Celebrating Chinese New Year with Science | Family reunion, prepare the New Year’s Eve dinner in a healthy and delicious way!

Dragons soar and tigers leap, auspicious stars shine, and good fortune welcomes the spring and the New Year. As the Spring Festival approaches, Beijing Science and Technology News has carefully planned and launched a series of articles with the theme of "Celebrating the New Year with Science" from February 9 (New Year's Eve) to February 17 (the eighth day of the first lunar month), making this Spring Festival holiday full of "science and technology".

Written by reporter Ding Lin, Photo and text editor Chen Yongjie

New Media Editor/Liu Daheng Art Editor/Li Lifeng

It is the New Year's Eve again, and the best thing in life is family reunion. On New Year's Eve, every household is busy preparing the most important meal of the year - the New Year's Eve dinner. A steaming hot New Year's Eve dinner is full of the strong flavor of the New Year and warm family affection.

New Year’s Eve dinner is the most important meal of the year, and perhaps also the most troublesome one: it has to have delicious fish and meat, satisfy everyone’s tastes, be suitable for all ages, and be auspicious and festive... If you add "healthy and balanced" to the mix, it seems even more difficult.

How can we achieve a balanced, scientific and healthy nutritional combination to add good luck to the festive Spring Festival?

Eat healthy during the Chinese New Year and remember the following principles

The New Year's Eve dinner is not just about "meal", but also about the joy and warmth of family reunion. Every family's table is filled with fish and meat, and almost all the dishes you usually like to eat are prepared. Although it is rich enough, it is difficult to avoid being greasy and "heavy". In fact, a healthy New Year's Eve dinner should follow the following principles:

① Steam rather than fry: Fried foods are more common during the Chinese New Year, including fried fish and fried rice cakes, which can cause people to consume too much fat and cause excess energy. Replacing fried chicken with boiled chicken and steaming rice cakes can help keep your diet low in fat.

②Better light than salty : Most New Year’s Eve dinners have heavy flavors. Eating too much salt can easily lead to high blood pressure and increase the burden on the kidneys.

For colored dishes such as braised pork, you can add less salt if soy sauce is added; for cold dishes, adding more vinegar and less salt can also highlight the refreshing taste.

③ Better coarse than fine : The staple food during festivals is mostly fine grains, and the raw materials used are mostly refined flour, refined rice, etc. However, fine grains often lose a lot of B vitamins during processing. You can use more coarse grains to make steamed bread, snacks, rice, porridge, etc., or steam some sweet potatoes as the staple food.

(Image source: Microsoft Designer Image Creator)

Tips: Three cooking tips

① "Big fish and meat" and "light diet" are not contradictory. As long as we use less salt, MSG, oyster sauce and other sodium-containing seasonings when cooking, and use natural spices such as tomatoes, onions, lemons, bay leaves, and lemongrass instead, add salt when the dish is almost out of the pot, and when pouring oil, don't pour too much because of shaking hands, we can also enjoy healthy and delicious meat dishes with peace of mind.

② Use steaming, boiling, sautéing, blanching and mixing more often, and use less baking, frying and deep-frying. Before stir-frying or deep-frying, you can coat the food with batter to increase the taste and reduce the loss of nutrients.

③ For pickled foods such as bacon and sausage, blanch them in water for a few minutes before cooking. This can dissolve some harmful substances such as nitrite into the water and reduce some salt. They can be paired with vegetables and fruits. The vitamin C in vegetables and fruits can block the formation of nitrosamines. When cooking sausages, you can add garlic or garlic sprouts. The sulfur compounds in them can also inhibit the conversion of nitrite into nitrosamines. When eating pickled vegetables, you can drink green tea. The tea polyphenols in green tea can effectively reduce the content of nitrite in pickled products and inhibit its conversion into carcinogens.

Tips for pairing dishes

A New Year's Eve dinner usually consists of three parts: cold dishes, hot dishes (main dishes), and soup, accompanied by staple foods, snacks, and drinks. Many people think that the New Year's Eve dinner should be as much as possible. In fact, although the "Man Han Banquet" looks very stylish, it is easy for people to eat too much without paying attention. Not only does it cause waste, it also adds burden to our gastrointestinal tract.

The cold dishes at the beginning can be mainly vegetarian, with some starchy foods. Using these cold dishes rich in dietary fiber to fill your stomach can increase your sense of fullness and avoid eating too much meat and fish, which is not conducive to digestion.

