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 Independent restaurants and chains with fewer than 20 outlets won’t
be required to post calorie counts under a nationwide law that goes
into effect at the end of this year, but that doesn’t mean their
meals are any better for the waistline, researchers say.
On average, meals from the non-chain restaurants contained about
1,200 calories each, which is more than half the daily requirement
for most women and about 44 percent of the daily requirement for
men, the study found.
“Fast food restaurants get blamed all the time, but as this study
shows the small chains and individual restaurants that don’t post
nutrition information are just as bad when it comes to excessive
portion sizes,” said senior study author Susan Roberts, a researcher
at Tufts University in Boston.
Between 2011 and 2014, Roberts and colleagues collected and analyzed
a total of 420 meals from randomly selected non-chain restaurants in
three U.S. cities: Boston, San Francisco and Little Rock, Arkansas.
For comparison, they also collected 56 meals from large-chain
restaurants in the same cities.
Overall, they found that 92 percent of the meals contained more than
570 calories, which they call the benchmark calorie count in a
single meal for a woman who needs about 2000 calories a day to
maintain the same weight.
Some cuisines were consistently heavier in calories than others, the
researchers found. American, Chinese and Italian meals all averaged
about 1,500 calories, while Greek, Japanese and Thai meals averaged
900 to 1,100 calories.
When the study team compared the large-chain meals with similar
non-chain meals, the big chains’ meals averaged 68 calories less
than their non-chain counterparts, according to the results in the
Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Humans have “a whole biological system designed to get us to eat the
food in front of us so large portions encourage overeating, not just
because we are weak willed but because our biology is pushing us to
finish our plate,” Roberts said.
“That is so important – it means people can stop blaming themselves
for overeating when they eat out and start blaming the restaurants
for setting us up,” she said.
Roberts would like to see legislation push restaurants to price
their meals by portion.
“So, say you want the lasagna on the menu but only want a one-third
portion, you could order that amount and pay one third of the
price," Roberts said. "It would completely take away the current
incentive that restaurants have to overfeed people."
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Without such a proportional pricing concept, calorie counts should
be required on the menus of all restaurants, not just large-chain
and fast food places, Roberts added.
“We may think we are automatically eating healthier by choosing to
dine at a location other than a fast food or large chain restaurant,
but it seems like we are only fooling ourselves,” Allie Matarasso
said in an email.
It’s unlikely that new legislation targeting smaller restaurants
will be put into effect anytime soon, so it is important to know how
to avoid excessive energy intake while dining out, said Matarasso, a
clinical dietitian with Montefiore Health System in New York City,
who wasn’t involved in the study.
Sharing a meal with a friend or asking the waiter to serve half the
meal and pack up the other half to take home are ways to decrease
the portion size and reduce the temptation to overeat, she said.
It’s also important to know what healthy portion sizes look like,
Matarasso added. “A serving of protein should be approximately the
size of the palm of your hand and starch should be about the size of
your clenched fist,” she said.
It’s also beneficial to practice basic principles of healthy eating
regardless of where you’re dining, she said. These include ordering
items that are baked, broiled, steamed rather than fried, asking for
sauce or dressing on the side, loading up on vegetables, choosing
whole grains, and avoiding calorie-containing beverages.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/23r6FEb Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online January 20, 2016.
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