Croque Madame

This evening, I watched Rachael Ray’s 30 minutes meal again. I am a Rachael fan. Her cooking style is casual and her presentation is always entertaining. I like her show.

During the show, Rachael was cooking a French sandwich– croque Madame for a late night supper. Basically it is a toasted bread with ham, cheese and one big fried egg. She also made some salad using some exotic dressing. The foods are very easy to make and look delicious.

However, since I am dieting now, I can’t help counting calories for every food I see. It seems to me that Rachael’s croque Madame has a very high energy density.

My calculation is based on the recipe from the Foodnetwork and nutrition values from the USDA database.

One slice of white bread has 70 kcal calories with 1gram fat; one big fried egg has 100 kcal but with 7 grams of fat and 210 mg of cholesterol; two slices of turkey ham have 66 kcal with 2 grams of fat and 36 mg of cholesterol; and two thin slices of Swiss cheese have 100 kcal with 7.8 grams of fat and 26 mg of cholesterol. She also used one cup of whole milk which accounts for 150 kcal with 8 grams of fat and 24 mg of cholesterol; and 2 tablespoons of butter which have 200 kcal with 23 grams of fat and 61 mg of cholesterol (she actually used double size of milk and butter for two sandwiches).

Now let’s forget about all sorts of oils, salad, alcohol and others first, the French sandwich alone already has 686 kcal with 48 grams of fat and 357 mg of cholesterol. The whole late night supper, I figured, could be more than 800 kcal. This is a lot.

This supper is unhealthy. It has a lot of energy and too much fat and cholesterol. The fat accounts for almost 50% of the total energy, and the cholesterol surpasses the daily allowance suggested by AHA (no more than 300 mg cholesterol per day).

During the show, there was a little Rachael flashing in the left corner suggesting that we can substitute the whole milk with fat free milk and the cheese with low fat cheese. Even with these replacements, the energy from this sandwich is still about 500 kcal.

If all meals are like this, the daily energy intake is very likely to exceed 2500 kcal. To me, this amount of energy intake is too much. Before dieting, my daily energy intake was about 2000 kcal. If I adopt Rachael’s recipes, I may gain a lot of weight every day.

In fact, Rachael Ray also seems to have gained some weight. Although I am not sure whether her regular diet is like what she makes on TV, I am concerned about the regular folks who watch the show. If they follow Rachael’s 30 minutes meal, they will gain weight for sure.

Two or three years ago, Rachael was making foods using canned or precooked foods. She doesn’t do that very often now. However, she is still cooking traditional American meals—high energy, high fat, and high cholesterol. Maybe she needs to think about her foods again.

The art of tea

Tea is a drink. The art lies in how people prepare it and drink it. Unfortunately, the art of tea has been distorted.

The biggest tormenter is the invention of bagged tea. Western people, unable to fully appreciate the oriental culture, drink the tea like eating fast foods. You dip an ugly paper bag into the hot water and, bingo, without actually seeing the tea leaves, the smell of tea fills in the room, the water turns into brown or red, and the tea is done. You never know what is inside that bag. It is said that cheap tea bags may contain really low grade tea leaves and even dregs. The smell of tea and jasmine might be flavored, i.e., made by artificially additives. But people still drink it, enjoy it, and feel being invigorated by it.

Bagged tea is now a multi-billion business. Commercialized anything is a sure way to destroy its inherent art. On the other hand, the tea ceremony has been claimed to replay the old art of tea drinking. Thus, the tea ceremony in modern tea houses becomes popular in China recently. However, the tea ceremony also twists the art of tea in some subtle ways .

In China, modern tea houses are different from traditional tea houses. Although they both are socializing places, in traditional tea houses, the purpose is not the tea drinking and the tea is not necessary good. People go there to chat, listen to oral stories, or appreciate something else. But in modern tea houses, the tea is usually very fine and expensive, and there are some elaborated tea ceremonies. You appreciate both the performance and the tea itself.

Certainly, the so-called modern tea houses are not modern in Japan. In Japan, watching a Geisha performing the tea ceremony in a tea house is one of common social activities. Although similar tea ceremonies have been around in China since the very beginning of the tea drinking, the introduction of the Japanese tea style do help revive and popularize the tea ceremony in China.

