Chinese Nutrition

Since I only had a bottle of Ensure for dinner last night, and didn’t have any lunch today, my mom said we should go out to eat. My dad had to run an errand for my sister’s family so it was just the two of us. We decided to go to Boiling Point in Irvine. We got there around 6:30 pm and waited about 10 minutes for a table. If you’ve never been to Boiling Point, it’s a personal Taiwanese hot pot restaurant with pre-made soup/ingredient choices, and you can order additional items to put in your pot. It’s not all-you-can-eat but the amount of food is more than adequate.

I ordered a beef hot soup/pot with no spiciness. My mom ordered the seafood & tofu with mild spiciness. I remember ordering something with mild spiciness once and it was really spicy so I chickened out this time. That and I could only eat on one side of my mouth and the food was super hot (temperature). I was a bit worried about the nutritional content of their food because Chinese. I ate all of it anyway and looked up their nutrition info when I got home.

At first glance, it seems there are too many significant digits for sodium. How can you measure something to 0.1 mg precision? But if you look at the nutrition PDF file, it breaks down each menu item into it’s contents and provides nutrition info for each ingredient. So for my beef hot pot, a lot of the sodium comes from the Kamaboko (143.9 mg) and Kakiage tempura (132 mg). We also got the spicy fermented tofu appetizer. It wasn’t what I thought it would be: fried stinky tofu. On paper, it’s saltier than either of the hot pots.

So, 459 calories and 517 mg of sodium is not bad. Both are about one-quarter of allowable daily value (DV). However, it tasted pretty salty and the soup was oily when I was done eating. I highly doubt the provided nutritional values are accurate. That’s the problem with eating at restaurants and eating prepackaged foods. You’re trusting that the ingredient list is what is actually in the food. I’m sure the chef is not measuring out salt to tenths of a milligram. Unless you cooked the meal yourself, you’re never really sure what is in there. At some point though, you have trust the info is accurate enough and make good food decisions.