Low carb diet in China?

February 26, 2023 7:47 AM

I lost 35 pounds and stopped being pre-diabetic by cutting out high starch foods like rice and potatoes. (Okay, sugar, too.) Now I'm going to China for two months. How do I avoid rice? How do I avoid rice without insulting anyone's hospitality?
posted by musofire to Food & Drink (7 answers total)

Best answer: Have you been to China before?

I ask this because, generally, rice is not as common to see at a dinner (especially at a banquet or when someone is inviting you over) as it is in, for instance, Chinese restaurants or meals outside of China. In China, rice, noodles, and dumplings, are served at the end of fancy meals as a sort of filler after all the fancy vegetable and meat dishes have been exhausted. And in fact, it will be seen as a sign of appreciation for hospitality that you don't need the rice/noodles at the end; the host's selection of meat and vegetable dishes will have been enough to sate your appetite and they have adequately provided for you. Take a look at the banquet spread at the top of the link and notice that there is no rice on the table. In my experience, the rice/noodles/dumplings at fancy meals showed up when I was already full to bursting and they all mostly went uneaten.

There are cheap restaurants that sell rice combo meals (gaifan or gai jiao fan), but those are usually the sorts of places where workers or travelers get quick meals, not the sort of place where someone's hospitality is on the line.

At restaurants above those low-end combo places, you will never be served rice unless you specifically ask for it and you will only get it with the rest of the food if you ask for it then. When I lived there I had a couple of restaurants that I regularly went to in my neighborhood and it took a few visits before the restaurateurs remembered that I wanted rice with the meal, not at the end. I like the rice to soak up the sauce from the rest of the meal or as a break from something spicy. But it would have been totally normal to not have rice at all.

This varies a little as you move around China and run into different cuisines. And also, there are certain areas where rice is less common and you will mostly see noodles. But again, this is all something you will have to specifically ask for and which likely won't be seen at places where someone will be hosting you.

Potatoes might be slightly more difficult to avoid. There are a couple of very common cold appetizers with slivers of potatoes as the main part of the dish. They mostly look like this. But they'll just be one of many appetizers at a banquet or fancy meal and you can just say that potatoes don't sit well with you and there will be plenty of other options. You could also just eat one bite from the plate and move on to the next without offending at all. And you might run into some transparent noodles, often made of potato starch (though sometimes made from other things). For other dishes (say the Three Earthly Treasures, which you might find at a hosted meal) potatoes are never the main ingredient and just one of many things in a dish, so you can eat the other parts of the dish without looking like you're avoiding it. For that dish in particular, I love the flavor but don't love eggplant's texture, so I would always just eat the peppers and potatoes and it was fine.

You'll also run into more potatoes in DongBei (northeast) cuisine; I've had dishes there that are indistinguishable from a meat/potato/carrot stew you'd run into the US midwest. But there's plenty without potato, too.

Some of the sauces will be very sugary, though. You won't often run into something like sweet and sour chicken at an American Chinese restaurant, but something like Squirrel Fish could be served at a fancy meal and it has a very sugary sauce similar to sweet and sour sauce. And there are plenty of other dishes that you might run into at fancy meals with sugary sauces. Also watch out for sugary drinks (bubble tea and any of the bottles or cans that you might see at a meal, including the milk drinks). They're really sugary. Just ask for hot water or tea.
posted by msbrauer at 8:28 AM on February 26, 2023 [26 favorites]

Seconding msbrauer, when I spent a summer in Beijing, rice was something you specifically had to request as it wasn't served with the meal at any restaurant I went to. In Beijing I didn't see any of the potato based dishes, they were all meat and veg, I'm sure that varies depending on region. Honestly I think the only places I saw refined carbs, starchy food, or sweets were dessert and food carts on the street.

Oh and sauces can be sweet as well like msbauer mentioned as well.
posted by CleverClover at 8:42 AM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I spent a number of years in China, and in general the diet is lighter on carbs than that in the West. As stated above, rice is generally served as a supplement in case you did not get full on the dishes (except in fast-food type places where you'll get the food with rice, but you certainly don't need to eat the rice) - you won't insult anyone but not eating it, at their home- actually it can be a compliment because it's saying that you got full on the food they served you, and don't need rice to fill up.

Sometimes rice or noodles are served with the dishes- if that's the case, you can just not eat them, or eat less. There are a lot of noodle soup places, dumplings, won tons.... but you can avoid this by either choosing to eat something else or not eating all the noodles in the soup, for example.

Don't worry, this is not offensive. Also unfortunately a lot of women in China are pressured to "stay slim" and they avoid carbs because of this. Even men will if they are trying to keep their weight down. That's just to say that most Chinese people will understand that you don't want to eat a lot of carbs.
posted by bearette at 10:06 AM on February 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, and hot pot! Try that- delicious, and few carbs (you're boiling meat and veggies in soup, and can order noodles if you want, but don't have to)

Sweet sauces are less common in China than in Chinese places in the U.S. Especially in the areas around SHanghai, there's lots of fresh fish and seafood, and minimal sauces- especially when you are a guest in a home
posted by bearette at 10:08 AM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

In China, rice, noodles, and dumplings, are served at the end of fancy meals as a sort of filler after all the fancy vegetable and meat dishes have been exhausted.

This was exactly my experience in Hong Kong in the late 1990's/early 2000's.
posted by rjs at 10:36 AM on February 26, 2023

Chinese people love low carb food and aren't unfamiliar with the concept, and we have been eating konnyaku and other stuff that Americans have appropriated as diet food for years and years before then. I lost a lot of weight in China by mostly drinking a lot of tea and concentrating on eating the food in front of me, and I rarely ate rice unless I was at home with my grandparents.

Breakfast might be your toughest bet, but even the steamed bread is so much healthier and tastier than whatever is sold in the US, and tastes like actual grain. I believe that American wheat has some significant poison added to it which causes so many health problems for the general population.
posted by yueliang at 2:14 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

One more thing: you look like you might be male, in which case you might be expected to drink alcohol, especially at banquets. I know cultural norms around this have possibly changed since I last visited the country, but men are just expected to drink. If you're served beer it will be low-alcohol light lager served in very small glasses (sort of like a tasting glass at an American craft brewery). If you're served bai jiu (blech!) it'll be a small glass about the size of a shot, but it's very high alcohol and tastes like perfume smells.

I don't know good ways around this. There's a trick if you're vegetarian to just say you're Buddhist and then you won't get served dishes with little bits of pork in it (most vegetable dishes have a tiny amount of pork almost used like a seasoning). There are a lot of Muslims in China and it's known that they don't generally drink alcohol. In high Muslim areas like Gansu or Xinjiang there are always a couple of nonalcoholic beer-adjacent options available; all are sugary but some are better than others.

I didn't drink when I lived in China and still ended up having to drink some beer or bai jiu. I doubt you'll be subjected to a drinking competition like bureaucrats and Chinese businessmen have to endure (I never was), but you can just take tiny, tiny sips and be good.
posted by msbrauer at 12:33 PM on February 28, 2023