SORA NEWS



 

The Shio Care system helps you draw a line to solve one of the biggest drawbacks to delicious instant ramen.

A Japanese doctor recently said it’s OK to eat ramen every day, which is something noodle fans would definitely like to believe. However, the physician’s permission came with a couple of conditions, one of which was about drinking the broth.

Since ramen noodles themselves don’t have much flavor, when you dig into a bowl most of what you’re tasting is the broth, which naturally leads to the temptation to drink every last drop. However, the broth is high in sodium, and so Japanese nutritionists regularly caution against consuming all of it when you indulge your ramen cravings.

But the question then becomes how much is OK to drink?

 

When restaurants or instant ramen makers give you nutritional information, they’re required to give you the numerical data for the whole bowl, so if you want to know how much sodium you’re avoiding by drinking some but not all of the broth, you’re going to need a calculator and some measuring cups to compute the answer yourself…but you can skip all that if you’re eating this brand of cup ramen.

When you peel the lid off Myojo Foods’ Umadashiya instant ramen, you’ll see two lines inside the bowl. The upper one marks where you’re supposed to pour the hot water up to in order to cook the ramen, just like you’ll find in other brands’ packaging. The bottom line, though, is the special one, since it shows how far you can drink the broth down to if you want to leave 150 milliliters (5.1 ounces) of it behind to cut down your sodium intake.
 

 

Meanwhile, on the outside of the cup you’ll find a special additional notice telling you approximately how many grams of sodium (食塩相当量) you’ll cut from the total listed nutrition facts chart if you leave that much broth undrunk.

Myojo is calling this the Shio Care (“Sodium Care”) package, and it’s employing it across the entire Umadashiya lineup, which includes not only ramen but instant udon and soba noodles too, starting in September.

It sounds like a great way to work some ramen into a healthy diet, and with Myojo being a subsidiary of instant ramen giant Nissin Foods, maybe we’ll see the Shio Care system adopted by Cup Noodles one day.