What do we do to eat healthy while living in Bangkok???

In the land of smiley faces and delicious foods around every corner how do we try to eat healthy while living in Bangkok???? 

Moving to a new city let alone country is a hard thing to do!! Not only do you have all the moving/relocating issues such as finding a new house, sorting out utilities, new schools and making new friends but you also have to find your way through a whole new food and grocery shopping experience. Trying to track down trusted brands that you can get back home but also having to find suitable alternatives for those you can't.

When you are trying to eat a certain way, whether it be vegetarian, vegan, paleo, organic or one of many others it adds another level of difficulty especially in Asia!! The healthy eating options other than a few organic things can be very hard to track down if possible at all. There is also sugar added to many things that just doesn't occur at home (Australia). Trying to wade through all the different new products and choosing the best one is both confusing and time consuming especially when you don't know what you are looking for. Below I have run through a few of the food sources that some we struggle to find and others that are easy and sometimes better than home.


**As I have gone through and written this it has gotten longer and I added more groups so I apologise for the long post. Feel free to scroll to the section that you are interested in and ignore the rest :) **

Bread and Cereals

Although there are many delicious bakeries all around Bangkok finding a bread for us that was both multi-grain and sugar free was a struggle. If you have ever toasted bread in Asia you may have noticed a distinctly different smell while it's cooking. That's the sugar. This is how you can tell if your supposedly 'healthy' bread has added sugar. I have been caught out numerous times when thinking I have a healthy bread and then when I toast it getting so frustrated at the smell! I was very lucky to find our go to bread at our local Big C grocery store. It's made fresh everyday and is only 60 THB (around AUD $2). Can't give you a name as it''s labelled different every time I'm in there so a photo will hopefully help. It is the loaf in the centre rack at the far right with seeds on the sides. Sometimes called village bread I believe.

In regards to cereals nothing is too different here to anywhere else in the world. The shelves are full of refined carb, sugar filled cereals claiming to be healthy due to all the added, synthetic vitamins/minerals. Then there is the huge section of muesli or granola with health claims practically screaming at you and the pretty rainforest or mountain designs on the boxes to appeal to your sub conscious. Once you get sucked in you turn over the box and read the ingredients list only to find out that sugar is not only the second ingredient but it has been added numerous times under different names. After 2 years living in Asia I have yet to find a suitable cereal so I was so thankful when my mother-in-law bought me Sarah Wilson's 'I quit sugar' book when she came for a visit earlier this year. In there I found the best recipe to make my own toasted muesli with coconut, nuts and oats and have never looked back. There is always a fresh supply to munch on whenever we feel the need and once all the nuts have been activated and are stored in the freezer it takes only 20-30mins to make a new batch. I swear if it were marketed and sold it could go for at least $10 a box easy! It is by far the best tasting muesli I have ever had as well as the healthiest. Coco-nutty granola is the name of the recipe and I add 2-3 cups of oats and leave out the sweetener. I also use 40g butter and 40g coconut oil.

Fruits and Vegetables
This is definitely one of my favourite parts about living in Asia. The wet markets!! Yes it is easier to go to the supermarket and be in the aircon and have everything nicely priced, packaged and convenient but while living here I want to experience how the locals shop!!!! It is both daunting and great fun at the same time. We were lucky to be in Singapore first so my introduction to wet markets was..... mmmm how can I put it..... Clean! All the meat was kept in fridges and the stalls were all immaculately clean and the seafood was all on masses of ice. All the produce was nicely arranged and easy to pick out. I really enjoyed my weekly trip to the Tiong Bahru Wet Market and to this day still miss it due to the friendly stall I owners I got to know. Now I must say I was hesitant to shop at the wet markets in Bangkok as my maid told me they were dirty and smelly and the stall owners weren't very nice. However after working for American and European expat families for the past 30 years I think she was trying to keep me going to the nice cool and clean Big C store. Singapore is pretty much an English speaking country so there was never really a language barrier either, however this is not the case here. Once I went to a wet market with a friend I was once again hooked. The sights, the smells, the friendly faces and the cheap prices. The piles of vegetables and fruits that were some of the freshest I've seen had me dreaming about all the different exotic salads I could whip up without fear of blowing the weekly budget.

