How To Health-Up Your Unhealthy Snacks
When I first moved to Vietnam, many years ago, I was a bit naïve about things.
The whole experience was a grand adventure; trying new foods, meeting new people, becoming entrenched in a new culture.
A few things definitely weirded me out. Vietnam has amazing food, right? From pho to banh mi to bun thit nuong, from bun bo Hue to com tam, it was just…wow.
Yet what do I see when I go to the supermarket? More flavors of packet noodles than I’d ever dreamed of! There are like four six twenty aisles of noodles there! In my city we have Cup O’ Noodles and Ramen, and that’s basically it!
The sight would have provoked raptures in my still-younger self, because when I was in University, and thus much poorer than I am now, ramen was a go-to food. They stretched the budget and the belly, and I experimented many times with how to improve the flavor and the nutrition.
Eaten in moderation, your basic instant noodles are… well… they’re not the worst thing you can eat. But they’re not terribly good. However, we’ve got an easy way to health those tricky, tasty suckers up.
Cook your noodles, serve ’em, and then toss a handful — a good handful, not one of those tiny little-kid handfuls — of microgreens or sprouts on top. I personally love the peppery bite of rocket (plus, isn’t the name just cool?) and radishes. White radishes or red, they are a perfect foil for the studied blandness of noodles. You know what? Add two handfuls. Pick two different types, and see what flavors work best together.
You don’t need to end with noodles. Plenty of unhealthy snacks can be made healthier with a blast of ‘greens. Soup of any kind is a perfect food to add sprouts to. Snacking? Trade off handfuls — one of chips, one of microgreens. Wrap your candy bar in tasty, savoury basil sprouts! Go nuts! Throw some daikon sprouts on your ice cream! We haven’t tried it here at AGG, but we bet it’s amazing!
Speaking more seriously, there are generally four problems with snacks. They have too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat and too many icky preservatives (like, do squid-chips really need to be mummified before they can be eaten?) Junk food is designed to taste fantastic, to appeal to your natural desire to eat those things; after all, we need them… in moderation.
That said, there’s no power on Earth that can make junk food truly healthy. Where you — yes, you, Mr. or Ms. Office Worker Who Should Be Working Right Now — can do better is by eating less of it, and by supplementing it with something that actually gives your body what it needs to make more of, well, you. And the more microgreens you eat? The fuller you get with the good stuff, and not the junk. Foods full of dietary fiber fill you up without fattening you up, feel me?
Adding microgreens and sprouts to your diet is not a silver bullet, but it’s a start. And hey, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a silly cliche. Or a handful of sprouts, if we at AGG had our way.
So good luck! Make your snacks healthy, or at least less acutely fatal!
