A journey into the world of "real food" with Seattle-based journalist Rebecca Morris
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Question of the Week: What's A Customer To Think?
We're speaking of the misleading nutritional claims that popular restaurant chains, including Chili's, Taco Bell, Cheesecake Factory and Applebee's, list on their menus. As reporter Isaac Wolf of the Scripps Howard News Service wrote (his story was published in many papers, including the Seattle P-I on May 22), the food at many restaurants contains more calories and more grams of fat than the menus state. Scripps had food tested in eight cities; many dishes were found to have several times as many calories and fat as the restaurants claimed. Here's another interesting point: many of the restaurants did a mea culpa, blaming oversized portions. Can't they coordinate the nutritional information to the portion size? New York, San Francisco and Seattle have policies requiring a menu item be counted as one serving. Do you rely on nutritional information provided by restaurants?
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2 comments:
I read that article about how menu information was off by sometimes 4 times the amount of calories and fat listed by the restaurant, and some of these items were touted as their "healthy" choices.
One thing to consider: even if restaurants post their ingredients and map it appropriately to serving size, you may still run into a problem. In order to cut fat and calories, what do you think will be done? And how satisfying will the food be after it has been "transformed?"
The book, "Intuitive Eating" helped me understand this beyond the science of eating (numbers, fat grams, sugars and carbs, etc). It explains that people will end up eating MORE of something that they really want, until they reach a point of satiation that is not necessarily correlated to how full their stomach actually registers. So for example, if you really wanted some potato chips (fat, salt), but you told yourself, "I'm going to eat these 7 small baby carrot sticks, because they are crunchy", you may eat the baby carrots, but you may also down an entire bag of potato chips later, and eat much more than you originally wanted.
My point: even if restaurants show us the contents of their foods (and I definitely think they should), we are on our own to begin redefining our relationship to food as well as to teach our bodies how to feel satiation with real food (the point of your blog journey), which is another way of saying mindful portion control.
I read the article as well. Confirms what I already knew. (And what you should have as a choice in your poll.) They are for guidance but not to be taken at face value. I always (if possible) look up nutritional info, but realize that it may not always be accurate and should be taken with a grain of salt. The cook might be having an off day, the portion may be larger/smaller, and on and on. I appreciate the effort, but don't live and die by it, calories in and out are not an exact science.
Love your blog!
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