Celebrity dietitian and motivational life coach Tanya Zuckerbrot, author of www.ffactordiet.com and founder of www.skinnyandthecity.com, has helped thousands of people lose weight and keep it off with her program. Her philosophy? Tanya believes you should never sacrifice taste, even when you're eating healthy foods. Have a recipe in need of rehab? Click here to submit!

Recipe may vary from photograph. Photo: Alamy

As the weather turns cooler and life gets more hectic with the kids back at school, it is easy and relatively economical to order Chinese takeout for the family. But, take a look at a menu, and you are overwhelmed with options, most of which are bursting with sodium and saturated fat. Even an option which sounds healthy is typically battered with brown sauce -- which can add 500 calories and 4,000 milligrams of sodium to the dish! Many Chinese restaurants will offer "diet-friendly" choices consisting of steamed vegetables with a protein and the sauce on the side. Read: No flavor.

My sweet and sour chicken recipe will give you the Chinese flavor you love without the excess fat and calories. A typical portion can cost you up to 600 calories, 15 grams of fat and 350 milligrams of sodium and is devoid of nutritional value, except for protein from the chicken. By adding broccoli and red pepper to the dish, I am able to boost the vitamin/nutrient content, including vitamin C. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that can fight off free radicals and even help your immune system during the winter months. Although the evidence suggests it cannot prevent a cold, having 500-1,000 milligrams a day of vitamin C can help reduce the severity of cold symptoms. Serve this dish with brown rice, instead of white, to add more fiber, and you've got a delicious meal the whole family can enjoy.

As we've mentioned many times before here on That's Fit, most Chinese take-out menu items can be a disaster to your diet. Many are high in sugar and sodium, while some also contain a great deal of unhealthy fat. But could there possibly be something else in Chinese food that causes weight gain? There is indeed, say researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it may be something you were aware of.

Monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer frequently used in Asian cuisine, can cause you to gain weight, new research published in the journal Obesity suggests. Rural Chinese men and women who consumed the most MSG were more than twice as likely to be overweight than their peers who didn't use the additive.

In the past, no definitive connection between MSG and weight gain in humans could be made, primarily because it was considered to difficult to measure the intake of the additive from processed foods. However, the UNC research team devised a method of analyzing certain data, which for the first time provided a clearer picture on the possible MSG/weight gain link. To read more about their findings, click here.

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Let's say you head out to a restaurant for lunch with your co-workers. Depending on the situation, you might not have a say in what restaurant you end up going to. And you don't really have a say in how the restaurants prepare the food. In fact, the only thing you do have control over is A) What you order, and B) how much of it you eat.

So let's say you end up going to a Asian restaurant like P.F. Chang's. Chinese food is notorious for being high in calories, sodium, carbs and fat, but surely there must be some healthy options. You browse the menu and come across one dish that that sticks out as healthy: The Citrus Soy Salmon Lunch Bowl. Heck, they even let you choose whether you want it with brown or white rice! So let's analyze this choice. Salmon is healthy. Citrus is healthy. Brown rice is healthy. Soy is high in sodium but low in calories and fat. Overall, for a restaurant meal, it sounds pretty good, right?

You tell me ...

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I hardly ever order dessert when I eat out, so on the rare occasion that I dine at a Chinese restaurant, I look forward to the inevitable coming of the fortune cookie -- I like to finish off the meal with something light but sweet. Plus, I love cracking it open to find my fortune. I carry the good ones around with me in my wallet.

But withe the consistency of sweet cardboard, fortune cookies are obviously highly processed and therefore devoid of much nutritional value. I couldn't help wonder, then, if they're more than just not good for you, but downright bad for you. What do you think? How many calories are in a fortune cookie?

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Chinese health officials, in a striking statement all things considered, told Chinese consumers this past week that they need to take more personal responsibility in preventing themselves from eating tainted food.

Well, that's nice. Tainted food should never find its way to a store shelf unless I am mistaken. Now, the responsibility of a normal adult to know what they're eating by reading food labels sounds fair enough, and it was another suggestion from Chinese authorities.

But then again, those same authorities suggested for Chinese consumers not to buy obviously shoddy or expired products. I guess there is very little quality control in that country when it comes to food safety, eh?

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Go to any town in North America and you're sure to find a Chinese restaurant with the same offerings: Stir-frys, fried rice, fried noodles, spring rolls ... the list goes on and on, and pretty much everything is battered, deep fried and loaded with salt. This is a far cry from traditional Chinese food, which is full of healthy stuff like veggies and tofu, but the unhealthy stuff is still wildly popular in the States and beyond.

Chinese food had been getting a lot of bad press as of late, and I think it's great to bring people's attention to the fact that a single dish usually has twice your daily recommended serving of sodium and fat.

So what can you do if you find yourself out at your local Chinese joint? According to this, order veggie and shrimp dishes, opt for things that are steamed, and choose stir-fried over deep-fried.

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Are you a fan of eating Chinese food? I was a huge fan until a few years ago when I started investigating all the sugary coatings used on many of those tasty dishes along with the huge amount of sodium found in many dishes on the standard Chinese restaurant menu. Of course, there were so many levels of things off the chart that I can to cut down on eating "most" Chinese food completely, unless I prepared it myself.

There are many kinds of Chinese foods that are excellent; watercress, green soybeans, snow peas, pepper chicken, brown rice (not fried) and others -- all without all that added sugar and salt. But then again, many Chinese restaurants seem to have cratered to catering to the salt-hungry American, as a new study shows.

A consumer group study has found that a typical Chinese restaurant menu is filled with nutritional no-nos. For example, a plate of General Tso's chicken contains about 40% more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day. The battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables has 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat.

Yes, that woke me up on most Chinese food dishes. How about you?

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I admit it -- I have a secret love for Chinese food. Put a plate those deep fried dumplings in front of me and all my healthy eating principles go out the window faster than you can say "kung pao." Luckily I have enough will power to avoid Chinese restaurants except on a few rare occasions.

Today I cam across this quiz, which tests knowledge on the nutritional (or non-nutritional) facts of Chinese food. Try it out -- I got a 7 out of 10 and was happy to find that one of my favorite dishes -- hot and sour soup -- is one of the healthier dishes at a Chinese restaurant.

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