Nutritional Info for asian food ?

Do any of you know a good way to figure out the nutritional content of asian food? Most of the places I go to are mom & pop diners so they don't publish the nutritional info for their dishes. For example, today I had lunch in a japenese noodle shop. I had a bowl of soba noodles with 3 slices of fishcake and 3 tofu puffs.

Obviously, this meal is woefully short on fruits and vegetables, but beyond that I can't really assess it - even in general terms. Is okay once a week or a hidden-calorie disaster to be avoided if at all possible?

I know this has come up before, but i wanted to give it its' own thread.

Sat. Jan 14, 11:52pm

I live in Malaysia and nutrition facts on Asian food is next to none. I have a small calorie counter/fat content booklet that I can refer to, for the more popular dishes in Malaysia & Singapore. Since I am not into calorie counting and hardly eat out, that is a non-issue.

The nearest entry I have to soba noodles will be the equivalent to Fishball noodle soup which states 330 cal, 1 gm fat (saturated), 2 gms fat (non-saturated).

barbara_j

Sunday, January 15, 2006, 4:30 AM

My fiance really likes soba salad, and makes it at home - cold soba noodles w/ some sort of sauce and something in it, I can't really remember. I do remember, though, that just one portion of the noodles, plain, is over 300 calories, so I stopped eating it (b/c really, who eats just one portion of noodles??) I don't remember the actual calorie details, just that the noodles were much higher calorie than other noodles... Sorry!

Sunday, January 15, 2006, 10:32 AM

Try www.healthclub.com/foods and type the name of the food/dish into the search box. It has thousands of restaurants in its database and can find a similar dish from an Asian restaurant that does report its nutritional data.

Sunday, January 15, 2006, 3:57 PM

Wait!

As long as the portion size wasn't too big - one cup of soba is about 250 calories and soba is often made from buckwheat and so has at least 2g of fiber - already way better for you than regular pasta. Fish cake is probably decent diet-wise, and I would only worry over the tofu puffs as I assume that's something fried?

Sunday, January 15, 2006, 7:10 PM

Update

OP here -

After much searching I found an austrailian website that lists many of the foods I ate. Unfortunately, all the measurements were by weight, and I didn't take my scale with me :)

Here's what I found:
100 g cooked soba noodles = 99 Cal
1.5 cups beef broth = 90 Cal
100 g Tofu Puffs = 224 Cal
100 g Kamaboko-style fishcake = 159 Cal

I only ate half the bowl of soup/noodles on Saturday, so I did okay on that front. But I think the tofu and fishcake were a mistake. In future I'll get the beef instead of tofu and skip the fishcake (especially since it tastes like boiled jello).

Note: the fishcake I'm refering to comes in half-moon slices about the size of a tomato wedge. The interior is white with a bubble-gum-pink border. I found a couple of recipies that call for Kamaboko, and their description sounds like the fishcake I ate, but I'm not entirely sure I got the right name.

100 g is about 3.5 ounces. How many ounces does a slice of fishcake weigh? who knows !

Link

Sunday, January 15, 2006, 11:18 PM

Here's a link I've used for some Asian foods.

Link

Monday, January 16, 2006, 11:37 AM

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