Are you on diet? But now you can enjoy Korean food without any worries.
A research team announced on March 28 that Korean food helps people not gain weight as its actual absorption of calories is about 10 percent lower than meat-oriented Western food of the same calories.
The team of the state-funded Korea Food Research Institute has experimented on rats with 28 favorite dishes of Koreans to measure calorie intake for the first time since June last year.
Traditionally, food is translated into calories by multiplying the amount and a given coefficient(cal) of each ingredient of the food per gram, such as protein and carbohydrate.
“If the traditional method is correct, obesity rate of Koreans should be high but the rate is significantly low compared to Westerners,” a researcher said. “This is because the method does not counted calorie-consumption in interaction among ingredients in the body.”
In the experiment, researchers have found that bibimbap or rice topped with seasoned vegetables and boiled unpolished rice had calories 10 percent less than the energy measured in conventional method. For example, the energy of bibimbap in the new test was 523.9 Kcal, down 13.6 percent from the 599.4 Kcal calculated in the conventional method. This means the actual intake of energy is 450 Kcal when you eat bibimbap with 500 Kcal.
In contrast, the calories of fried chicken and coke in the new method was 1,385.6 Kcal, 10.4 percent larger than the 1,255 Kcal measured in the traditional method.
Scientists presume that Koreans has absorbed low calories due to a variety of ingredients and its rich fiber which reduces absorption of calories from carbohydrate and fat. On the other hand, Western food generates calories about 10 percent more than measured in the conventional method as it has high carbohydrate and fat without fibers, according to the researchers.
“This outcome proves that Korean dishes are low-calorie health food compared to Western one in a metabolic aspect,” said senior researcher Kim Eun-mi of the institute.