Several months ago, I was entertained by a friend with this kind of tea ceremony. He learned this fancy stuff in China and brought a tea ceremony set here. The set consisted of a wood platform with sophisticate carves, a small dark brown porcelain tea pot, four tiny porcelain cups, and some other small gadgets which he was still unsure how to use them. The tea packed in a delicately embroiled tin was very expensive. After a brief introduction about these things, he almost fully stuffed the small pot with the fine tea leaves. He then slowly poured hot water into the pot, covered it and flipped it a couple times. In no time, the tea aroma filled the room. We all agreed that the tea was indeed really good. After a few more minutes to let the tea leaves be completed soaked, he lifted the pot and poured the tea through the dumping hole on the platform. He explained that the first course was merely to wash the tea leaves. Well, this made sense because the first course of the tea might be dirty (pollution? Dust?) and likely very strong, given so many leaves and so little water. Then he quickly poured hot water into the pot again. We waited impatiently. A couple minutes later, he proudly announced that the tea was ready. He carefully arranged the four cups in a row and dripped the tea into them in a rotating fashion. He educated us that this serving method was called “General Hanxin counts soldiers.” After this silly ritual, we finally picked up the cups. I took one sip, and “Hmmm,” I said. Well, my friend kindly stopped me from taking another sip. He instructed that I should not sip the tea like that. The right way to drink the tea was to look at the tea first, smell it, and then take a small sip. The tea should stay in the mouth for a while to fully stimulate the taste buds. Besides, I should take at least four sips to finish this small amount of tea. That was a little bit overwhelming and hypocritical, I protested.

Anyway, my friend served several courses of tea for us and performed some other tricks. We had a lot of fun that night. I learned that the whole ceremony was called “Gong-fu Cha.” It has been popular in the southern China for hundreds of years. I believe it has some connections with the old tea ceremony in Sung or Ming dynasties. Chinese tradition may be preserved in southern China quite well. Similar to the Japanese Teaism, the “Gong-fu Cha” may be related to Zen and Taoism too. Zen teaches us that we can understand our lives by appreciating small things.

However, there is something not very right in this kind of tea ceremony. It is true that the elaborated tea making steps are to raise the expectation for the tea itself, and the smell, color, and taste of the tea is fully appreciated during the ceremony. But these extra fancy rituals of making the tea push the art of tea drinking to a pathetic stage. Tea is a drink after all. If you pay too much attention to the ritualistic performance, the tea loses its meanings. In fact, the rituals prevent people fully appreciating the tea itself. The tea ceremony is in contrary to the fundamental Zen doctrine, that is, matter is the matter itself.

A real tea lover, I think, should make the tea in a simple way. You pick out some tea leaves, examine their color, shape, and texture, smell them, and maybe taste them even before drop them into the cup. After pouring water into the cup, you can see the leaves dancing merrily, opening up gradually, and floating or standing gracefully in the water. You can watch the water turning into green or red, feel and smell the tea fragrance rising from the cup, and appreciating this liquid jade. Then you taste it, one sip by another, and will enjoy it immensely.

Yes, I prefer not throwing away the first course of tea. I think the strong flavor is what the tea is supposed to have. Further, if there are any healthy ingredients in the tea, discarding the first course is certainly a big waste. Wise person never does that.

God acts with logos

Since his pontification, Pope Benedict XVI is diligently recasting his image from a rigorous traditional theologian to a flexible priest. During past few days, the Pope has expressed his regrets four times about a quotation in a talk he gave at the University of Regensburg on September 12.

The once obscure quote from a 14th century text is now read by a lot of people, religious or not. It says:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

To fully understand why the Pope quoted this paragraph, a responsible commentator must read the Pope’s original speech. This quotation is taken from a dialogue between a 14th century Byzantine emperor and his Persian guest. There the emperor made a point that violence is not what God likes. The Pope apparently shared this idea with him.

Things always go wrong when people take quotations out of context. Why did the Pope quote this paragraph but not others? There are numerous quotations which can illustrate the same point. Furthermore, when the Pope quoted this paragraph, did he endorse the view that Mohammed spread faith by violence?

