Wizard Recipes

China’s cuisine is as vast as the country itself, ranging from sublime vegetarian dishes to earthy meals using hair-raising animal parts. Here, though, many Chinese restaurants offer a mix of regional and Chinese-American–tasty food but nutritionally all over the map. We analyzed six Chinese entrées from real U.S. restaurants to help point you to healthier choices. Nutrition numbers are estimates: Results vary widely according to portion size. If sodium is a concern, ask the kitchen not to use added salt, and watch your intake the rest of the day. Your fortune: Healthy choices are in your near future.

Smart Chinese Food Strategies
Sodium is a major concern in Chinese-American cuisine–one tablespoon of soy sauce has about 1,000 milligrams. Reach for the low-sodium (about 500 mg) bottle, if you must. Better yet, use Chinese mustard, duck sauce, or chili sauce to boost flavor wihtout as much added salt.

What You Need to Know About Ordering Chinese Food

• Prepare to share: Chinese entrées are huge. Split one, take leftovers home, and keep portion sizes reasonable.
• Keep it lean: Avoid extra fat–choose lean proteins and vegetarian plates, and steer clear of deep-fried dishes.
• Rice counts, too: Remember each cup of brown or white steamed rice adds about 200 calories to your meal.

Splurge Only: Pork Lo Mein
1,419 calories
Oil-slick noodles and marbled meat send calories soaring, while more than a day’s worth of sodium lurks in the seasoning.

Healthy Choice: Ma Po Tofu
650 calories
This fiery entrée may be listed with vegetarian items. If not, order it without ground pork to slash calories and saturated fat.

Ask Your Server: Ginger Chicken with Broccoli
849 calories
Loaded with green veggies and (typically white meat chicken–just watch your serving size.

Healthy Choice: Shrimp with Garlic Sauce
700 calories
Shellfish and vegetables in zesty, low-fat sauce. Make it better: Ask them to use less oil.

Ask Your Server: Mu Shu Pork
858 calories
Stick to two filled pancakes of this vegetable-packed dish and cut calories by half.

Splurge Only: Sweet and Sour Chicken
1,032 calories
Batter-coated and deep-fried lean protein, smothered in sugar-laced sauce.

Price was heading towards an organic vision of food and health, being much ahead of its time. He understood that by eating we are bounding with the earth and its elements, as well as solar energy. “Dinner that I took tonight,” as he was saying in a lecture that he held in 1928, “was part of the sun with a few months ago. The food industry hides and diminishes these links. By stretching the Tropic chain, so that the population from the big cities can be nourished using far away soil, we violate the “laws of nature” at least twice: stealing nutrients from the soil in which plants were grown and then wasting them trough food processing. Unlike the indigenous populations studied by Price, which endeavored to return nutrients back to the local soils on which their entire existence depended, “our modern civilization returns extremely few nutrients compared to the quantities consumed”. Renner shows us how Price came to the conclusion that the food and health problem is actually an organic dysfunction. Destroying links between local soils, local food and local populations, the industrial system, it can not fulfill the biochemical requirements of the body, which, by not having time to adapt, will collapse.

Regardless whether or not you are willing to follow Dr. Price in his long journey, he and all other researchers of western diets from the twentieth century that have returned to the civilized world with the same simple conclusion, devastating and hard to resist: the human animal is adapted and apparently can prosper on the basis of extremely varied diets, but the Western diet, however you define it does not seem to be a part of them.

But the ecological critic of the industrial civilization that was promoted by Weston Price in 1930 hasn’t survived the Second World War.  The niche of this type of writings-in which Sir Howard and Lord Northbourne from England and the American agrarians took part- closed shortly after Price published “Nutrition and Physical degeneration” in 1939. Soon, people had to turn the back to the attacks on “industrial civilization”, on which their salvation depended in time of war. At the end of the war, the industrial civilization strengthens his position, becoming more confident.

The next consolidation was the agriculture industry (that had a benefit from the transformation of the mountains in soil fertilizers and toxic gas in pesticides) shortly the other types of agriculture disappeared. Weston Price and his colleagues who had studied the western diseases had been forgotten by now. No one was willing to look back or to recognize the wisdom of the primitive groups, moreover, they disappeared or were quickly assimilate, even Aborigines were moving to the city.

In terms of the Western diseases, these didn’t disappeared- immediately after the war the rates of heart disease have exploded-but now they remained to the responsibility of modern medicine and to the reductionist science.          The nourishment became a widely language accepted in discussion about nutrition and health. The industrial food chain would be brought up again late in the 60s along with the rise of organic agriculture.

Price didn’t found a singular ideal food, but met diverse population whose regime was based on fish and seafood, dairy, meat or fruit, vegetables and grains. The Masaya population from Africa consumed almost no plant, feeding meat, blood and milk. Sailors of the Hebrides did not consume milk at all; their diet was mostly based on fish, seafood and oat from which they were preparing porridge and cakes. Eskimos with whom he talked ate raw fish, hunted animals fish eggs, fat and rarely ate green plants. Along the Nile, near Ethiopia, Price met the healthiest population, according to their assessment: the tribes who ate milk, meat and blood from animals that were raised on pastures and animals from the Nile.

Price found out that the groups that were eating flesh from wild animals were generally healthier than populations of farmers who were eating mainly cereals and other plants, the farmer populations, caries and teeth problems were more frequent (but compared to us this problems remained rare). Price noted that many of the encountered populations, consumed especially animal organs which were rich in fat soluble vitamins, minerals and “active X”, a term made up by him and probably designating vitamin K2.

Price also found out that almost all studied populations valued fish and seafood, that have been eaten even by highlander groups which were crossing the mountain for long distances to obtain them, buying from the tribes on the coast, dried fish eggs and other foods. But the common denominator of a sound health, as he was saying, is a food based on fresh foods of animal origin and plants grown in soils that are rich in nutrients.

