Udon Noodles: Are They Healthy? Nutrition, Carbs & Better Swaps

Dr. Josh Axe · Free quiz

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Udon are the thick, chewy wheat noodles of Japan, eaten hot in a savory broth or cold with a dipping sauce, and in Kagawa Prefecture, the old Sanuki province, a bowl of udon is usually the first meal visitors sit down to.6 The traditional recipe has three ingredients: wheat flour, salt and water.1 That simple dough makes a comforting bowl, but a serving is mostly carbohydrate, with little fiber or magnesium.12

Udon starts with wheat, a whole grain, but the flour in it is refined. In The Biblio Diet, the book I wrote with Jordan Rubin, pastas made from white wheat flour sit in the avoid column, and processed white flour is one of the book's Sinister Six, the six foods it asks you to avoid.3 So udon isn't a food I recommend for everyday eating; keep it an occasional meal.

The book's eat column is where I'd point you instead: buckwheat, plus pastas made from quinoa, rice, einkorn, spelt or khorasan wheat, and wheat only when it's sprouted.3 For a noodle bowl, that means 100% buckwheat soba, sprouted-grain noodles or whole-grain noodles. The sections below show how to build a better bowl when you do have it.

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What are udon noodles?

You'll find udon dried, frozen or precooked in shelf-stable packs. Dried udon can be as simple as the traditional recipe, while precooked and fresh packs add water and sometimes starches: one lists modified tapioca starch and tapioca starch, and another uses enriched wheat flour, egg whites, vinegar and cornstarch.87 The broth varies, too. One packaged udon soup base is built on dried bonito, mackerel, tuna and kombu (kelp), the fish-and-seaweed base of Japanese dashi.9

A short history of udon

Udon's best-known home is Kagawa Prefecture, which was called Sanuki province until 1871, so its noodles are known as Sanuki udon. Local legend credits the Buddhist priest Kukai (774–835), a Kagawa native who studied in China for two years, with bringing back the knowledge of how to make udon. The noodles of his time were short, flat bits of dough made from flour and salt water, boiled and served in a savory sauce. By the Edo period (1603–1867), noodles much like today's were being served to pilgrims on their way to the Kotohiragu Shrine, and every April 24 the people of Takinomiya still offer udon at their shrine in thanks to Kukai and the noodle makers who followed him.6

Are udon noodles healthy?

The Biblio Diet describes how milling stripped away the germ and the bran to produce a fine white flour.3 Here's what that means for a bowl of udon, from the wheat field to your bloodstream.

On my show, I've called sugar and refined grains the biggest culprit behind insulin resistance, and white pasta is one of the foods I named.15 Large studies of refined grains fit that concern. The PURE study followed 137,130 adults in 21 countries for a median of 9.5 years. Those who ate the most refined grains, 350 grams a day or more (about seven servings), had a 27% higher risk of dying during the study and a 33% higher risk of major cardiovascular events than those who ate less than 50 grams a day.16

What can you eat instead of udon?

The label shows the difference. Per 2-ounce (55- to 56-gram) dry serving, a 100% buckwheat noodle carries 6 grams of fiber and 7 grams of protein, a khorasan-wheat udon carries 3 grams of fiber and 10 grams of protein, and a traditional udon carries 1 gram of fiber and 5 grams of protein.17181

Read the label before you buy. Three soba products in USDA's branded-foods database list wheat flour first and buckwheat second,192021 so look for buckwheat flour as the only flour. "Whole wheat" udon can be a blend too: one organic version combines whole-wheat flour with sifted wheat flour.22 The Biblio Diet gives the rule that sorts these out: "Any flour ingredient without the word whole in front of it is at best 'unbleached flour,' which is essentially white but made so without using bleach."3

Sprouting changes the grain before it's milled. Heal Your Cells, which I wrote with Dr. Will Cole, explains that sprouting reduces phytic acid, a natural compound in grains that binds minerals, so more of their iron, zinc, calcium and magnesium becomes available to your body.23 Lab measurements show the size of the change: sprouting brown rice for 12 to 72 hours cut its phytic acid by 60%, and sorghum sprouted for four days lost up to 87%.24

You don't have to stay with noodles, either. When I talk about insulin resistance, I tell people to skip the white-flour products and refined pasta and choose higher-fiber carbohydrates: sweet potato, butternut squash, quinoa and whole-grain brown rice.15 Any of them makes a good base for the broth and toppings below.