Unfortunately, the Pope didn’t notice these subtle problems behind this quotation. He didn’t realize that this quotation can inflame the whole Islam world. For them, the Mohammed is a sacred name. No question should be raised against him in any form. Unfortunately, the Pope violated this rule. As a well learned scholar and a prestigious person, the Pope is not allowed to make this mistake. He should apologize to the Islam world.

However, leaving this mistake alone, the Pope did make some useful observations. This talk may have profound effects on modern religion thoughts if not tainted by his obnoxious quotation.

In the talk, the Pope tried to answer this question: “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”

The question the Pope posed is timely and legitimate. Every western people, religious or not, is puzzled by the rationality and motivation of Islamic jihad (holy war). Jihad is intrinsically violent. I think maybe because of this, the Pope quoted that terrible paragraph.

The Pope’s thesis was that God acts with logos. In Greek, logo means both reason and word. Thus John opened his Gospel with “in the beginning was the logos (in the Greek version).” Certainly, this is a play of words. But the implication is very interesting.

As the Pope pointed out, our Bible, translated from the Greek version, was an reconstruction from both Greek philosophy and Biblical teaching. Reasoning was embedded in the Biblical teaching from the very beginning.

Therefore, many people tried to take out the Greek influence in the Bible and reveal the true meaning of God’s words. This dehellenization has undergone three stages: the Reformation in the 16th century from which the fundamentalism derives; liberal theology in which the God of philosophers and the God of Abraham were separated; and the modern deculturation in which people believe the true meaning of God’s word should be separated from the Greek culture (and western culture in general) so that it can incorporate with other cultures.

The Pope disagreed with the idea of dehellenization. He reasoned that since the Bible had all the imprints of the Greek culture, it could live in harmony with other cultures as well.

During his speech, the Pope also made several interesting points on science and religion. He stated that if the science was defined as “the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements,” then humanity, including psychology, sociology, and philosophy, should not conform themselves to “scientificity.” He concluded that reason and faith could be integrated in a new way, “if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.” Human spirituality is an important subject and needs to be studied. Thus, theology is by itself a discipline, is parallel to science, and is an “inquiry into the rationality of faith.”

Only the power of reasoning, the Pope believed, should we use to embody other cultures. God acts with logos.

Disclaimer: not to repeat the Pope’s mistake, let me make it clear that I do not believe in any religion, and I don’t endorse any words in the Pope's quotation, nor are those said by the Pope.

The fall of the Atkins diet

A netter recently informed me that the Atkins diet was effective in losing his weight. In each of the two week sessions, he successfully lost more than ten pounds without feeling too much uncomfortable.

How could this happen? The Atkins diet has been criticized by all kinds of nutrition societies and has gone bankrupted after Dr. Atkins died. Market has proved that the Atkins diet is a failure. So the netter’s story puzzles me.

When we eat something, to some extent, we intake nutrients because human body (except for stomach and intestine) doesn’t care about the shape or texture of foods. All the body wants are nutrients, and cells work on these small molecules.

Human body needs macronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, and fat; and micronutrients: all sorts of vitamins, minerals, and other chemicals. In modern time, we can supply the body with quite a lot of micronutrients by taking pills, but we still have to gobble down a big chunk for macronutrients. Thus, most diet formula focus on the different combination of macronutrients.

The Atkins diet is a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet with a liberal fat intake. It assumes that a high intake of protein will satiate the body while providing enough body building nutrients. This is partially true, but not the whole story.

Dietary proteins, when digested and absorbed, are decomposed into different types of amino acids, and these acids are reconstructed in the body to build necessary proteins. Glucose, usually derived from dietary carbohydrate, is the main energy source for human body. Fat is a second important energy source but given an abundant supply of glucose in modern diet, fat only stores energy. Fat is also a critical component in maintaining cell structure.

If dietary carbohydrate intake is limited, human body may quickly deplete the glucose reserve (such as glycogens in the liver and muscles) and start to burn fat in muscle cells. On the other hand, glucose may be generated through gluconeogenesis in which proteins are converted to glucose. So low-carb high-protein diet may change the way human body utilizes the energy.

But the liver has limited capability to process proteins. The byproduct during this conversion, the urea, has to be excreted through kidney. So high protein diet may overwhelm the liver and kidney. Protein poisoning such as nausea, diarrhea, or even death, is possible for those high protein diets. For example, an arctic explorer, Stenfasson, once tried the protein only foods for a week and got seriously sick, although he did loose more than 10 pounds.

