Restaurant calorie counts a weighty subject
March 2, 2007
In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much.
And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.
That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels.
The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the results would be that different in Canada. The study looked at six mid-range, family-style chain restaurants, and we have no shortage of those.
The dish that clocked in with the highest number of calories was a chicken and broccoli pasta from the Ruby’s chain. The dish had 2,060 calories - almost 100 calories more than what an average woman needs for an entire day. And that’s just one meal.
A burger from a different chain racked up 1,940 calories. No fries, no pop, no nothing - just a burger. The amount of fat in both the burger and the pasta was obscene: 128 grams for the pasta; 141 grams for the burger. That’s the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a cup of butter.
Could you have imagined a single burger incorporating the equivalent amount of fat as three-quarters of a cup of butter? Probably not, and there’s the rub. We simply have no idea of what we’re being served.
Staggering calorie counts are presumably not the norm at most restaurants, and many are downright healthful. But can you say that for sure about the places where you eat? That favourite pasta dish you regularly dig into at your restaurant of choice - have you got any idea how many calories are in it?
The places surveyed by the CSPI all had nutritional breakdowns available for their main dishes. They provided the information to the CSPI for its study, and would likely provide it to me or you as well if we could identify the right people to ask.
But that same information isn’t posted in their restaurants. The eateries said they didn’t want to confuse customers, given that menus change and people tend to customize their meals.
Recognized. But restaurants generally have a stable of steady dishes and sides that they serve. It’s hardly pushy of us to want to know what’s in them. When burgers start tipping the scales with the fat equivalent of three-quarters of a cup of butter, the public has a right to know.
Changing bad habits starts with education. And that means knowing what we’re eating. While nobody would benefit from some nightmarish new regulation requiring restaurants to feature all nutritional breakdowns on every changeable dish they serve, perhaps we could at least require that restaurants post details of their standard fare.
Some of the fast-food places are already posting their nutritional information, and I think it will make a difference over time.
Some of us will walk out of the door forever after being jolted by the calorie counts. Some will stay, but will choose the burger with slightly fewer calories, or the lunch without the fries and the mega-pop. And sure, some will carry on as usual, but at least they won’t be able to claim ignorance when the pounds start piling on.
More and more I see the parallels between our tobacco addiction of days gone by, and our modern-day food compulsions. Nicotine is addictive, but the same can be said of dietary fats and sugars once they’ve been torqued into the raison d’être of our food pursuits. Someone really had to put in effort to create a single burger laden with more fat than a person should be consuming in five days of eating.
So on the one hand, those who eat too much are indeed their own worst enemies. On the other, restaurant fare is in some cases scoring so high on the fat, sugar and salt scale that you have to wonder about the industry’s role as clever alchemist, happy to fuel our feeding frenzy with an overdose of high-calorie flavour.
Eat 500 calories more than you burn every day, and you’ll put on a pound in a week. You’ll need to run for almost an hour every day to burn off those same 500 calories. If you could easily find the details of every dish you ate, you’d almost certainly make some different choices.
Ask the restaurants that you frequent to make those details readily available to everyone. We can’t eat smart without it.
Showing posts with label obesity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obesity. Show all posts
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Eating: The new smoking?
Nov. 24, 2006
Underlining that truth really is stranger than fiction, the human species appears to be destined to eat itself to death. Could Jules Verne ever have imagined a more fantastical end? But here we are, growing fatter with each passing year and taking our children down with us into poor health, early death and depression.
How has this happened? It’s as easy as too many calories and not enough activity, and as complex as globalization, public policy, urban planning and genetics. But whatever the reasons, the problems they’ve created are now abundantly clear, and frightening enough as public-health issues to warrant a response every bit as dramatic as we eventually mustered against smoking.
This much we know: Overweight and obese people get sick more often and die sooner. They’re also more likely to raise kids who are overweight and obese themselves. Much like smoking, kids who grow up with parents whose eating habits and activity levels make them obese are at higher risk of falling into the same patterns themselves. Given the dramatic rise in overweight/obesity rates this past decade, you can see where a trend like that will take us.
A federal report last year on Canadians’ growing weight problems noted that there’s not only more of us putting on weight every year, but fewer of us taking it off.
Obesity Epidemic in Canada found that over a 10-year period, a third of Canadians who started out at “normal” weights eventually moved into the “overweight” category. A quarter of those who had been classified as overweight shifted into the “obese” category. Meanwhile, only 10 per cent of those who started out overweight lost enough weight to move into the “normal” group.
As the report points out, the direct and indirect costs of all that weight gain are tremendous. As a proportion of total health-care expenditure, the current toll of obesity is comparable to where tobacco was 15 years ago: approximately 2.5 per cent. Almost seven million Canadians are overweight, and another 4.5 million are obese.
Just like tobacco, there’s nowhere for costs to go but up. The disease risks increase over time. Smoking-related disease now accounts for nine per cent of our health spending, and obesity costs could very well follow suit.
Like all lifestyle-related problems, we are loathe to acknowledge that it’s us who will have to do something about it. This week, for instance, more than eight in 10 Canadians polled by Ipsos-Reid agreed that doctors should be required by law to tell parents if their child is too fat, as if the blame for our kids growing fat rests with the family GP for holding out on us.
A frank conversation with your doctor is a great start, of course. But getting at the deep roots of this worrying issue will take considerably more effort than that. And it’s all about tough personal choices.
