Here are some tips for choosing well when you’re craving this Japanese specialty:
- Rather than a house salad, ask for a seaweed salad with the dressing on the side. House salads tend to be iceberg lettuce with a high-calorie dressing. Consider them off limits.
- Edamame makes a great low-calorie, high-protein appetizer. Make sure you ask for them to be lightly salted or with no salt, since they usually come heavily salted.
- Choose sashimi over sushi. Sashimi is just the fish -- no rice -- and that means you’ll get all the good protein without the carbohydrate load.
- If you like spicy, ask for wasabi. In Asian cuisine, spicy usually means Asian chili sauce with high-calorie mayonnaise. If you like the heat, ask for extra wasabi or chili sauce on the side.
- The California roll is one of the healthiest choices you can make. Eight pieces have about 300 calories and are both nutritious and filling.
- Limit or avoid soy sauce. A tablespoon of soy sauce has 1,000 mg of sodium. That's way more salt than any of us need in one sitting. Plus, without the overpowering soy, you might discover flavor you didn’t know was there in sushi or sashimi.