Speaking of high-protein low-carbohydrate diet, one cannot avoid examining the Inuit paradox. For a long time, these arctic living people only ate fat and meat with little vegetables. Apparently they survived and were not tremendously obese, and the prevalence of heart disease was not higher than that of modern western people. What was the secret behind their diet?

Although Dr. Atkins may not derive his diet from the Inuit diet, he did use the Inuit diet as the proof for his high protein high-fat diet. However, there are still substantial differences between the Atkins diet and the Inuit diet.

First is the fat content. People who adopted the Atkins diet consume a lot saturated fat and processed vegetable oil which has high concentration of trans fat, while fat in the original Inuit diet contains much unsaturated fat (e.g., fish meat). Inuit people also ate the fat in a relatively raw form which provides them essential nutrients such as vitamin C.

Second, modern people spend much less time in physical activity while the original Inuit people were basically hunter gathering tribe. Inuit people needed such a energy dense diet to support their heavy physical activity, while for modern people, the weight loss though the Atkins diet is essentially a disease-inducing process.

In a sense, Inuit people had adapted to the high protein high fat diet, while modern people are adapted to high carbohydrate diet. Try to switch diet style may work temporally, but only temporally. People cannot stay on the Atkins diet for too long. The myriad of side effects caused by the Atkins diet will teach dieters that the Atkins diet is not a good idea, which is proved by the market itself.

Dr. Atkins diet has been out of fashion, and now the south beach diet is coming, so do other exotic diets such as negative calorie diet. No matter what diet you are trying, you have to remember human body needs a balanced diet. Restricting your total energy intake may be better than consuming brand named weight losing bars.

Salt, love it and hate it

When I first dined in a US restaurant, I was a little bit puzzled by the two bottles on the table. It was kind of embarrassing to ask the waitress about them, but my wife and I quickly figured them out. They must be some sort of condiments. I tasted them. One is salt, and the other is pepper.

I saw a lot of people spread salt and pepper on their dishes, but to me, the US foods are already salty. Then I understood why there are so many research examining this salt issue. We need about 2 grams of salt per day, approximately one teaspoon. But regular folks like you and me are consuming 4-5 grams per day, more than double of the amount that USDA recommended.

In the US, from fast foods to homemade dishes, people just add too much salt. A simple McDonald’s hamburger, for example, can give you 530mg sodium, and a medium pack of French fries contains 220mg sodium. It is almost half of your daily allowance, and you just eat one moderate amount of foods. One big-Mac or a double hamburger with a large pack of French fries would easily cost you all sodium allowance.

Salt is not only a flavor but also a preserver. Cucumbers and cabbages can be salted and pepperized to make pickles and kimchi. Meat and fish can also be salted to create a unique salty flavor. All canned foods, vegetables and meat alike, are salted. In the grocery store, I can’t find a sausage or ham with sodium less than 15%. Even worse, regular fresh meat is also slightly salted to be better preserved. Among all kid’s junk foods, a sodium level of 20-23% is considered low salt. But you can still taste the salt in there. Everything, if you count cooking process, is salted.

Salt, chemically named as sodium chloride, is an essential macro-mineral. Sodium in our body can maintain cell electric potentials and sustain nerve activity. There are sodium-hydrogen pumps in almost all cells. Cells, from the very beginning, rely on sodium to survive.

So human, like all animals, craves for salt. If not making modern people worse, our human kidney tends to preserve sodium while excreting potassium, another essential electrolyte.

The most important health risk of high salt intake is high blood pressure. Clinical trials such as Trials of Hypertension Prevention (TOHP) and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH)-Sodium feeding study have clearly showed that reducing salt can lower blood pressure, even if the blood pressure is only slightly elevated (high normal blood pressure). They showed that a 40% of salt reduction in our daily diet is feasible and beneficial to health. But the problem, it seems to me, is that high salt intake is a diehard bad habit.

No example is better than one’s personal experience. I was born in the east coast of China where salt intake is relatively lower than those northern and western Chinese. My hometown cuisine is famous for its low salt taste and sweetness (yes, I know sweet is not good). When I visited my wife’s hometown, I complained about the salty taste of their foods. But when my mother-in-law visited me, she complained that I put too little salt in the dishes. However, after a week or so, she gradually changed her taste and appreciated my low salt dishes. The trouble is that she switched back to high salt diet right after she went back to her home.

