Eating out healthily
I was just reading in my local newspaper The Pantagraph, this article which ran the middle of May. It asks are we getting too much information about the food we order when we eat out? New laws and regulations are coming about the require restaurants to publish nutritional facts about the food they serve. These nutritional facts range from simple calorie counts which are misleading to drawn out tables about number of not only calories, but also sodium, carbs, and fat and cholesterol. While the fact is that the more information the restaurant provides to the consumer the easier it is to make healthy choices, the more detailed information often ends up becoming more confusing thus potentially causing someone to say I don’t have time for all this, just give me the Big Mac that I always get. That Big Mac has 540 calories, 29 grams of fat (which is 45% of your recommended daily intake for fat),75 mg cholesterol (which is 25% of your daily recommended daily intake) and 1040 mg of sodium (which is 43% of your daily recommended daily intake). Ok, I admit all these numbers can be daunting, but to me they are like a big Wow put right in my face. By having this one big mac I’ve had almost half of my fat and cholesterol for the day? Wait just a minute here, I only have one sandwich at one meal here? I haven’t even had a drink to wash this sandwich down and who can go to McDonald’s and not have french fries with their Big Mac. But you’ll notice that the sandwich only has 540 calories which ok, in and of itself we can work around in a typical 2000 calorie diet. But everything these days has fat and cholesterol added to it. Now let’s add a large french fries to our sandwich. Our large fries have 500 calories, 25 grams of fat (38% of daily intake), and 350 mg of sodium (15% of daily intake). I’m more than shocked to learn that they don’t have any cholesterol. So we haven’t had to add any cholesterol, but did you notice the fat of the french fries? Between the Big Mac and French fries we have consumed 83% of our fat for the day. That only leaves us 17% of our fat to have with the remaining almost 1000 calories we still need to consume today to keep our metabolism up.
Instead of publishing all these nutrition facts which I do appreciate, but I also wish that restaurants could take some time to do research on ways they can reduce such things as sodium in their food products. Like for example how much can we cut without sacrificing taste? My bet and guess would be that at least some sodium or cholesterol could be cut. If a restaurant was able to have a research lab I bet they could cut up to 500 mg of sodium. I mean do we really need that much sodium or is it just easier and cheaper to put those pickles loaded with sodium on the burgers rather than finding a healthier alternative. I know I take my pickles of my sandwiches, but the juice from the pickles has still gotten on my food thus adding sodium I don’t need. How about making the pickles a choice that people can ask for? I know the pickles aren’t the only culprits of the sodium, but they are an easy example I can give. I just feel that there are probably simple swaps of ingredients or recipe adjustments that restaurants could make to let us have the same taste at a healthier ratio.
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