(Image source: Microsoft Designer Image Creator)

For hot dishes, remember the "three-part" principle: 1/3 meat, 1/3 vegetable, and 1/3 meat and vegetable combination. The choice of ingredients can be diversified, and fish, shrimp, meat, poultry, eggs, and various fruits and vegetables can be cooked together. The number of hot dishes can be roughly equal to the number of adults at the table, so that there is a rich variety of dishes and it is not easy to cause waste.

Eating meat and fish should be moderate. During the Spring Festival, it is advisable to eat 2-3 liang of fish and poultry meat every day. Excessive animal food not only makes you gain weight, but also causes abnormal blood lipids and is not good for cardiovascular health. We can add vegetables to meat dishes, such as adding kelp and carrots to stewed meat; adding lotus root and kelp to meatballs; surrounding meat dishes with cucumber slices and broccoli; adding mushroom cubes, lily and other side dishes to stir-fried beef, etc.

In fact, it is very simple to match meat and vegetables well. Just remember that for vegetables, dark green>orange-red>light color; for meat, fish and shrimp>poultry>red meat. Choose the best combination, and then add edible fungi (such as mushrooms and fungus), root vegetables (potatoes, lotus roots, yam, etc.) and bean products. You can also match soup in this way.

As for staple food, you can choose several types, coarse and fine, and you can also arrange beans. The staple food in the New Year's Eve dinner can be less than the usual amount of rice, after all, many dishes contain staple foods (such as potatoes, yams, taro, etc.), to avoid excessive intake of carbon water. We can appropriately increase the proportion of coarse grains in the staple food, and eat coarse and fine. However, for people with fragile gastrointestinal function, they should still eat some refined white rice and flour to reduce the burden on the stomach.

Tips: Control your weight, start with five "points"

How can you avoid gaining three pounds during the holidays? Experts suggest that whether you are dining at home or out, you should:

"Light dishes" to keep the food fresh;

"Lighter aroma", especially when dining out, there will definitely be more seasonings and spices;

"Lighter taste", choose less salt, steaming, boiling and other cooking methods;

"More vegetarian dishes", for Spring Festival, you can choose higher-grade mushrooms and fresher green leafy vegetables;

"A wider variety" means that all kinds of food are taken into account.

How to eat overnight meals “healthily”?

Many families not only have a rich and colorful New Year's Eve dinner, but also pay attention to "surplus every year". However, a large table of fish and meat dishes cannot be finished on New Year's Eve. Some families can eat it for four days, and some even for seven days, which can be called "seven days of leftovers". In a sense, eating the leftovers on New Year's Eve is the beginning of a new life.

When the "New Year's Eve dinner" becomes "leftover food", some invisible health threats have quietly emerged. So, how can we eat leftover food in a healthier way?

(Image source: Microsoft Designer Image Creator)

① It is better to have leftover meat dishes than leafy vegetables . After the New Year's Eve dinner, there will inevitably be leftovers. Many people choose to eat the meat dishes and leave the vegetables. However, vegetables are prone to produce nitrite after being refrigerated, and antioxidants, vitamin C, folic acid, etc. will be lost after being heated; meat dishes will only lose some B vitamins when reheated. Therefore, leafy foods are best cooked and eaten immediately.

② Overnight meat dishes should not be refrigerated for more than two days . If overnight meat dishes are stored in the refrigerator at low temperature for 48 hours, the nitrite content will not exceed the standard, so if you need to store overnight meat dishes, it is best to refrigerate them for no more than two days.

③Fully heat before eating . The food that cannot be eaten needs to be reserved in a clean lunch box with serving chopsticks and sealed and refrigerated. Fully heat before eating to reduce the occurrence of Helicobacter pylori, hepatitis, diarrhea and other diseases.

④ Don’t store raw vegetables for too long . As the storage time increases, the nitrite content in raw vegetables will gradually increase. Once leafy vegetables begin to fall off or become waterlogged, do not eat them.

⑤ It is safer to store overnight dishes in the freezer . Generally, it is a hard condition to keep the freezing area at around -18℃. Food stored in a sealed freezer can even be kept for 1 month or even longer.

Source: Comprehensive People's Daily Science Popularization, CCTV.com, China Digital Science and Technology Museum, Life Times, Tencent Medical Dictionary