Chinese food

Stir fry, Lo Mein, dumplings, etc.

Is it healthy and tasty or just tasty and fattening?

Everyone always says I eat too much chinese food(mostly vegetable Lo Mein vegetable dumplings [vegetarian]) and it's unhealthy and fattening.

What's your people's view on this?

are you gaining or loosing weight.  It  really don't matter...yes, it has a fair amount of sodium but if you are not gaining weight then it is fine for you. 

If you buy it, likely it is full of monsodium glucimate or other synthetics which are fattening and have no particular food value.  If you cook stir fry yourself with nothing but veggies and minute amounts of soy or salt, it can be very good.  Dumplings? Nyeh... I can't imagine them being good for you.

Well chinese can be unhealthy for the fact that they use a lot of soy. And soy is full of sodium so it will retain your water and make you more bloated and not lose the extra weight. If you really like chinese food maybe you can try making your own dishes by using just the meat and vegetables, try to get a good rice and use minimal soy sauce but allow it to still give your dish a kick. If you go out to eat for it a lot, maybe ask if they have nutritional information on any of their dishes.

Stir Fry is incredibly healthy for me unless I get it from a restaurant. In the later case, it's too fattening for me. Usually, I buy frozen stir fry at the grocery store and make my own stir fry sauce. It takes little oil when you make it yourself vs when you buy it at the store. 4.5 cups of stir fry = 350 calories when I make it myself.

 

Dumplings are bad if you eat a lot since it's just pasta and meat, but you could say that about almost everything.

 

No comment on Lo Mein. lol.

are you making it yourself or ordering it? i think if you are ordering it it will be much worse for you in terms of sodium and fat... but if you make it yourself you can control what you use.  one of my favorite dishes of the moment is to make veggie dumplings with soy steak strips (morninstar farms) and mixed veggies in teriyaki sauce. i just lightly pan fry them so it's not too much oil.  sometimes i use fresh veggies sometimes just frozen. and i got a lower sodium teriyaki. so all in all i don't think it's bad!  plus at home you can make brown rice instead of white rice, you can steam your veggies instead of frying them, etc.  but i will say i reallly only like tofu when it's made at chinese food places... i don't know how they do it but it's good!  eggrolls probably aren't the best for you since they are normally fried but dumplings either steamed or lightly pan fried i don't think are too bad.  the lo mein, maybe not so good.

I don't know where you live but where I am, it's common for Chinese restaurants to advertise, "Healthy" or "MSG free".  Another alternative is Vietnamese food which has a lot of fresh and raw veggies and broths. 

I also make my own stir fry about once a week, it is one of my families favorite meals.  I use fresh veggies and sometimes tofu.  I stir fry the veggies in about 1 tbsp of olive oil with lots of fresh garlic, then when they are almost done I add about 2 tsp gourmet sauce which I get from Costco ( I believe that gourmet sauce it part teriyaki and part soy sauce).  I then cook separately these yakisoba noodles in water  (until the water is cooked out, I usually cook 3 packs for my family, so I use 1 1/2 cups water) that I get in the refrigerated section at the grocery store, I add a little more gourmet sauce and then mix the veggies in and it is very good. I don't use the season packets that come with the noodles since I am using gourmet sauce instead. I have been losing weight while eating this dish about once a week.  I also have recently bought these mini veggie egg rolls at Costco, they are 3 for 100 calories.

Personally i think Vietnamese or Thai is healthier than Chinese food.

But you really like stir-fry/ chow-mein try cooking them yourself. If you like I can give you some simple recipes. I cook at home and I almost just use whatever I like....and the dishes taste yum yum... :)

Another suggestion is that go to those chinese restaurant that advertise no MSG or healthy eating. A lot of those older western chinese restaurants (like something called "the Golden Panda...you get the idea.) use loads of MSG and animal fat to cook...and that's extremely unhealty.

Just my 2 cents.

Restaurant Chinese food is challenging to chose wisely from a healthy stand point, but it certainly can be done. Anything Sweet and Sour sauce is going to be deep fried and covered in a gloppy sugary sauce. Low Mein is based on wok fried noodles in an abundance of oil.

On the other hand, eating this way once in a while, small portions, mostly steamed everything as a 'free from counting calories meal' won't hurt most people.

If your making your own Chinese food, well then you have control of the oil,vegetables, and meat choices.

A healthier alternative might be dim sum; most dishes are steamed, but they still retain the meaty (and vegetable-y) goodness of Chinese food =]

mmm, not trying to be picky here, but actually almost all dim sum are packed with fat and high calories.

One shrimp dumpling itself is 40 calories. and Although it is called shrimp dumpling, they have added fat pork to make it more tasty.

Here's a a list to all popular chinese foods including dishes and dim sum and dessert. If you can read chinese take a look. If you don't keep it as a reference and ask a friend to translate for you next time you need to know the calories of a certain chinese food.

Link to list

Try this website, it has all the basic dishes that would be at a chinese food place.  http://www.cspinet.org/nah/chinese.html

I like to make chinese at home.  I, like the others, use a low-sodium soy sauce which is also good for my DH's HBP.  Birdseye has a great blend of veggies for stir fry with peppers, water chesnuts, mushrooms, carrots, etc...  I use either chicken breast or a top sirloin trimmed of fat and sliced thin.  Use a low-fat italian dressing or olive oil to stir fry the meat and veggies.  I also use whole wheat spaghetti broke in half instead of rice noodles.  I have put my recipe in the recipe converter on here and it gives me about 409 calories per serving.  Here is the link to my recipe http://caloriecount.about.com/recipe/101479.h tml

We have this once every week or two weeks and it is so easy too!

However, the style of eating dim sum might keep your calories low, since sampling each dish instead of eating several parts of a meal end up decreasing your overall caloric intake.  Whenever I go out to eat dim sum, although the shrimp dumpling may be 40 cals, and I enjoy some fattier things like sui mai, I usually don't eat over 600 cals.

Restaurant stirfries and lo-mein will have obscenely high calories. If you get dumplings though, and if they're steamed, you can probably safely log it at around 300 calories for six.