Eating out in Beijing is a culinary delight. With the tastebuds of locals evolving to desire more diversity and better quality, expats especially benefit from the areas of the city that want to cater to these wishes.
That is, it’s all a joy until you want to know how much food you’re fitting into your pie hole and how many calories it’ll set you back. It’s frustrating especially if you’re trying to get into nutritional ketosis and you want to measure out how many net carbs and fats are in each meal. Whether you’re on a low carb, Paleo, or general calorie-counting diet, it’s simply hard to find out what’s in each dish without taking your food scale and grilling the chef on the spot.
Flying blind is what waist conscious foodies here in Beijing have to live with, because we found all of four brands that carry nutrition information. We’d be happy to be proved totally wrong on this, readers, for the sake of all our summer bikini strivings.
Obentos
What we like about Obentos is that even if you’re building your own box online, they’ll calculate the total nutritional numbers for you. That’s just too cool. Our suggestion would be to add fiber so we can figure out net carbs (total carbs minus fiber).
Mon-Fri 8am-10pm, Sun-Sat 9am-10pm.
B1 – 109, Grand Summit Phase 2, Liangmaqiao, Chaoyang. (朝阳区亮马桥东方东路19号官舍B1层)
Glo Kitchen
We give props to Glo Kitchen for trying to get the information we need out there, but some of the information on their website is missing. We hope more complete information is available on location.
Open daily 11am-9.30pm.
(1) Unit 103A, Guanghua Lu Soho, 22 Guanghua Lu, Chaoyang, (朝阳区光华路22号 光华路SOHO一期103A&B室) (2) Unit 101, Bldg 7, 97 Jianguo Lu, Chaoyang (朝阳区建国路97号万达广场7号楼101)
Tribe Nutrition
Tribe Nutrition meal plans are meant to make life easy, with planning and cooking done by chefs and nutritionists. Detailed information for nutrition is available on each dish’s box, with the calorie range of each meal plan available online before you pick.
7-Eleven
We wish we were joking, but with desperate times comes desperate calorie-counting measures. This chain that never sleeps makes it onto the list because we can always count on their salads having the nutrition information we need to stay on our diet while out and about.
Locations vary. Open daily all day at certain locations. Search for 便利店 on Baidu to find the closest location near you.
Labels Are Not Complicated
Life happens. It’s not realistic to expect that we’ll never eat out when our food scales are unavailable, so we hope more places will release their nutrition information. And since most of the chain restaurants need to standardize food servings to count costs anyway, we know that they can easily provide this information with a scale, a calculator, and a link to the USDA Food Composition Database where they can find comparable food items. Simple labels should at least include total calories, protein, fat, carbs, sugars, and fiber. Extra points for sodium.
We’re happy to keep this blog updated as more F&B providers compile nutrition information. Just let us know if we’ve missed someone in the comments, and we’ll add their name to the list.
More stories by this author here.
Email: vanessajencks@truerun.com
Twitter: @vanessa_jencks
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