Cooking healthy Fried Rice Noodle

Healthy food need not be bland or clinical.

The Health Ministry has just recently come up with a programme on eating right and this really calls for a bouquet.

Malaysians and food can never be separated and our food, thanks to the country being a melting pot for so many races, is delicious right down to the last morsel!

The one thing that really changes the diet is when the doctor decides you are hitting 40 or that you really need a full medical check-up twice a year instead of the usual once annually.

Eating healthy or eating right does not mean changing the entire diet or making drastic changes to the kinds of food you eat. On a personal note, don’t let doctors and medical personnel scare you into thinking that you are going to be having only bland and unappetising food for the rest of your life.

One also need not be a great cook to accomplish the impossible in order to serve healthy food on the table.

Healthier option: Rice noodles for dinner.

The first thing that must be done is to select the cooking oil that you should use. From experience, vegetable oils are good, and only use those with palm oil for deep frying.

A good reminder is not to reuse your cooking oil until it turns thick and near black.

It not only clogs your arteries, it is also bad for the cook to inhale such oils as it can cause health problems later on in life.

One of the first questions that we Malaysians would ask when faced with a health complication, like heart problems, diabetes and high blood pressure, is whether we can eat food with coconut milk.

Thanks to modern technology, coconut milk does come with reduced fat these days but more importantly, we can substitute it with low-fat milk.

The use of herbs and improvising recipes also help make food tastier but really, can we do without our traditional foods such as gulai, curry and rendang?

The key to all this is moderation, both by the cook and the person who consumes the food.

From experience, after the shock of getting the bad news of your ailments dies down, try to think positive and look into changing your diet before doing anything else.

Initially, after being told about the illness, you tend to over-react to the advice of dieticians and doctors but techno-savvy people like us should not be daunted by such challenges.

Get on the Internet and read about the ailments you have. There are loads of advice on-line; look for the one that you can endear to.

One of the main pieces of advice that I impart to friends and family is that you can live without rice and a challenge is to keep rice consumption to a bare minimum. Right now, we try to keep to our pact of having rice only once every two days and if that is not do-able, try eating other foods instead of rice for dinner.

The appliances that we have in our kitchen also contribute to healthy cooking. Have your own non-stick pans and even non-stick pots, if possible.

Steam your food or bake them in foil with lots of herbs and you can dispense with the use of excessive oil.