Typical Restaurant Meal Loaded With Fats, Salt, Calories: Studies

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Just one meal often provides most of the daily recommended amounts, encouraging obesity

WebMD News from HealthDay
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, May 13 (HealthDay News) -- The next time you sit down at your favorite local eatery, ponder this: Two new studies find that the average restaurant meal provides diners with most of the calories, fats and salt they require for the entire day.
The authors of both reports said these excesses can make restaurants unhealthy places to eat, adding to the obesity epidemic and increasing diners' risk for heart disease.
"In all of the meal categories there are huge ranges in calories, sodium and fats," said Mary Scourboutakos of the University of Toronto, and lead author of one of the studies. "You really don't know [what menu choice is healthiest] unless there is calories labeling or sodium labeling. There is no way to predict which meals are going to be the worst."
Both reports were published May 13 online in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The first report was conducted by researchers from the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. They found that most typically ordered restaurant meals contain more than half the calories the person would need per day.
"Your average serving -- just an entree, no drinks, no appetizers, no desserts -- is virtually a whole day's calories on one plate," said lead researcher Susan Roberts, director of the center's Energy Metabolism Laboratory.
For the study, Roberts' team analyzed 157 full meals from 33 restaurants in the Boston area.
They found 73 percent of the meals ordered had over half of the 2,000 daily calories recommended for adults by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and 12 meals contained more than the full daily recommendation.
Large portion sizes seemed key, the Boston study found, because prior research has shown that people tend to eat what is placed in front of them.
"When restaurants provide these [large] portions -- which are far more than the human body can process -- they are very directly contributing to the terrible epidemic of obesity we have today," Roberts said.
Meals with the highest average number of calories included those from restaurants specializing in Italian (1,755 calories), American (1,494 calories) and Chinese (1,474 calories) fare. Meals with the fewest average number of calories were from Vietnamese (922 calories) and Japanese (1,027 calories) restaurants, the researchers said.
A person's local diner or family-run restaurant was just as likely to pile on the calories as a big chain, the Boston study found. In fact, local, small-chain restaurants tended to have slightly higher calorie counts per meal (an average of 1,437) than national chains (1,359), although the difference wasn't statistically significant.
"Many of these [local] restaurants make fast food look healthy," Roberts said.
However, without the aid of calorie counts on menus, figuring out which meal is better for you can be tough.