Udon vs. soba, ramen and other noodles

Here's how udon compares with the noodles you're most likely to find beside it on the shelf.

Udon noodles nutrition facts

USDA FoodData Central has no generic record for udon, only branded product labels, so this table uses the closest generic record, cooked Japanese somen, a thinner wheat noodle (FDC ID 168909).2

A cup gives you energy, some protein and a little manganese, and not much else your body needs. Magnesium shows the gap most clearly: per 100 grams cooked, whole-grain noodles carry 54 milligrams of magnesium and 3.9 grams of fiber, against 2 milligrams of magnesium in the Japanese wheat noodle.282 Foods high in magnesium, such as leafy greens, pumpkin seeds and buckwheat, are an easy way to add more.

What better noodles and habits do for you, ranked by evidence

Ranked by evidence, choosing whole grains and buckwheat over refined noodles, and eating the starch last, is best for more fiber and the protection that comes with it, a healthier heart and a longer life, lower type 2 diabetes risk, smaller blood-sugar spikes, better blood sugar and cholesterol with buckwheat, and lower inflammation.

Do udon noodles spike your blood sugar?

What you pair with a starch matters. In a Japanese study of 58 adults, eating vinegar, dairy or bean foods along with white rice lowered its glycemic index by 20% to 40%, whether those foods came before, with or after the rice, and udon itself tested lower than white rice.34 As I put it in my protocols, "Never eat carbs 'naked': always pair with protein or fat."35

I made this change myself. After I stopped doing triathlons, I kept eating the same, which was quite a few carbs, and I started noticing I was getting a little tired in the afternoon. When I made the change to more moderate carbs, more protein and more fiber, it was like I had a steady energy curve throughout the day, and 2 or 3 in the afternoon was no different from 10 in the morning.36

Order matters, too, which is the reason to eat your protein and fiber before the carbs.36 In a small trial at Weill Cornell, 11 adults with type 2 diabetes ate the same 628-calorie meal twice, a week apart, so each person tried both orders. When they ate the ciabatta bread and orange juice first and the grilled chicken, salad and steamed broccoli 15 minutes later, their blood sugar reached 199.4 mg/dL at one hour. When they ate the chicken and vegetables first, it reached 125.6 mg/dL, about 37% lower, and their insulin at one hour was about half as high.14

The same thing held with a Japanese meal. In a 2025 study, 26 healthy Japanese adults ate a hospital set lunch of steamed rice, a main dish, a side dish, soup and dessert in different orders while wearing continuous glucose monitors (people knew which order they were eating). Their blood sugar peaked at 169.0 mg/dL when they ate the rice first and at 143.3 mg/dL when they ate everything else 15 minutes before the rice, on menus that changed daily but were matched in calories and in their balance of protein, fat and carbohydrate.5

A 2026 review of six studies in 107 healthy young adults found the same pattern, with most of the studies showing a smaller rise in blood sugar when vegetables, fruit or protein-rich foods came before the carbohydrate.37 Over the longer term, a 2022 review of meal-order trials in type 2 diabetes pooled the three trials that measured HbA1c, a roughly three-month blood-sugar average, in 147 people. Eating carbohydrates last lowered it by 0.21 percentage points more than eating them first or in no set order, a difference that wasn't statistically significant.38 At a noodle bowl, the order looks like this: the vegetables, egg or fish and some of the broth first, then the noodles.

A short walk afterward helps, too. In a study of 10 inactive adults age 60 and older whose fasting blood sugar ran between 105 and 125 mg/dL, three 15-minute walks after meals lowered average 24-hour blood sugar from 129 to 116 mg/dL compared with a day without walking, and the after-meal walks brought down blood sugar after dinner more than a single 45-minute walk did.39 My family and I like to take a walk after dinner sometimes, though we don't do it every night.40 There's an old Chinese proverb for the habit, too: 100 steps after meals and you'll live to 99.40

How do you build a healthier udon bowl?

