Bok Choy for Weight Loss and 3 Key Nutritional Benefits

Bok choy is one of the most popular vegetables to cook with throughout Asia, yet still not widely used in America.

Very low in calories, yet high in many beneficial nutrients, bok choy is excellent for weight loss and a green superfood well worth using more of in your daily cooking.

What Is Bok Choy?

Originally from China where it has been cultivated for centuries, bok choy is now grown for the US market, predominantly in California and Alberta in Canada.

While it is a member of the cabbage family, it doesn’t really look like one. The shape is closer to a celery, with thick white stalks and dark green rounded leaves.

You may also find bok choy referred to as pak choy, choy sum, bak choi, paak choi, Chinese mustard cabbage and Chinese chard cabbage.

What Does It Taste Like?

Bok choy has a much lighter taste than regular cabbage and a better texture for cooking with as well. I use it regularly in healthy stir fries and occasionally in soups and salads as well.

On its own the flavor has been described as a cross between cabbage and iceberg lettuce, with a slight mustard tang to it (though only the most delicate of taste buds would find it particularly strong).

In recipes, it will tend to take on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with. This, along with all the beneficial effects and nutritional properties mentioned ahead, make choy sum a great low-calorie base for many meals.

3 Bok Choy Nutritional Benefits

1. Very Low in Calories and Carbs

1 cup of chopped pak choy (around 170 grams) has just 20 calories and only 3 grams of carbohydrates.

This is so low it is considered in the negative calorie category of foods, whereby your body actually uses up more calories digesting it than are in the food itself. It also has a glycemic load of 1 (as low as you can get).

Bok choy is clearly a great vegetable for weight loss and just eating it has a natural thermogenic effect.

2. Rich in Antioxidant Carotenoids

Most nutritional information for bok choy will tell you that it’s very high in vitamin A. This isn’t strictly true.

What it is really high in is antioxidant carotenoids like beta-carotene that can be converted into vitamin A if needed.

If you have enough vitamin A in your diet from sources like organic eggs, or cod liver oil (which is also high in complementary vitamin D), then you won’t convert these carotenoids.

They will remain in their current form, circulating in your body to extinguish free radicals and prevent them from damaging cells. This is a role that is more beneficial to anyone that isn’t already low on vitamin A.

That said, pak choy is a good source of potential vitamin A for vegans and vegetarians. Ideally have it in meals with healthy fats to aid in beta-carotene absorption.

This green superfood is also a good way to obtain two other valuable carotenoids — lutein and zeaxanthin.

These nutrients are particularly good for protecting your eyes from damaging UV and high-intensity blue light. Having enough of them in your diet can help protect your vision now and lessen your chances of developing age-related macular degeneration and cataracts later in life.

3. High in Vitamins and Minerals

Vitamin C is another antioxidant found in this high nutrition vegetable. A cup of chopped pak choy leaves contain around 45 mg or 75% of the recommended daily allowance.

Unfortunately vitamin C is easily depleted by heat, usually over 160 degrees Fahrenheit or 70 degrees Celsius. For this reason it’s best to add bok choy at the later stages to stir fries and other meals.

It is also much better to steam these greens in a steamer that protects the nutrients than boil them, where much of the nutritional value is leached into the boiling water.

Another even healthier option is to juice or blend it. Having bok choy in a green juice or smoothie is a simple and delicious way to get all of its nutrition in a highly absorbable form.

Other vitamins in pak choy include significant levels of vitamin K and a variety of B vitamins, especially folate. Vitamin K is essential for proper calcium metabolism and preventing inflammation disorders.

B vitamins are needed for proper digestion, energy production, a well functioning brain and nervous system and reducing stress, healthy skin and hair and a variety of other important functions within your body.

Alongside all the antioxidants and vitamins, this vegetable provides a good spectrum of minerals. Calcium, iron, potassium and selenium are most often measured as the predominant ones in terms of RDA, but the smaller amounts of other minerals are also important.

Better Than Multivitamins

I hope this page has provided enough reasons to include more of this high nutrition superfood into your daily diet.

Despite having next to no calories, pak choy has many benefits and is an excellent way to get a variety of vitamins, minerals and protective antioxidants into your diet.

Being natural, rather than synthetic, these nutrients are much more easily absorbed by your body than lab-engineered multivitamins.

I’d appreciate reading your comments if you have cooked with bok choy before and enjoy eating it. Next up I’ll be covering in detail the best ways to use pak choy in your meals.