The market I now go to is the Khlong Toei Wet Market however my maid has told me this morning that she wants to take me to the Asoke wet market as she feels it is much better but I love the authentic Thai feeling of Khlong Toei. It looks a little scary from the outside and very dark and dirty on the inside but I can assure you it is a bundle of fun!!! I can get a weeks worth of fruit and veg for $20 max and that is with us eating a massive salad and almost a dinner plate of veg everyday. I also feel a lot happier knowing my money is going to a hard working Thai family than a massive corporate company. You can also tell no chemicals, pesticides have been used in growing as the tell tale holes in the leaves are easy to see. I have heard of some concerns of formaldehyde being on vegetables but that seems to be confined to mainly mushrooms, especially the straw type to stop them from shriveling.

Meats
We don't have much trouble in regards to meats except for a good steak as that can be a little pricey as I like to buy the Australian grass-fed. However when following the correct food portion sizing one good size steak is actually 2 adult portions so when my hubby and I decide to have a BBQ we just share a steak and then fill up on delish salads and oven baked jacket potatoes. All of our meat is purchased either from Big C or Villa Market. Cheap options are available as well as some organic/healthier options with some chicken and pork cuts which really aren't that more expensive.

Meat at the wet market is whole other experience. Being pregnant I am not buying the meat at market (better to be safe than sorry) however once the baby is born I will start getting prawns, fish and chicken from the market. These are all kept on ice so if you go down early you can get some great stuff and it's all chilled. There is not much beef at all but there is plenty of pork! Even though the pork is not chilled they are carving it fresh in front of you straight off the carcass so it's probably some of the freshest meat you'll get considering it was most likely killed that morning. As long as you get the meat (chicken, fish, prawns) that are well chilled and freeze the chicken before using it I don't think there is that much of a risk of being sick however you really never know. All I think about is that majority of the food eaten around Bangkok has come from here and everyone seems to be fine :) ! It seems to be more of a mental battle to buy and eat it than anything else. I am quite lucky that I can pretty much stomach anything and I don't really get sick from food however I feel over the first few months of being here my body did have some adjustment to the local food and bugs that just come with living in Thailand.

One of my favourite quotes from Anthony Bourdain is not a really pleasant one but so true when living in places like this. "If you haven't sprayed the toilet bowl at least a couple of times you haven't experienced the true food culture!" Not pleasant but so so true!!!!

Carbs in Asia

Following on from the breads and cereals I wanted to touch on the best carbs to eat when in Asia. There is always a stigma attached to carbs however my nutrition philosophy of eating real food as close to nature intended bypasses all the 'bad' carbs that you should steer clear of. If your going to eat potatoes eat it with the skin on as that's where all the nutrients are. If your going to have rice have brown rice. We happen to find an amazing germinated brown jasmine rice in Big C that has a lovely nutty flavour as well as a fluffy sticky texture just like white rice. After my husband and I were eating that for a while we had a meal somewhere with white rice and couldn't believe how bland it tasted. Was really quite odd. I didn't end up eating much of the rice that time as it just felt like I was eating a tasteless filler.

As far as I am concerned if we eat the carb source in a state as close to nature intended then I am happy. We try to stay away from all refined, processed carbs. If it's in a packet we don't really have it. However in saying that what is life without a bit of indulgence so every Sunday is our 'bad' day and we pretty have whatever we feel like. It may be as simple as baking some cookies or a cake, our favourite chocolate bar, making eaton mess or going out for a meal or having a good old meat pie and sausage roll while watching the AFL (Australian Football League). Whatever food it may be I feel as a future nutritionist it is important not to ban anything from being eaten however if certain boundaries are put in place then it's a lot easier to stick with any plan you choose to follow when embarking on a healthy change.