When you do have udon, make the noodles the smallest part of the bowl. In my Insulin Resistance & Prediabetes protocol, the meal plan is built on 30 grams of protein at every meal, vegetables first, and whole carbs last and paired with protein.42 That's close to how the Japanese table has long treated its staple starch: as Heal Your Cells puts it, rice in Japanese longevity diets is traditionally eaten in smaller portions alongside fermented foods like miso, natto and pickled vegetables.23 Chinese medicine has long favored warm, cooked meals like soups and broths because they're gentle on digestion, so a broth bowl built mostly from vegetables and protein fits that tradition well.

For the broth, homemade chicken broth is hard to beat. On my show, I've said that chicken broth in particular might be the most beneficial, because along with collagen, it has glucosamine, chondroitin and hyaluronic acid.43 See bone broth benefits for more. For flavor, I'll finish dishes with cold-pressed flaxseed or toasted sesame oil, and toasted sesame suits a noodle bowl.44

Leave pork, shellfish and squid out of the bowl: no pork-bone (tonkotsu) broth, no braised pork (chashu), no shrimp or squid tempura and nothing colored with squid ink. Shellfish and squid don't have both fins and scales, the standard I follow from The Biblio Diet, so choose wild-caught fish with both instead, such as salmon, mackerel or bonito.3 Skip the deep-fried tempura toppings, too.

If you add beef, keep it fresh, unprocessed and grass-fed. The WHO's cancer agency classifies processed meat of every kind, processed beef included, as a Group 1 carcinogen, largely on colorectal cancer data, and rates red meat itself Group 2A, probably carcinogenic.45 As I've said on my show, when studies show red meat eaters tend to be less healthy, that's because most of the red meat people eat today is grain-fed, not the fresh, grass-fed red meat I recommend.46

When you buy packaged udon or broth, check these:

• The ingredient count. Traditional dried udon has three ingredients, and The Biblio Diet's guideline is to buy food with at most five.13

• The soup base. The fish-based soup base in one instant udon bowl lists shrimp,47 so choose a base made from fish with fins and scales, such as bonito, plus kombu. Free glutamate comes in other forms, too, such as yeast extract and hydrolyzed protein, which the label lists by those names rather than as MSG, so read the whole ingredient list.48 See MSG.

• The sodium. Read the sodium per serving on the broth or seasoning packet; the safety section below gives typical numbers.

Who should avoid udon?

Celiac disease is an immune reaction to gluten, the protein in wheat, barley and rye, and it ranges from severe malabsorption to no symptoms at all.50 In a 2026 analysis of studies covering 394,274 people, 1.5% had blood tests pointing to celiac disease and 0.8% had it confirmed by biopsy, and 41.4% of the confirmed cases had no symptoms.51 If you have it, buy only noodles labeled gluten-free. Under FDA rules, that label means the food has less than 20 parts per million of gluten and no gluten-containing grain unless it was processed to remove the gluten.52 Einkorn, spelt, khorasan wheat and sprouted wheat all contain gluten, so they aren't safe with celiac disease, and soba blends made with wheat flour aren't either. 100% buckwheat soba and rice noodles labeled gluten-free are the ones to choose. See gluten-free grains for more options.

Sodium is the other thing to watch. I'm not against salt; unrefined sea salt on real food is a good thing.53 In an udon bowl, the salt to watch is the hidden kind in packaged broth and noodles, measured against a Daily Value of less than 2,300 milligrams for the whole day.54 That fits a bigger pattern: more than 70% of the sodium Americans eat comes from packaged and prepared foods rather than the salt shaker.54

Homemade stock starts lower, and you season it yourself. See foods high in sodium.

The bottom line

Udon noodles: frequently asked questions

References

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Dr. Josh Axe, DC, DNM, CNS

Doctor of Natural Medicine · Founder, DrAxe.com

Dr. Axe is a certified doctor of natural medicine, clinical nutritionist, and multiple New York Times bestselling author. He has spent 20+ years in clinical practice helping people heal at the root cause and founded one of the most-visited natural-health platforms in the world.

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