Kim Min-koo has an easy reply to new American research that hits South Korea where it hurts in the noodles. “There’s no way any study is going to stop me from eating this,” says Kim, his red face beaded with sweat as he adds hot water to his noodles in a Seoul convenience store. “This is the best moment the first bite,” Kim, a freelance film editor who indulges about five times a week, says between gulps. “The taste, the smell, the chewiness it’s just perfect.”
Instant noodles carry a broke college student aura in America, but they are an essential, even passionate, part of life for many in South Korea and across Asia. Hence the emotional heartburn caused by a Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital study in the United States that linked instant noodles consumption by South Koreans to some risks for heart disease.
Anything but quittingThe study has provoked feelings of wounded pride, mild guilt, stubborn resistance, even nationalism among South Koreans, who eat more instant noodles per capita than anyone in the world. Many of those interviewed vowed, like Kim, not to quit. Other noodle lovers offered up techniques they swore kept them healthy- taking Omega-3, adding vegetables, using less seasoning, avoiding the soup. Some dismissed the study because the hospital involved is based in cheeseburger-gobbling America.
Elderly South Koreans often feel deep nostalgia for instant noodles, which entered the local market in the 1960s as the country began clawing its way out of the poverty and destruction of the Korean War into what’s now Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.
Some people won’t leave the country without them, worried they’ll have to eat inferior noodles abroad. The U.S. study was based on South Korean surveys from 2007—2009 of more than 10,700 adults aged 19—64, about half of them women. It found that people who ate a diet rich in meat, soda and fried and fast foods, including instant noodles, were associated with an increase in abdominal obesity and LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol. The study raises important questions, but can’t prove that instant noodles are to blame rather than the overall diets of people who eat lots of them, cautions Alice Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition lab at Tufts University in Boston.
