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Dining Out, Weighing In – Restaurant Meals Are Higher in Calories


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With two out of three Americans overweight today, it’s getting harder to believe that all this extra fat is a simple problem of self-indulgence or poor .

In fact, researchers and from various sciences say unequivocally that it’s not. Certainly adults are responsible for what they put in their mouths. But when so many are affected, from all across the American demographic, we have to also look what’s going on in our culture at large.

And one thing that’s going on is that there’s a lot more going out. In 1978, just 18 percent of the Americans consumed were eaten away from . But by 2003, that was up to half.

Why should that even matter? A is a is a , right?

At the bottom line, yes. The trouble is that when we eat out, we simply have much less control over what ends up on our plates, and from there, on our bottom line. That shows up in a of ways.

Nutritional indicates that for almost any given that you might choose to prepare at , when it’s compared to a of the same name, it’s often not the same thing at all. So even trying to consciously select what looks like the healthiest choice on the menu might not do you much good.

Restaurants tend to use more oils and fats, more sugar, and more salt in their preparations. The reason is simple: if the is yummy, you’ll come back! But that tends to add up to a lot of extra you weren’t counting on.

And speaking of extras, how about all those extra nibbles: the plates of appetizers, the baskets of with pots of cool butter, the bonus beverage specials? Most families simply don’t have all those edible with regular meals.

But at a , your drinks are brought before you even order. You often get bread or rolls to eat during your wait, and appetizers and desserts are helpfully suggested by your server.

Yet those extras can have even more than your meals! An order of buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing? That’s a tidy 1,010 before dinner. For a fried onion blossom with dip, figure around 2,000. Even a basket of garlic bread is about 800 . How many people are sharing those at your table?

Then you get to the main attraction, and the major problem with dining out—portion size! meals are often three to four times larger than a normal serving size.

Even plates, glassware and utensils have grown. Very often, the dinner plate you get in a would qualify as a platter in any kitchen, but then, they have to be bigger to accommodate those super servings!

It wouldn’t be such an issue if we were better at walking away. An old adage about fitness says that the most important exercise to do is “pushbacks,” as in, when you’ve had enough, push back and get up from the table.

But shows that Americans in general tend to be “completers,” and many of us were raised to feel a sense of guilt if we left on our plates. Add that programming to a giant of pasta, and suddenly, you’re stuffed!

The truth is, no matter how we’re raised, or whether we’re slim or fat, if more is put in front of us we’ll eat more, period. And usually, we’re not even particularly aware of it. This has been proven out by study after study, in both the and abroad.

And that’s not all. The also shows that as we become accustomed to those mega-sized meals we’re presented in restaurants, we tend to prepare bigger portions at , as well. We may not use all the extra oil, salt and sugar that restaurants do, but we’re certainly having more of our main ingredients, and we’re eating big and hearty.

The other thing that restaurants have over the meal is . Even the most accommodating cook typically won’t make a different special meal for each member of the family. Again, the nutritional shows that the more different things you can have, the more you’ll eat overall.

Department of Agriculture studies showed that when offered three varieties of a given item—say, sandwiches or cookies—people would eat more than if they were offered three items of the same . That’s part of why those all-you-can-eat buffets are such a caloric catastrophe. Who ever has just a little?

Given the demands of today’s busy lifestyles, dining out nowadays is not only a pleasure, but a time-saving survival tool. Restaurants may eventually be required to provide nutritional facts for their meals, but even without hard numbers, awareness of the pitfalls can go a long way toward helping us control those counts.

We just need to think about what we’re up against when someone else is serving, so that when we’re eating out, we’re not taking so much in.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Bistro Table. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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