Fats and Oils
When it comes to fats and oils I have a reasonably old school approach as we don't use any vegetable oils. These are very high in Omega-6 fatty acids which are inflammatory. Just for reference Omega-3 fatty acids are anti-inflammatory so it is important to keep the ratio very much in favour of Omega-3. I am also not scared of saturated fat mainly due to the fact that all sources of saturated fat are natural and have been eaten for centuries!!! There is nothing natural about vegetable oils. When looking at a flow chart of how they are made it just amazes me how horribly processed they really are.  The point of using saturated fats is that they have a higher smoke point and are less likely to be broken down when cooking due to their fatty acid structures 'saturated' nature. Vegetable oils are poly and monosaturated which means they are unstable and when you see them smoking in your pan that is the oil breaking down and you are ingesting free radicals that have broken off. Nevermind the tea and dark chocolate and any other anti-oxidant you are consuming as this is completely wiped out by ingesting free radicals from vegetable oils.

Although my view on fats and oils is different to my Uni course I just feel that natural is better for our bodies. Something that requires severe amounts of processing just doesn't seem like a healthy option. 60 odd years ago vegetable oils and shortening was introduced and we saw a massive shift in the view of what healthy eating should be. Decades later we are in the midst of a health epidemic which all stems from what we are putting in our mouths. 

With this in mind we use ghee and virgin cold pressed coconut and olive oils. When the oils are cold pressed there are more nutrients as the high temperature of extracting the oil has not stripped/destroyed them. If I could find them I would also use lard and tallow but unfortunately I just have to save the leftover when doing roasts. Being that we live in Thailand getting the right coconut oil is very easy and relative inexpensive. As long as it is cold-pressed, virgin coconut oil your onto a winner. I do find however that sometimes the coconut oil is a little overpowering with some foods so in that case I cook with the ghee. We get our ghee (photo) from Radiance Wholefoods on Soi 22 in Sukhumvit. They have fabulous organic products and are a go to shop for me for many things including all the nuts I use in my homemade muesli.

When it comes to butter I am all for it!! Our brand of butter that we use is 'Anchor' which from what I can gather is the closest I will find that is produced from grass-fed cows.

Dairy
Now this little food group was a mission to figure out!!!!!!!!!!! haha. After tasting all different sorts in Singapore to figure out which we liked my hubby actually helped decide this one. He loves a coffee from Starbucks on the way to the office and found out which one they used and then we followed as he said it tasted great. The only difference is that we use the gold brand of Meiji milk as it just seems thicker and tastier. Makes the perfect froth for our latte in our Nespresso machine too! A small problem that we find is that there are times when we struggle to find the gold carton as they can be sold out from our normal shops but other than those times which are few and far between we have been fine. With our cheese I just stick to brands I can get from home (Coon and Mainland) as that is what we had when in Aus.

Yoghurt was the main issue really when it came to dairy. I am a full fat dairy crusader for many

reason (could fill up another 10 pages so will leave that for a different post...haha) and trying to find unsweetened natural full fat yoghurt is hard!!! My husband has yoghurt, muesli and berry compote every afternoon so I really had to find a solution. For a while I was buying the only one I could find that had no sugar added but was low fat but then I stumbled across good old Yalna!! So thick and delish so have put the expensive issue to the back of my head (150thb compared to 56 for the other) and have not looked back. I am happy to pay more for full fat sugar free yoghurt any day of the week especially when he only has 100g at a time!! In the photo the front tub is unsweetened, the strawberry one on the left has concentrated fruit juice (sugar) and strawberries added and the other just has a bit of honey added. I just mix 50g of either one to the unsweetened when we feel we need a little sweetness.


Well I think that is enough for now. I hope you have found this helpful and if there is anymore that I track down that aren't too obscure for others to find then I will add to it.

Until my next post on navigating Thai wet markets enjoy your week and more importantly enjoy delish healthy real food!!!

Sarah

Your Colours of Nutrition Health Consultant