How to cook healthier Chinese cuisine (4 of 4) - Rice
Aug 10, 2018
Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.
This week we are talking about simple things we can do to tweak the Chinese way of eating and cooking for better optimal health.
Today we are taking on the one ingredient that will ultimately give us Type 2 and type 3 diabetes and that ingredient is White Rice!
White rice is the staple of all Chinese cuisines. We eat white rice with virtually all Chinese dishes and we tend to eat a lot of it. We eat white rice in the form of congee for breakfast, and we eat it for lunch and dinner. And when there’s leftovers, we turn it into fried rice.
Rice is a grain and it naturally does not come in white. So to turn a grain into white rice, there is a lot of processing involved. And because of all that processing, any trace of nutrient within the grain itself has been removed. So eating this highly processed white rice does not have any nutritional value whatsoever. White rice is a economical way to makes us feel full, but it also does something much worse to our bodies. Eating white rice will spike your blood sugar, causing spikes in your insulin, which can lead to diabetes in your future.
So we come up with some healthier alternatives if you have to eat rice. We look at a popular dish that Chinese people love to eat because it smells so good! And that dish, is Clay Pot Rice.
We can serve clay pot rice in a variety of ways. The most common ones is to have clay pot rice with preserved meats and with salted fish and pork patty. Preserved meats is typically made of dried, preserved pig parts, not necessarily pork, and those pork sausages are high in nitrates, nitrites, salt and sugar. It is pretty much as bad as food can get.
Nitrates and nitrites are linked to chronic degenerative diseases. So eating this stuff will cause long term harm to your health. And to makes things even worse, pork is one of the dirtiest meats that we eat. Pork is considered a dirty meat not because pigs just roll around in dirt, but because of what the pigs themselves were fed. Think about what the pig farms feed the pigs, I’m talking about the GMO soy and corn, pesticide-laden farm waste, hormones and antibiotics, and you can imagine how dirty pork is. And then think about the pig’s living conditions, the bacteria-infested pig pens where they live all their lives until they are butchered.
And as for the salted fish, it has such a high level of salt in it that you know it causes long term damage and inflammation to your bodies.
Clay pot rice is typically served with the meats on top, and below the meats is a whole lot of white rice. White rice gets digested quickly, and rapidly processed into sugar.
Refined White rice is a refined carbohydrate, similar to those found in white bread, flour tortillas, and most breakfast cereals and is stripped of all nutrition. Refined white rice has a glycemic index of 73 which is about the same as white flour which is 75.
According to the Harvard School of Public Health, foods with a high glycemic index can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes,. Studies showed that eating five or more servings of white rice per week increased the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 17 percent! So eating 1 serving of rice 5 days a week will increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 17%. And in general, we probably eat at least 7-10 servings of white rice a week.
How can we make a more nutritious clay pot rice? Well, our version of clay pot rice uses very different ingredients.
Our version of clay pot rice uses a combination of brown rice and black rice (tweet this)
Black rice is sometimes called forbidden rice. Both black and brown rice have a lower glycemic index of just 62 as opposed to the white rice’s glycemic index of 73. But brown rice tends to have more texture and less smooth. So to make your rice smoother, we cook it with coconut milk. Not only does it gives a whole lot of flavor to the rice, coconut milk also slows down the break down and absorption of the sugar.
On top of the rice, we use organic chicken breasts rather than pork. Marinate the chicken with a little bit of sesame oil and tumeric so that the chicken breasts are tender and tasty. add some lemon grass, shiitake mushrooms, and baby bok choy to make our clay pot rice full of nutrition and antioxidants.
The results, it taste even better than the traditional clay pot rice. And I can eat it knowing that I am treating my body well and I am feeding it with nutrition and antioxidants that my body really needs.
If you want to give it a try, we have a quick recipe on the bottom on this blog. Try it out for yourself and let us know how you like it.
Until next time, love what you live, and live what you love.
Missed the previous episodes to this series? Here's the links:
Part 1: https://www.thefoolishacademy.com/blog/chinese-cuisine-1-of-4
Part 2: https://www.thefoolishacademy.com/blog/chinese-cuisine-2-of-4
Part 3: https://www.thefoolishacademy.com/blog/chinese-cuisine-3-of-4
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