The Healthy Side of Thai Food – Getting Your Green Fix

Thai food is full of delicious oddities that consistently delight even the most provincialized palate. What’s more exciting about a lot of Thai food than the incredible taste? The fact that it’s so healthy!

Here are a few healthy tips from the Thai kitchen:

Getting Your Green Fix: When asked to think about eating green vegetables, a lot of us from the west will visualize a salad; most likely with a dressing. Some of the most popular dressings are pretty heavily laden with nameless laboratory atrocities, as well as lots of bad fats and sugar (unless it’s a “light” dressing in which case the fats and sugars have most likely been replaced with more analogs and aberrations). What’s worse is that we don’t usually put the best green stuff in the salad, but things like iceberg lettuce and boiled eggs, or – dare I say it – bacon bits.

Here is a dish of green vegetables, good ones too, and some dipping sauce to accompany them. What you’ll notice is that the vegetables are raw (if not incorporated in a dish, vegetables are usually consumed lightly steamed or raw) and varied. They are also all very green. But the sauce is the real star of this show.

With a jaw dropping, mouth watering range of easily prepared condiments that can play so well with any sort of flavor – making everything from bitter herb to shoe leather do such a divine dance across your palate that your eyes roll back in your head and your shoulders slump.

Nam Prik is a general term that refers to chili sauce. It is a base term, and is extended into things like “nam prik kabi”, which is a mango chili sauce made with shrimp paste. The important thing about these Thai sauces is that they are bursting with flavor, but pretty scant on the calories. They are also full of various probiotics as fermentation is at the heart of a lot of Thai culinary base ingredients like shrimp paste and the all important fish sauce, which we’ll talk more about in the next piece.

Probiotics help prevent food borne pathogens (like salmonella) from binding in your digestive system and help prevent food poisoning, but even more importantly they improve your digestion in general helping you break down, process, and use the nutrients you are consuming more effectively.

If you’re interested in learning more about Thai Cuisine and all its old-world, health promoting properties (and being able to make some of it yourself) check out Sompong Thai Cooking School and see how you can get some intensive and highly personalized experience and education!