Top Ramen Is Changing Its Recipe to Be Healthier

Few foods are as synonymous with a cheap meal as Top Ramen. The colorful rectangular packs that often sell four for a dollar regularly get joked about as a college staple. But Nissin Foods, the people behind Top Ramen and the original inventor of instant noodles back in 1958, wants customers to know that just because Top Ramen is inexpensive doesn't mean the company doesn't care about its ingredients—so Nissan is making some hopefully beneficial tweaks to the brand similar to what it did with Cup Noodles last year. Yes, college kids are about to get a bit healthier—or at least as healthy as one can be surviving off Top Ramen.

Today—which also happens to be National Noodle Day—Nissin Foods has announced what it calls a "significant update" to the recipe behind its Top Ramen brand, "all while maintaining the essential noodle goodness and the taste integrity of each beloved flavor." The company has cut sodium by an average of 15 percent across all varieties, removed all artificial flavors and removed added MSG (though Nissin does include the reminder that Top Ramen still "contains small amounts of naturally occurring glutamates"). While the negative health ramifications of artificial flavors and MSG might still debatable, the science is pretty solid that too much salt is bad for your health, and seeing as Top Ramen is a notoriously salty meal, sodium certainly seems like an area where Nissin had room to cut back.

Beyond the recipe change, Nissin has also announced that it's freshening up Top Ramen's iconic packaging. Don't worry, the colors aren't going anywhere. If anything, they're brighter than before. And the color coding system isn't changing either: Shrimp is still pink, and Oriental is still blue – though now it's called "Soy Sauce." A new logo also helps emphasize the two vegetarian flavors: Soy Sauce and Chili.

Now, if the taste stays relatively the same, none of these changes are really life altering. However, if you had been hoping for a more natural Top Ramen, these tweaks should help give you some piece of mind at a very affordable price.