I even conducted an experiment by myself. For more than two weeks in a row, I didn’t put any salt into soup. I have to admit that it was tasted too plain but was tolerable. I think I reduced at least half of my salt intake because I maintained and even reduced salt in other dishes as well. The experiment ended when my wife decided to add a little salt in the soup to improve its taste. Nevertheless, now all people visiting us agree that our dishes are not salty.

I also convinced my parents that too much salt is not good since my mother has high blood pressure. Now they don’t put salt into soup any more. Together with exercise and a simple drug at low dose, my mother’s blood pressure is under control. She seldom experiences headache or fuzzy mind.

Cutting salt intake is hard. You need to eat more fresh vegetables and cook low salt foods instead of buying a lot of canned foods and junk foods (those pre-processed foods, including fast foods, may account for 80% of total salt intake). But the living expense will certainly go up. And you have to spend more time in the kitchen. I know, a lot of people hate kitchen. That’s why Rachael Ray’s 30 minutes dish gets popular.

Speaking of Rachael Ray, her old cooking method should not be recommended in terms of salt intake. She used a lot of canned foods which have high salt content. She always spread some salt on her dish which is not a healthy habit either. Fortunately, Rachael listened to her critics. In her new 30 minutes series, she used more fresh foods and stopped spreading salt everywhere. Nevertheless, I like Rachael. She is a charismatic woman.

Salt is not a bad thing. We need salt. But we should also pay more attention to salt intake. Enough is enough. Don’t go too far. That’s it.

A cup of tea, please

5000 years ago when Sheng Nung randomly grabbed a tree leaf to cure his wound, he instantly realized that the leaf worked magic. The leaf was passed on and the drink became known as “cha.” When Lu Yu wrote the definite bible of cha, Cha Jin, in 780 AD, cha had trickled from upper class down to common folks, and soon traveled to Korea and Japan. Cha became a characteristic of the oriental culture.

Although there are different teas such as green tea, oolong tea, and black tea, only green tea has been hailed as healthy drink. It can prevent heart disease and cancer, relieve arthritis and improve general health. For example, a group of Japanese researchers examined the effect of green tea on mortality among 40,000 Ohsaki people. They measured tea consumption at baseline and followed them for about 11 years. They found that drinking more than 5 cups of green tea was associated with lower total mortality, and in particular, it was associated with lower cerebral infarction death (hemorrhage stroke).

Nobody knows why green tea is so great. It is generally believed that antioxidants and some exotic chemicals may be the cause. It’s God’s gift, some say.

The interesting thing is that oolong tea and black tea are not as healthy as green tea. This may be due to the different process in curing the tea leaves. Tea leaves are dried and wrinkled to make green tea, while oolong tea and black tea requires further baked leaves. The antioxidants may be lost during the baking process.

Green tea in China is well appreciated among intellectuals and the upper class. However, tea preference differs significantly across regions. People along the east coast around Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, prefer green tea, while people in the south coast around Fujian and Guangdong like dark oolong tea. For northern people, it seems to me they drink dark tea too, but the tea taste is not as strong as that of the southern tea.

In Japan and Korea, most people drink green tea. It is in Japan that tea drinking becomes a greatly elaborated ceremony (there are some kind of ceremony in China too). In Japan, one of the key skills a geisha must know is tea ceremony. Needless to say, watching a beautiful woman handling tiny tea pots and performing silly rituals is quite pleasing.

Although leaves in most types of tea look like wrinkled or self wrapped strips, when they are in hot water, tea leaves can have different shapes. For example, Longjing tea leaves will open up gracefully in the water and hang in the middle of the water, but not float on the top. One type of tea has leaves standing in the middle of the water like needles. In general, the more beautiful the leaves look in water, the better the tea is, so is claimed.

The most exotic tea I tried was the Mongolian tea brick. One of my college classmates brought a bulk of tea brick to school. In making the tea, he literally knocked one piece off the brick, threw it into the hot water, and then he added some sour milk he brought from home too (he said tea and milk can be boiled togther too.). The tea looked quite gross, and the taste was so strong that I almost vomited. But Mongols conquered half of the world by drinking this kind of tea.

