Eat your vegetables first

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

- CHIT U. JUAN

That’s the advice of my nutritionist as I wondered why I lost weight despite my having eaten more rice and protein the past week. Believe it or not, the “vegetable first” experiment is proving to be effective. She also says, and | saw many posts about it, that eating vegetables first creates some kind of viscous gel that may wash the cholesterol or fat from the other proteins you consume...after the vegetables!

While traveling in Vietnam earlier this month, my friends and I were in awe at the variety of vegetables one can have with every meal we had. We are on the same tropical belt and can grow almost all the kinds of greens which Vietnam and Thailand can grow. What seems to be the problem? Why is our consumption of vegetables one of the lowest in Asia ?

In Vietnam, they have an abundance of vegetables, from the pricey leafy greens like lettuce and arugula, to the lowly sayote tops, kamote tops and morning glory or kangkong. While kangkong used to be harvested in swamps — making us call it swamp cabbage — there now are upland Chinese varieties that grow on soil. No matter what budget, there is a vegetable for you. The only challenge is how to cook it other than pinakbet or chopsuey. While the Chinese restaurants cook almost all kinds of veggies in either garlic stir fry or oyster sauce, we Pinoys usually have boiled ones, like a salad eaten with bagoong or guinamos. The Vietnamese, however, almost always have a side dish of fresh herbs, fresh strips of even banana heart and again, kangkong. Then you can see they use culinary herbs like mint, basil and coriander a lot, unlike our Filipino recipes. But we share our love for bitter gourd, or ampalaya, and other tropical ones like eggplant and string beans of all kinds.