Price examined with very much attention the relationship between the quality of the foods with an animal origin and the nourishment of these animals. Comparing the vitamin content of butter come from cows that were eating fresh grass, with the butter prepared from milk of animals fed with forage, Price found out that, besides the fact that the levels of vitamins A and D were significantly higher in the butter that was yellow from the animals which were grazing pastures, the people who ate the animals were much healthier. He was convinced that the key for health was the soil quality. In 1932 Price published a book entitled New Light on Some Relationships between Soil Mineral Deficiencies, Low Vitamin food, and some degenerative Diseases.

By establishing these relationships between the quality of soil and the  of people which are on top of the food chain, Price promotes a critic against the industrialized agriculture that was just at the beginning in 1930. And was not alone: in the same period, Sir Albert Howard, an English agronomist, philosophical father of organic agriculture movement, he also claimed that the industrialization of the agriculture-especially the introduction of nitrogen synthetics as a fertilizer, which simplify the soil chemistry- will affect us eventually our health. Howard insists that “the health problems of soil, plants, animals and human must be treated together, being one and the same complex subject”. By the time as Howard’s note the above observations, they were merely a working assumption, Weston Price offered an empirical basis.

One of the most active voices of the prewar period was Weston A. Price, a dentist of Canadian origin who leaned on one of those questions of common sense, which today can not even ask us. Now, like heart disease, chronic dental problems are a part of our lives.

But if you think about it, it is strange that everyone needs a dentist and that so many people need braces, channel interference, the wisdom tooth extraction and other routine procedures necessary to maintain modern oral hygiene. The need of many remedial interventions for just one body part that is involved in the feeding activity, activity that is essential for our survival, reflects a defect in our design, a kind of omission of the natural selection? It is unlikely.

But what did Price found out? First, he found out that populations that eat traditionally have no need for a dentist.(Well, almost: the teeth of the “strong highlanders” in Switzerland, which have never seen a toothbrush, were covered with a greenish-filing but Price found that, below this layer, the teeth were well formed and had no cavity). Whenever he discovered a primitive population that hasn’t yet contact with “alimentary substitutes of modern trade” - as refined flour, sugar, vegetable oil, canned or preserved food trough chemical ways- revealed very few or none signs of modern degeneration - like chronic diseases, dental caries and dental arches with malformations. These problems were caused either by a certain element of Western diet either a certain deficiency.

Wherever Price went, he took pictures of the teeth of the populations that he met and took samples from their food and sends these to Cleveland for analysis so that he could determine the content of macro-nutrients and vitamins. He found out that the indigenous diets were much richer in vitamins A and D than the modern U.S. - in average about ten times higher. This was due in a large part to the fact that, as is it was noted in 1930, that by processing food, it loses nutrients, especially vitamins. Trade food are thought to be stored and transported over long distances and the only way that they can become more resilient and less vulnerable to pests is to remove some of the containing nutrients. In general, the calories are much easier to transport- in form of refined cereals or sugar-only nutrients that can alter or attract bacteria, insects and rodents, all extremely interested in these nutrients. (Even more than us, apparently.)

Price concluded that the modern civilization did sacrifice mostly the quality of the food in favor of the quantity and the length of the shelf-life.

Some of these researchers planned to observe the Western diseases among isolated populations, in particular, as Albert Schweitzer wrote, among “indigenous people that are increasingly adopting the lifestyle of the white people”. Some have noted that Western diseases appeared shortly after these individuals began to eat Western food, especially refined flour and sugar and other “commercial food“. They also observed a Western disease was always followed by another, often in the same order: obesity was followed by type 2 diabetes, which was followed by hypertension and heart attack, followed by heart diseases.

In the years preceding the Second World War, the medical world held heated discussions about Western diseases and about the conclusions that these lead us regarding to our more and more industrialized lifestyle. The pioneers of this vision claimed that indigenous populations were poorly adapted to certain innovations of modern food, but haven’t reached any consensus on the factors responsible for this state. Burkitt, for example, believed that the guilt is the absence of fiber in the American diet, while McCarrison, a British military doctor, focused his attention on refined carbohydrates while other researchers blamed the consumption of meat and saturated fat, or in case of Price, the appearance of processed food and industrial crops, whit a deficiency in vitamins and minerals.

But not everyone was agreeing with the conceptions that according them, the chronic illnesses were a consequence of Western lifestyles and the industrialization of  food harm our health. One of the objections to this theory was genetic: different races are exposed to different diseases, white people were predisposed to heart attack, and black people were predisposed to diseases like leprosy. Yet, as Burkitt and the other researchers have pointed out, blacks living in America suffered from the same chronic diseases as white Americans. Apparently, moved to America, immigrants belonging to nations with low rates of chronic diseases contracted the diseases.

Another objection brought to the idea of Western diseases, objection that persist even today, was a demographic one. Chronic diseases are so many in the West because of the fact that they occur at relatively late age and, because of the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century they have become treatable infectious diseases, consequently, we live long enough to suffer from chronic diseases. From this perspective, chronic diseases are the inevitable price of longevity. But if it’s true that life expectancy has increased considerably in the twentieth century (in the U.S. reaching 49 to 77 years), this is due mainly to the fact that more people survive infancy and childhood, in 1900 the life expectancy of a person aged 65 years was only six years less than that of the contemporary age of 65 years. The age reports and the rate of chronic diseases like cancer or diabetes type 2 are higher today than in 1900. This means that, at the present, the chances that a person age 69 or 70 years to suffer from cancer or diabetes type 2 are greater than a century ago. (The situation may be similar also for a heart disease. But it is difficult to pronounce ourselves with certainty, because of the vague statistics from 1900).