastes that you like in your dishes while providing significant decreases in your sodium intake.

Some good "lower sodium" alternatives: