Guide to Eating Healthy.

You probably know about Eating Healthy. We would have read about it on TV, in the newspaper, magazines etc. We would have been nagged about it by our parents, aunties and uncles. Our teachers in school would probably have told us about it. In Singapore, the Health Promotion Board has been educating the public about eating healthy.

HPB has introduced the Healthier Choice (red circle logo with a food pyramid icon in the centre) logo and asked restaurants and even hawkers to provide healthier options in their menus. You would probably have seen it.

While surfing HPB’s website, I realised they have a site about Healthy Dining too. http://www.hpb.gov.sg/healthierdining

It’s easy to talk about having less sugar, less salt, less oil, more fiber, more vegetables, more fruits. The place that I work has a Wellness Division. They organise the ACTIVE day yearly and have activities that help keep us sane and healthy. They’ve gotten the Health Promotion Board to set up a booth too. What the HPB people did in exchange for a little gift was to make us install an iPhone App.

I find it quite interesting and I thought readers of this blog might like it and install it too. Oh yes, it’s free too! Search for iDAT by Health Promotion Board on the Apple AppStore.



You can try out the other functions, but I would like to highlight the “Add Meal” part of the App. One way to help us eat healthy is to calculate the calories intake. We should not waste our time eating food that’s not worth the calories.

We know to stay healthy we need to consume enough (not too much nor too little) calories and healthy ones as well so that our bodies can make use of it. Keeping tabs on the food we eat will help. Most of us carry our phones with us, so this App is very convenient!

Many of us would be clueless about how much calories a dish would have. Most Apps would not have the calories of local food.




Looking at the list of food does makes me hungry! They must have invested a lot of time in making this app!




Other favourite dishes that caught my attention are Bak Kut Teh or Beef Rendang. It doesn’t mean that I won’t eat it. I will just eat less of it, or share some of it with friends or colleagues.

I hope this different view of how to eat healthy was a good read and also some food for thought for you. The food that you see on this blog is mostly dishes that we share with our family or friends.

Before I forget, have you all thought about participating in the HPB’s Let’s Cook Healthy Together- Photo Contest? To help you, here’s a step-by-step on how to participate in the contest.


How to Submit Your Photos in 3 Easy Steps

Not sure what to do?

This 3-step on submitting your Healthy Dish Photo to the Let’s Cook Healthy Together Photo Contest will certainly help you with it!

1. Go to The Let’s Cook Healthy Together Photo Contest app .
2. Fill in your personal particulars
3. To Join: Upload 1 photo of a cooked dish and recipe. And that’s it!

 Optional Bonus Activity: Upload 1 photo of you cooking together with your friends or family. You will get 5-20 Bonus Points!




Recipe Example

Ingredients:
- Yam (diced, 300 grams)
- Mushroom (about 8 rehydrated shitake mushrooms, sliced)
- Pork belly (250 gm, cut into strips, without skin, marinated with pepper, soy sauce and cornflour)
- Dried Shrimps (Hae Bee) (a hand grip)
- Chinese Sausages (Lup Cheong) (1 sausage, sliced thinly)
- Garlic (3 cloves, chopped)
- Shallots (5 bulbs, chopped)
- 3 cups of rice (rinsed, drained)

Seasoning:
- 2 Tbsp oyster sauce
- 1 Tbsp dark soya sauce
- Salt, pepper
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1/2 tsp sugar

Method:
- Rinse and set aside the 3 cups of rice.
- Heat oil, fry the garlic, shallots until fragrant.
- Add pork, sausages, mushrooms and dried shrimps. Fry for 2 minutes.
- Add in yam, rice and all the seasoning. Stir until it becomes fragrant, around 3 minutes.
- Pour the mixture into the rice cooker and add water till it just covers the rice.
- Turn on the rice cooker as how you would cook normal white rice.

That’s it!

Cook, Snap and Win at https://apps.facebook.com/contestshq/contests/218928