How to Cook Healthy Food For Kids : Make Deconstructed Vietnamese Bunless Bahn Mi

Where's the Bun?

America has an addiction to wheat.  That's probably because wheat is so commonly found in so many of the foods we consume on a daily basis.  If you have or know someone who has celiac disease, you know how prevalent wheat is in the American food supply.  Wheat is found in grain products like flour, cereal, pasta, and bread.  But it is also found in surprising places like soy sauce and Twizzlers.

Books like Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health and Grain Brain: The surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar--your brain's silent killers argue that wheat is not only harmful to those with celiac disease, but to everyone in general.  These books argue that as wheat has evolved, humans have developed a wheat intolerance, resulting in problems from attention deficit disorder, to joint inflammation, to dementia.

At the core of the wheat problem is the high glycemic index of wheat combined with the high prevalence of wheat in the American diet.  The result of this combination is that wheat is a significant contributor to the glycemic load in the American diet.  To read more about the health implications of a high glycemic load diet, see my previous post:
http://doctorchrisko.blogspot.com/2013/08/cooking-for-your-kids-carbs-gone-bad.html

One of the most common sources of wheat in the American diet is bread.  In my previous post, I explained that all types of wheat bread--white, brown, whole, and 100% wheat are all harmful because they are all derived from a fine flour that is high in glycemic index.

Sandwiches are amongst the most common sources of bread in the American diet.  Rather than get your kids used to eating sandwiches, why not get them used to eating the goodness that lies between the two slices of bread?  Hans and Franz show you how easy it is to go bunless by making this deconstructed bunless Bahn Mi:

I based the bunless Bahn Mi loosely off of the following recipe for a traditional Bahn Mi sandwich:
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/grilled-pork-banh-mi

References

Davis, William.  2011.  Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, Dr. Davis

Perlmutter, David, and Kristin Loberg. 2013. Grain brain: the surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar--your brain's silent killers