Eating Healthy In Thailand: 4 Dishes To Live By

Thailand is a country with a very wide cuisine, and even though much of it is made from fresh ingredients, it can be quite taxing on the stomach if you are not careful, thanks to the spices, strange meats and unknown recipes. However, if you know how to make some of the following dishes at home, it is really easy to eat healthy in Thailand because of the availability of fresh meat, vegetables, fruits and everything else that you could possibly need via an online supermarket Thailand such as Villa Market. Fresh, raw food items and all types of cooking ingredients can be delivered to every part of Thailand, so you can cook healthy meals no matter where you are.

Seafood Salad, or Yum Talay

The yum talay or seafood salad is as tasty and as healthy as it sounds, unless you are allergic to seafood; in that case, you may need to be very careful in Thailand, given that most dishes here contain seafood of some sort. For the rest of us, the combination of shrimp, mussels, scallops, crab, squid, fish, green veggies, tomatoes and onions is about as healthy and as tasty as a seafood salad can possibly get.

Stir-Fried Water Spinach, or Pad Pak Bung Fai Daeng

Water spinach is actually called morning glory in this part of the world and it is the chief source of your healthy nutrients in the pad pak bung fai daeng. It’s a tasty and healthy combination of Chinese morning glory and chicken broth, made a bit spicy with chilies and garlics. Given how easy it is to find the ingredients and make pad pak bung fai daeng, a lot of Thai expats consider it to be one of their go to healthy dishes.

Chicken – Rice, or Khao Man Gai

It doesn’t get simpler than chicken and rice when it comes to finding a combination that’s healthy, tasty and provides all the energy we need to go through our days. A supreme combination of easy to digest protein and carbs, Khao Man Gai is also cheap to order at a restaurant and even cheaper to cook at home by buying the raw materials from an online supermarket. If you are cooking at home, do throw in a few cashew nuts and veggies to make it even healthier and tastier.

Papaya Salad, or Som Tam

A healthy food list needs to have a few salads on it, so here’s the second salad that you can make at home in Thailand, or just order at the diner. Depending on who is cooking it and what is available at that moment, som tam can have an astounding number of ingredients in it. This may include, but isn’t limited to, long beans, cherry tomatoes, chilies, lettuce, green beans and of course, raw papaya. Other than the vegetables, som tam will also have palm sugar, fish sauce, roasted peanuts, garlic, lime juice, and the list goes on!

Honorable mentions that didn’t make it onto the list are yum ma-muang (green mango salad), tom yum goong (hot and sour shrimp soup) and the optionally vegan Kaeng liang (vegetable soup). As mentioned earlier, Thailand does have a fresh supply of raw food that is nothing short of incredible, but if you are an expat who isn’t used to the local cuisine, it’s just better to stick to simpler recipes like the ones we just discussed.