A little bit googling told me that tea reached Europe around 1600s. The upper class in England, influenced by the tea-drinking king, started the fashion of drinking black tea. One of the main tasks for British explorers was to trade as many tea leaves as possible from India and China.

It is also of note that Coffee was introduced to Europe from Arab around similar time. Coffee first became popular in the European continent. When Brazil started cultivating coco trees from the seedlings stolen from France, coffee drinking became popular in the whole world.

Coffee contains more cocaine than regular green tea does. Cocaine is addictive. Many people can’t start a day without a cup of coffee. But I know some people start their days with a cup of tea too.

Coffee and tea, together with coco-cola and alcohol, have been off my food list for a long time. I only drink plain water, two bottles a day. I notice that sometimes I need to drink half a bottle of water to wake me up. Maybe I am addicted to water. What a life!

fast food nation

To me, it makes nonsense to eat hamburgers and French fries in a traditional restaurant. So last weekend I was amused to see several customers did just that in the Ruby Tuesday, a family restaurant chain. If they want to eat hamburgers, why don’t they go to fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s or Arby’s which are right across the hall? Are there any big differences between hamburgers made in the Ruby Tuesday and McDonald’s?

On the other hand, I was disturbed to find that in the kid’s menu, all that the Ruby Tuesday offers are hamburgers, chicken strips, and macaroni cheese, generously supplied with French fries. They are not different from those happy meals in fast food restaurants.

I was even more upset when my son came home announcing that he ate a hamburger or a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch these days. He commented that they were delicious. Kids are now flooded with high fat and high protein foods with little vegetables, unless you count French fries as vegetables.

It is clear that if American kids are trained to eat fast food style lunch in the school, they will grow up with a specialized taste for cheese and ground meat. It also makes perfect sense that people will sit in a traditional restaurant and enjoy hamburgers. In fact, nowadays, my son opts for toasted bread with cheese and ham for dinner, rather than rice and traditional Chinese dishes we spend hours cooking.

How could this happen?

American whites are mostly from northern or western Europe. For them, family meals mostly contains foods high in fat and protein, owing to the cold climate and their agriculture structure. In Scandinavia, for example, the fat contents in their foods used to be more than 50%. In addition, our human body craves for fat (thrift gene hypothesis), as it is the most efficient energy to store. It is not surprising that American foods during Benjamin Franklin time featured cheese and meat too.

Hamburgers were invented in Hamburg, Germany. It could be further traced to Mongols who traveled on horse back carrying meat under the saddle. The meat was grounded during riding and Mongol soldiers would eat them in raw without leaving the horse back. In Europe, the original hamburgers were grilled beef patties wrapped with bread. It was in the US that the beef patty was first inserted into two bread buns. In the 1950s, when highway system and booming industry sped up life pace in the US, ready foods such as hamburgers became fashionable. It was so convenient to grab a hamburger and go. They also provided enough energy for heavy labor work.

Generations of Americans were born in this environment. Hamburger style fast foods are de facto American foods, and many Americans are even proud of it. One extreme is the Atkins diet in which the fat and protein portion reaches a dangerous amount (later they also focused on low saturated fat). Just today, a netter informed me that he tried the Atkins diet twice and both worked pretty well. Probably the satiation feedback by the high intake of fat and protein can reduce overall energy intake. However, I remain skeptical about the effect of the Atkins diet, and am very cautious about its dangerous side effects. Luckily, the Atkins diet went bankrupt last year.

Now back to school lunch menu. It is well known that school lunch is not as healthy as most parents think, and my son’s experience proves it. Some of my colleagues are working furiously to get rid of fast foods in school lunch. However, they have achieved limited success. The high fat and high protein diet has been viewed as a typical lunch, and many people believe that it at least brings enough nutrients to kids. After all, kids are growing and they need more protein. The hamburgers are just fine.

At home, we work hard to entice my son to eat some vegetables. We cook Chinese foods every day and hope he would not forget about the taste of Chinese cuisine. We resolutely stay away from hamburgers or cheeseburgers whenever it is possible. A healthy lifestyle is very hard to build, and we will try our best.