Unhealty Food & Beverage Strategy in Malaysia

I am a frequent outside-food consumer due to work and other social activities that I need to perform outside, so I rarely have the chance to cook or taste mum's cooking, and I had lots of thoughts and opinion on the outside-food that I experience. But let's not talk about how much MSG or any unhealthy method that the food maker practice, you can read tons of them with Google search.

I call myself some kind of health conscious person. However, I don't avoid fried or oily food, or any form of unhealthy food that I know at all cost. I do consume them but I always limit how long I should stop taking fried food after I had it once, and I consume a drinks that has maximum 30grams of sugar per day. For my usual practice, I usually think about how much protein and fats are contained in the food before I order them. But I won't go to the extend to check how much grams of protein or fats in this steam chicken, vege, favor rice.... then sums up the amount of the protein, carb, fats, and calories I had consumed. I just study a little on information related to healthy eating and the type of balance meal we should consume in a daily basis to ensure our body can have sufficient energy source not only to perform our daily work and activities, but also to ensure we can maintain a healthy body as we ages instead of the other way round.

Obviously, the reason why I created this post is because I realize to achieve a healthy & balanced meal in the outside food environment is a huge challenge for consumer. If you are an outside-food consumer who wish to look for good food that consists of good quality and worth, I believe you are very familiar with the experiences below.

The ingredients are there but the portion.....

"Image/picture is for illustration purpose only". I don't recall seeing this text printed on the menu in most restaurants and cafe, but this is the first thing I had in mind when the actual food presented on the table in front of me. Follow by a great disappointment that the image/picture is too much differences in reality. Although I am, just like you, used to it as it happen at least two times a day for casual outside-food consumer.

It's not only the matter of size where the image/picture shows that the meat stick is suppose to same length with the plate but the actual food turns out that the meat stick is as long as a thumb drive, it's also really common to order a chicken ball noodle that has half a bowl of chicken balls in the the bowl and it turns out only two chicken balls are given to you; A salmon butter teppanyaki that turns out only consists of one 0.5cm height salmon slice with no butter taste, and much more. Believe me, the meat stick as short as thumb drive, two chicken balls, and 0.5cm salmon slice with no butter taste is my true personal experience.

The problem? We are indirectly cheated with the illustration that given to us before we see the actual portion. Especially in the case where we order salmon butter bento where the salmon is the main dishes in this meal, yet it's only 0.5cm with some rice and tiny little side dishes, and it cost around RM15.90. If you order chicken rice out there with RM15.90, you can at least confirm that you are full and chicken give you tons of protein, while tiny slice of salmon don't give you much omega 3 and fish oil. So in the end, if you measure by both cost and worthiness (feeling full or not), it's not worth

Healthier Meal = Higher Cost

When I started my budgeting plan to reduce unnecessary spending in my daily life, I also tried to plan for a list of food I should consume for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks in a daily basis. All the food in my list not only need to be less expensive, but also need to be healthy or at least not-so unhealthy. And I spent tons of effort and time from that time until now, which a few months had pass but I still failed to come out with an expected list. Because eating healthy and cheap food is really challenging here in KL.

Say, if I ask you to recommend me a place to get cheap and healthy sandwich. What's your best reckon? I know sandwiches are available in too much of places such as 7-11, Jusco, bakery shops, and even restaurants. But if we talk about healthy, the sandwiches that you can find contain of two tiny slice of bread, and some tuna or egg in the middle. The cheapest I could find is RM2.00. Let's save the calculation part. How worthy it is for two slice of bread with little content in the middle where we can always pay a few ringgits more to get all the relevant ingredients to produce more than three sandwiches with more stuff in it? Not to mention the tuna or egg can only be seen when you look at the middle part of the bread but not the other side. And it's even cheap and can be considered couldn't get any nutrition at all. I can get a mixed rice by adding two ringgits.

Of course, it's nonsense if anyone here expecting to eat really great food as in healthy and tasty yet really cheap, especially for those restaurant, cafe, and any food stall in the shopping mall and having their own shop. They need to pay rent and spend for supplier, maintenance..... to cut things short, they are setting their price in a way where they could afford to continue their business while earn a little more for their own life. But I still need to emphasize that, despite understanding their difficulty of expenses on all those expected and unexpected stuff to ensure their business could continue, me as a consumer just find it not reasonable and sometimes ridiculous that if I want to eat healthy meal, I have to go to expensive restaurant such as vegetarian shops (which are way more expensive that non-vegetarian shop), Subways, Simple Life, Beyond Veggie and other businesses that promote food for various health benefits. It's really difficult for people with average income to take "healthy" meal here once in a week. What's more, our primary school text book strongly emphasize that we have to take healthy meal everyday.

Furthermore, the so-call healthy meal we can find out there, what so healthy about them? I'm a usual customer for Subways especially breakfast. White bread or any other bread with various nutrition for your selection, choose your lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion, pepper, pickles, olives, and then the sauce. It's true that the bread and veggie provide lots of nutrition, but adding the sauce increase your sugar intake and other stuff in the sauce. It's true that you able to consume various nutrition with such meal, but if measure each ingredient by grams and calculate how much protein and carb you can get, the figure is really small and it's definitely don't worth RM10++. Of course, the problem don't exists only in Subways, if you have few dine in experience in other restaurant that promote healthy life and meal, you can find many things that actually contradict with their initial idea. In the end, cost is still a major issue.

Too much of unwanted ingredients

This issue is quite different from what's mentioned above because I consider this one quite serious as it directly related to how much our body receive the adequate nutrition and benefits to support our body system. I believe there is no problem to find a restaurant or cafe that can easily make you full in an instant. No matter how big or small the portion is. If you take closer look and taste on the food that you eat, it's always full of taste but it's not the real taste of the food. It's the taste of something else that add much more taste into the food.

We all love tasty food. The tastier, the better. But natural food can't be tasty, so adding lots of spice, soy sauce, salt, sugar and etc is a convenient and standard way to make food more tasty. But all these are also well known for causing diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attack, and all those common thing we will face as we ages. It's safe to consume very little of it in a daily basis, but the amounts of those food being added into the food out there are too much.

Not only that the overdosed of unhealthy ingredients produce certain damage to our body system, the usage of butter and other less well-known spices also used to make us feel like we had enough of our meal, not because we are really full but because the spices are reducing our appetite to continue eating. That's why we easily get hungry a few hours later. In the long run, we are not consuming sufficient food for our body, and we are consuming more on the spices, butter, and oil that give more bads and goods.

As usual, I do not have any statistic of how much unwanted ingredient and spices are included in outside food, but I believe you have many chances to taste it.