I’m no expert in obesity, but it seems to me that we’ve lost our relationship with food. Once, we were animals, lucky to find enough to eat, let alone too much. We burned a lot of calories just looking for food, and gauged our portion sizes carefully to avoid scarcity.
But we’re clever creatures, and soon figured out how to ensure food was always close at hand. Along the way, we imbued it with emotional resonance, and made it the centrepiece of every major event of our lives. We eat when we’re happy and equally when we’re sad, and for every emotional occasion in between. Hunger - once the only reason for eating - is rapidly losing relevance in these overfed times.
The proliferation of “fast food” has taken us to new levels in the disconnect. An entire industry has developed to provide us with instant access to food around the clock. Driving into any community in the country starts with running a gauntlet of fast-food restaurants on the edge of town. Many pack more calories into a single burger than our ancestors consumed in an entire day.
Fortunately, we’ve been here before. We once smoked the way we now eat, and for similar fuzzy reasons. We know how to effect change, even in the face of widespread public resistance. The strategies we’ll need are neither easy nor short-term, and in the case of obesity will require going up against Big Food as aggressively as was done with the tobacco industry. But if it’s that or be remembered by future historians as a nation destroyed by its eating habits, no effort should be spared.
What can’t be allowed to happen is the normalization of obesity. That’s already happening in U.S. television commercials, which increasingly feature overweight and obese actors. Fashion’s equally absurd focus on the mega-thin also must go, but we have to resist being lulled into any comforting assertion that overweight is the new “just right.”
As any number of disease trends and health indicators make abundantly clear, it isn’t.
Nov. 24, 2006
Underlining that truth really is stranger than fiction, the human species appears to be destined to eat itself to death. Could Jules Verne ever have imagined a more fantastical end? But here we are, growing fatter with each passing year and taking our children down with us into poor health, early death and depression.
How has this happened? It’s as easy as too many calories and not enough activity, and as complex as globalization, public policy, urban planning and genetics. But whatever the reasons, the problems they’ve created are now abundantly clear, and frightening enough as public-health issues to warrant a response every bit as dramatic as we eventually mustered against smoking.
This much we know: Overweight and obese people get sick more often and die sooner. They’re also more likely to raise kids who are overweight and obese themselves. Much like smoking, kids who grow up with parents whose eating habits and activity levels make them obese are at higher risk of falling into the same patterns themselves. Given the dramatic rise in overweight/obesity rates this past decade, you can see where a trend like that will take us.
A federal report last year on Canadians’ growing weight problems noted that there’s not only more of us putting on weight every year, but fewer of us taking it off.
Obesity Epidemic in Canada found that over a 10-year period, a third of Canadians who started out at “normal” weights eventually moved into the “overweight” category. A quarter of those who had been classified as overweight shifted into the “obese” category. Meanwhile, only 10 per cent of those who started out overweight lost enough weight to move into the “normal” group.
As the report points out, the direct and indirect costs of all that weight gain are tremendous. As a proportion of total health-care expenditure, the current toll of obesity is comparable to where tobacco was 15 years ago: approximately 2.5 per cent. Almost seven million Canadians are overweight, and another 4.5 million are obese.
Just like tobacco, there’s nowhere for costs to go but up. The disease risks increase over time. Smoking-related disease now accounts for nine per cent of our health spending, and obesity costs could very well follow suit.
Like all lifestyle-related problems, we are loathe to acknowledge that it’s us who will have to do something about it. This week, for instance, more than eight in 10 Canadians polled by Ipsos-Reid agreed that doctors should be required by law to tell parents if their child is too fat, as if the blame for our kids growing fat rests with the family GP for holding out on us.
A frank conversation with your doctor is a great start, of course. But getting at the deep roots of this worrying issue will take considerably more effort than that. And it’s all about tough personal choices.
I’m no expert in obesity, but it seems to me that we’ve lost our relationship with food. Once, we were animals, lucky to find enough to eat, let alone too much. We burned a lot of calories just looking for food, and gauged our portion sizes carefully to avoid scarcity.
But we’re clever creatures, and soon figured out how to ensure food was always close at hand. Along the way, we imbued it with emotional resonance, and made it the centrepiece of every major event of our lives. We eat when we’re happy and equally when we’re sad, and for every emotional occasion in between. Hunger - once the only reason for eating - is rapidly losing relevance in these overfed times.
The proliferation of “fast food” has taken us to new levels in the disconnect. An entire industry has developed to provide us with instant access to food around the clock. Driving into any community in the country starts with running a gauntlet of fast-food restaurants on the edge of town. Many pack more calories into a single burger than our ancestors consumed in an entire day.
Fortunately, we’ve been here before. We once smoked the way we now eat, and for similar fuzzy reasons. We know how to effect change, even in the face of widespread public resistance. The strategies we’ll need are neither easy nor short-term, and in the case of obesity will require going up against Big Food as aggressively as was done with the tobacco industry. But if it’s that or be remembered by future historians as a nation destroyed by its eating habits, no effort should be spared.
What can’t be allowed to happen is the normalization of obesity. That’s already happening in U.S. television commercials, which increasingly feature overweight and obese actors. Fashion’s equally absurd focus on the mega-thin also must go, but we have to resist being lulled into any comforting assertion that overweight is the new “just right.”
As any number of disease trends and health indicators make abundantly clear, it isn’t.
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