Sunny Health

For those who celebrate Chinese New Year, Hot pots, or steamboats, are practically staples for the reunion dinner. And what’s not to like about them? They’re convenient, accommodate a large variety of ingredients and hence cater to different tastes, and are healthy. Well, healthier than the deep fried stuff, right? After all, it comes with a soup base and lots of vegetables.

This is indeed true for the most part, but as with most meals, it depends on the ingredients consumed and how they are prepared. A healthy cooking method is only half the battle won. For a truly healthy hot pot, the following factors count too:

Cut back on sauces.
Sauces like soya sauce and chilli sauce are rich in sodium, so you'd want to refrain from using too much of it. Instead, allow your tastebuds to enjoy the natural flavour of the food derived from the rich broth. 

Choose fresh, not processed.
Ingredients like fish cakes, crabsticks and sausages, while convenient, are processed, and would contain higher amounts of preservatives. Fresh meat like thinly sliced lean pork (also known as shabu shabu), and chicken breast, are much healthier alternatives, and they're easy to cook too.

Watch your prawn intake.
Prawn is a popular seafood ingredient for the hot pot, and if you’re the type of person who wants to have your money’s worth, this is one of the ingredients you’d want to zero in on at the buffet. But if you have heart problem, you’ll have to watch it. This seafood ingredient is high in cholesterol. According to Healthline, a small serving of 100g of prawns supplies about 200 milligrams (mg) of cholesterol. That’s a full day’s allotment for people with high risk of heart disease. People who suffer from high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes should moderate their seafood intake in general.


Eat your vegetables, and make it quick.
Sure they probably aren’t as value-for-money or delicious as the meat and seafood, but they are important for a balanced diet. Besides, just binging on meat and seafood is very highly to lead to indigestion and heart burn. However, it is also important to not cook your vegetables for too long. In fact, overcooking any sort of food, especially vegetables, leads to significant loss of vitamins and minerals.

It is easy to see when leafy vegetables are overcooked. They lose their vibrant green sheen and turn yellow, and that’s when they’ve lost most of their vitamin B. Generally, green leafy vegetables are done cooking in 3 minutes or less. Hardier vegetables like cabbages, carrots and mushrooms tend to be cooked in ten to fifteen minutes. In fact, mushrooms are good choices for hot pots as not only are they rich in fibre, but according to Business Insider, it’s practically impossible to overcook them. This is because in the cell walls of mushrooms, there is a polymer called chitin, which is very heat stable. 

Don't drink too much soup.
We’re often bestowed the benefits of consuming soup. Soupy dishes are healthier. They contribute to water consumption and so on. However, when you leave your steamboat soup to boil continuously with its huge amount of ingredients, the soup becomes concentrated with nitrates, fats and excess proteins.  This coagulates into the white film you often see floating at the surface of your soup. Scoop it up so you can continue, but there will still be some remnants in the soup below, and eventually, it will have to be time to call it a night.

Go easy on the carbos.
Many hot pot eateries will offer rice or vermicelli to go with your meal. Why not reserve all that space for the ingredients, and cut down on piling on the calories? If you must have a staple to go with the ingredients, then opt for half a bowl or less.