Count Your Calories With Nutrition Labels at 4 Brands in Beijing
Eating out in Beijing is a culinary delight. With the tastebuds of locals evolving to desire more diversity and better quality, expats especially benefit from the areas of the city that want to cater to these wishes.
That is, it’s all a joy until you want to know how much food you’re fitting into your pie hole and how many calories it’ll set you back. It’s frustrating especially if you’re trying to get into nutritional ketosis and you want to measure out how many net carbs and fats are in each meal. Whether you’re on a low carb, Paleo, or general calorie-counting diet, it’s simply hard to find out what’s in each dish without taking your food scale and grilling the chef on the spot.
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Flying blind is what waist-conscious foodies here have to live with, because we found all of four brands that carry nutrition information. We’d be happy to be proved totally wrong on this, readers, for the sake of all our summer bikini strivings.
Obentos
What we like about Obentos is that even if you’re building your own box online, they’ll calculate the total nutritional numbers for you. That’s just too cool. Our suggestion would be to add fiber so we can figure out net carbs (total carbs minus fiber).
Glo Kitchen
We give props to Glo Kitchen for trying to get the information we need out there, but some of the information on their website is missing. We hope more complete information is available on location.
Tribe Nutrition
Tribe Nutrition meal plans are meant to make life easy, with planning and cooking done by chefs and nutritionists. Detailed information for nutrition is available on each dish’s box, with the calorie range of each meal plan available online before you pick.
7-Eleven
We wish we were joking, but with desperate times comes desperate calorie-counting measures. This chain that never sleeps makes it onto the list because we can always count on their salads having the nutrition information we need to stay on our diet while out and about.
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Labels Are Not Complicated
Life happens. It’s not realistic to expect that we’ll never eat out when our food scales are unavailable, so we hope more places will release their nutrition information. And since most of the chain restaurants need to standardize food servings to count costs anyway, we know that they can easily provide this information with a scale, a calculator, and a link to the USDA Food Composition Database where they can find comparable food items. Simple labels should at least include total calories, protein, fat, carbs, sugars, and fiber. Extra points for sodium.
This post first appeared on our sister website beijingkids.
Photo: Pixabay
