Many people prefer strongly flavored dishes, feeling that this is the only way to enjoy their food. In reality, however, food that is too heavily seasoned is not good for you. Below are the dangers of eating overly salty, sweet, or rich foods. Come take a look with the editor from Food World.
1. It's often said that heavily flavored foods are bad for your health. What are the specific dangers?
Generally speaking, when we talk about heavily flavored foods, the main concerns are excessive amounts of salt (including other salty seasonings), sugar, flavor enhancers, and oil. Intense flavors can also involve spiciness, numbness, or sourness, but these are generally not as serious as the issues mentioned above.
In most cases, heavily flavored foods are high in salt. As the saying goes, "A good chef uses plenty of salt." More salt, combined with some flavor enhancers and other seasonings, can easily leave a strong impression on diners. Salt is sodium chloride, a preservative substance that is somewhat toxic. Besides salt, all salty condiments, such as MSG and chicken powder, as well as soy sauce, yellow bean paste, bean paste, Japanese miso, satay sauce, broad bean paste, chili sauce, fermented bean curd, douchi, oyster sauce, shrimp paste, and fish sauce, also contain large amounts of sodium.
Excessive sodium increases the burden on the kidneys, promotes edema, raises blood pressure, causes dehydration, increases the risk of stomach cancer, worsens premenstrual discomfort, and also increases the loss of calcium in urine, which is not conducive to preventing osteoporosis, and so on.
2. It's often said that you shouldn't order salty and sweet dishes often. They taste delicious, so why are they unhealthy?
When food is too salty, it becomes unpleasant to eat. To counteract this, chefs find ways to make dishes salty without being overwhelming. A common method is to add sugar and flavor enhancers. Sugar can mitigate the salty taste and harmonize other flavors. By adding sugar, one can use more salt without it being overwhelmingly salty, and it can even create a rich, satisfying flavor. Unfortunately, sugar itself is unhealthy, and MSG further increases the sodium content.
Therefore, the combination of large amounts of salt, sugar, and MSG creates a very rich and flavorful dish, but it also means the sodium content is two to three times that of a normally seasoned dish, which is quite unhealthy.
3. Heavily flavored dishes are generally cheaper, while lightly flavored ones, like Japanese and Cantonese cuisine, are more expensive. Why?
This is because heavy seasoning can mask poor-quality ingredients. For example, with stale fish or meat, the bad taste is not noticeable when cooked with strong flavors. If a light cooking method is used, people can immediately tell the quality of the ingredients. This means restaurants cannot use stale materials, so ingredient costs must rise, and the dishes become more expensive.
Take fish, for instance. Only live fish can be used for steamed fish. Fish that has just died can be braised, and it still tastes good. If it's even less fresh, it's best to make it into a dry-braised fish, because the salty and spicy nature of this dish makes it hard to detect any slight off-flavors. As for meat, only fresh meat can be used for clear stew or stir-fried with winter bamboo shoots. Slightly less fresh meat can be used for braised pork. Even poorer quality meat can be used for twice-cooked pork or as a flavoring broth for noodles. After being boiled with seasonings, then deep-fried, and then mixed with a large amount of spicy, numbing, and salty seasonings, no one can tell the difference.
4. The cooking oil used in heavily flavored dishes is often a cause for concern. Why?
Heavily flavored dishes often use cooking methods like pan-frying or deep-frying, or they include a lot of red chili oil. This inevitably means the cooking oil is heated multiple times. In restaurants, oil used for frying is never discarded immediately but is reused many times. Therefore, when eating these rich dishes, you often find the oil is quite viscous and has a greasy mouthfeel.
A chef revealed that for making red chili oil and for mixing with cold dishes, they specifically use oil that has been fried multiple times and is sticky (this is essentially waste oil, basically falling into the category of gutter oil). This is because when the oil becomes sticky, it can adhere tightly to the surface of the ingredients and not easily drip to the bottom of the plate, which helps the flavors penetrate the food better.
Another chef mentioned that rich, oily dishes often use oil that has been fried multiple times. Because the seasonings are so strong, any slightly off-flavors in the reused oil, like a gamey or fishy taste, are undetectable. This is true for dishes like spicy diced pork and twice-cooked pork. However, for lightly stir-fried vegetables, fresher oil must be used; otherwise, diners would notice the old flavors, like those of lamb or fish, which would be very unpleasant.
5. If I only eat rich foods occasionally and not often, is it still okay?
Occasional consumption does less harm, but frequent consumption is much more damaging. Any unhealthy food needs to be consumed in large quantities to cause harm. Bad habits, because they are repeated daily, lead to a large total intake of unhealthy components, causing significant harm to the body. In daily life, there are many opportunities to eat unhealthy food: a gathering today, a dinner party tomorrow, a working meal after that, and treating your girlfriend to a restaurant the day after... If you often indulge yourself, there will be very few days left in the year for a light diet.
If you eat a light diet on most days and have a rich meal once or twice a month, it shouldn't cause any problems. Moreover, because a light diet keeps your taste buds sensitive, rich foods will taste exceptionally strong, and you might even find them hard to bear. Conversely, if you are used to rich foods, your sense of taste becomes very dull. You find slightly bland food tasteless and unbearable, which often means your body is in an unhealthy state: it has lost the ability to discern the quality of ingredients, and your internal organs are overburdened with processing sodium and various metabolic wastes.