STI: Dial a diet

Sep 27, 2004

Dial a diet
by Teo Pau Lin

Meals follow heart-friendly diets

Magic Meal Mobile
Delivers: All-day meals that follow the South Beach, Zone and Ornish diets, at $35 a day
Contact: 9145-6660 or www.magicmealmobile.com

WITH lipsmacking aplomb, this month-old operator proves that eating healthy doesn't mean nibbling like a rabbit.

It delivers daily meals that follow the South Beach, Zone and Ornish diets. But its menu is so deliciously inventive, you'd forget it's actually skinny food.

While the diets were created by American cardiologists primarily to help people with heart problems, founder Jonathan Chan says customers will probably take it up more for its side-effect - weight loss.

In the South Beach diet, you eat all the 'good' carbohydrates and fats (leafy vegetables, brown rice and extra virgin olive oil) but exclude the 'bad' ones (white rice, bread and butter).

The Zone diet helps to keep your insulin levels within an optimal range by moderating your hormonal balance. It stresses eating meals that contain 40-30-30 per cent proportion of carbohydrates, fats and proteins respectively.

The Ornish diet, which caters more to heart patients, emphasises meals that are strictly vegetarian and very low in fat, such as green salads and pasta with white bean and sun-dried tomato sauce.

Mr Chan, 29, started the business after his father's heart bypass surgery early this year woke him up to the importance of healthy eating.

Faced with a dearth of healthy restaurants here, the former venture capitalist began reading up on healthy diets and cooking for himself and his father.

'These three diets are the only ones I know that are heart-friendly. And if they worked for me, they'll probably work for other people too,' says the 56kg, 1.75m tall entrepreneur.

So far, almost all his customers have reported losing weight after going on the programme for a week, he says.

I tried the South Beach diet for three days and lost 1kg.

The food is delicious. Every morning, a cooler bag arrives carrying five meals (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and dessert) you are to eat for the day.

For example, you get smoked salmon omelette for breakfast, tuna salad with arrabiata salsa for lunch, portobello mushroom with herbs for afternoon snack, beef tenderloin for dinner, and peach and strawberry yogurt for dessert. All are amply portioned and bursting with flavour.

Mr Chan, who works with a Ritz-Carlton hotel trained chef in his industrial kitchen in Woodlands, uses chilled beef, local vegetables for their freshness, and, as far as possible, organic produce.

For now, the service is available only in districts 9, 10 and 11, and deliveries can also be made during lunch-time in the CBD area.

While he is working towards offering it to more areas, his catering service is ready islandwide. He also plans to open a restaurant and cooking school in Bukit Timah by December.

No msg is used and no item is deep-fried

Nature Vegetarian Health Food
Delivers: Vegetarian dinners at $180 for 20 days for two people
Contact: 6897-7370 or www.natureveg.com

THIS vegetarian caterer has seen business shoot up by 20 per cent over the past two months, especially during the bird flu scare.

Owner Edmund Toh, 36, says: 'It's good to eat vegetarian. No matter what the food scare is, you're not worried.'

He started the business four years ago and was one of the first caterers to go the healthy, vegetarian way.

'I had trouble finding one, so I started one myself,' says Mr Toh, a vegetarian.

His dishes contain no MSG and are low in salt and oil. No item is deep-fried.

He says that his set-up is now the largest here, and offers tempting tingkat dinners (metal meal-boxes) for individual diners.

Meals are mostly Chinese or Thai-style, including mock chicken with dry chilli, mock sweet and sour pork and braised beancurd.

His two chefs whip up the dishes in an industrial kitchen in Tuas. Four delivery vans drop them off to customers all over the island.

Only 30 per cent of his clientele are vegetarians.

'The rest order vegetarian occasionally to keep healthy,' he says.

'With all these food scares going on, more people are becoming aware of the need to eat healthy.'

Prices six times as high but some are biting

SkyOrganic
Delivers: Over 40 types of organic vegetables and 1,400 organic products
Contact: 6288-3326 or www.skyorganic.com

ORGANIC food is no longer hard to find. Call or order online and you get it at your doorstep.

SkyOrganic offers over 40 types of organic vegetables and 1,400 organic products from rice to pasta sauces and salad dressing.

Organic foods are grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers or chemical additives.

Owner Tommy Soon, 45, says the organic business here is still in its infancy.

Singaporeans are not willing to pay its high prices, which can be six times as much as non-organic equivalents, he adds. For example, organic beansprouts cost $3 per kg while non-organic ones cost only 60 cents per kg.

He has 600 customers, 80 per cent of whom are cancer patients.

The rest are the 'wealthier' and more health-conscious set, he says.

His vegetables are mainly grown on his farms in Indonesia and Malaysia, and he imports other products from Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

He has two vans which deliver the goods to customers islandwide.

The company was founded in 2000, but it was only in the past two years that he has managed to break even.

Mr Soon, whose main business is in metal scrapping, started the service after seeing many friends succumb to cancer.

'There's meaning in helping sick people get well. You can't make a lot of money in this business,' he says.