Chapter 3: The 10 Health and Nutrition Pitfalls of Restaurant Eating

Let’s be clear: eating restaurant foods healthfully is downright challenging! That’s true whether you’re dining out for pleasure on upscale fusion cuisine that mixes ingredients and flavors from a cadre of cultures, blending business with lunch at a sit-down restaurant that serves typical American fare, or grabbing an on-the-run dinner from a fast-food restaurant along a highway or in a shopping mall food court. The next step on your journey is to raise your awareness of the 10 health and nutrition pitfalls of restaurant eating.

You need willpower (or “won’t power”) and perseverance to manage restaurant menu minefields and eat healthy. Challenges confront you when you have to pick and choose from a menu or menu board and cannot carefully control the ingredients or the portions of the meals you order. You can’t march into restaurant kitchens and stop the chef or cook as they ladle butter, slather mayonnaise, or pour salt.

The pitfalls of restaurant eating range from huge portions to large quantities of fats, oils, sugar, and salt. But, please don’t despair! These pitfalls aren’t insurmountable and the more you raise your awareness, the better equipped you’ll be to deal with them head on. You can learn to choose, or better stated, pick and choose, to eat healthfully in 99% of restaurants and not be trapped by these common pitfalls. (Chapter 4 provides an in depth rundown of restaurant eating skills and strategies that will help.)

Sections 2 and 3 of Eat Out, Eat Well give you a head’s up on the pitfalls you’ll encounter with each type of restaurant fare or cuisine along with tips, tactics, and more.

The 10 Health and Nutrition Pitfalls of Restaurant Eating:

1 Treating restaurant meals as special occasions:

Back a few decades ago restaurant meals were reserved for special occasions. They celebrated unique events in a person’s, couple’s, or family’s life, which took place once in a blue moon. Today people eat restaurants meals an average of five times a week. With this frequency of restaurant meals, you can’t “afford”—when it comes to your weight, diabetes control, and health in general—to order with that old special occasion, splurge mindset every time you have a restaurant meal. Sure, you can still enjoy a splurge at celebrations. But to keep your waistline from expanding and to get and stay healthy, most people need to toe the nutrition line and make those frequent restaurant meals healthy.

2 Not having direct access to the chef:

Today your food is prepared either in a kitchen behind closed doors, in front of you in an open kitchen, or in assembly line fashion (think fast food chains and sub shops). In all cases, this goes on at least an arm’s reach away. In fine dining restaurants, most dishes are prepared from scratch. These dishes start with basic ingredients, then sauces, seasonings, and more are added. These situations lend themselves to requesting simple changes to make your meal healthier; however, you need to have a willing chef or cook and a waitperson who will serve as your conduit.

In many restaurants (think fast-food burgers, sandwich shops, and large sit-down chains), foods come in the back door near-ready for their final preparation or assembly steps. Customizing items or orders isn’t their specialty, though these types of restaurants are famous for telling you that you can “get it your way.” In these situations you have less control, but you can still exert pressure to get foods as you need and want them. You’ll learn to control these varied dining situations by asking questions and requesting changes. The good news is that restaurants need and want your business, and, with increased attention paid to health and nutrition, some restaurants are more open than ever to meeting your desires and customizing orders. Yes, a key to eating healthier is to get foods placed in front of you in the way and, importantly, in the amount you need them. Get ready to speak up and be assertive.

3 Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and low-fat dairy options are few and far between:

The very foods you should eat more of for good health are often limited or simply missing from restaurant menus. This includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and low-fat dairy foods.

Consider vegetables. You can find salads in fast-food restaurants. Side salads and entrée salads are present and accounted for in most sit-down American-style restaurants. But in fine dining establishments, vegetables, other than the occasional vegetarian entrée, are purely small side dishes used to fill out a plate with the protein source taking center stage. You’ll have to work hard to satisfy that recommendation for 2 1/2 cups of vegetables a day.

Fruit is even less available than vegetables in most restaurants. You may find it camouflaged between two pieces of crust (fruit pie) or served in its liquid form as juice. To get the 2 1/2 cups a day you’ll need to eat fruit as part of the meals you eat at home or bring it with you to enjoy during the day.

When it comes to whole grains, availability is improving. They’re making their way onto the menus of more sandwich shops and better restaurants. You’ll see whole-wheat or whole-grain breads and rolls available for sandwiches in sub and sandwich shops or in the bread baskets at nicer restaurants. You may—though this will still be tough—be able to order pizza made with a whole-grain crust or whole-wheat pasta. Brown rice may be available in Asian restaurants. But we’ve still got a ways to go before we can say that eating whole grains in restaurants is easy.

Low-fat dairy foods, such as milk or yogurt, can be challenging to find and incorporate into restaurant meals. Today, most fast food restaurants offer low-fat milk, which is lower in fat and calories than whole milk, but not as low in fat as fat-free milk. Low-fat milk is also available in most sit-down family-style restaurants. Don’t count on milk being available in the majority of ethnic restaurants. Yogurt, particularly the healthier low-sugar plain yogurt, is not often found in restaurants. You’ll find it served with Middle Eastern fare because it’s an ingredient used to prepare some foods. Low-fat milk and lower-fat and lower-sugar yogurt are becoming more available in individual servings in supermarkets, convenience stores, and some sandwich shops.

4 Protein foods take center stage:

Protein foods often dominate the plate, particularly when it comes to American cuisines. (Protein includes but is not limited to red meats—beef, lamb, pork, and veal—as well as poultry and seafood.) When you look at a menu, is your focus usually on what will take center stage on the plate? Often that’s the protein food. Healthy eating guidelines suggest that the portion of protein per meal should be no more than 3 ounces cooked for most adults. Unless you order an appetizer or mixed dish with vegetables and starch, such as stir-fry or pasta and clam sauce, you’ll get served a portion of protein that’s more in the realm of 6–8 ounces (cooked).

When you enjoy the food from some cuisines, such as Asian or Mexican, it’s easier to eat a smaller portion of protein. In American and family-style restaurants you need to put the portion-control skills and strategies you’ll learn in Chapter 4 into action. For starters, consider how you can transition from thinking about a source of protein as the center of your main course to letting a hearty portion of a healthy side dish occupy your plate. Consider going meat-free, even for just one or two meals per week. When you do eat meat, it should only take up about one-quarter of the plate, whereas vegetables should take up one-half of the plate and the remaining quarter should contain a healthy starch.

5 Portions are HUGE:

It seems that a “value equals volume” mentality long ago invaded restaurant meals, especially in chain and fast-food restaurants. Portion sizes (and the plates to hold these massive portions) just keep getting larger. When you are served large portions, it’s difficult to stop eating when there’s still food on your plate. That’s especially true if you were brought up holding membership in the clean plate club! One strategy you’ll read about frequently in this book is to outwit large portions by controlling portions from the start—when you order,—by splitting and sharing menu items or ordering a 6-inch versus a foot-long sub, for example. Get less food placed in front of you and you’ll eat less food during the meal. (You’ll learn other strategies to combat large portions in Chapter 4.)

A word to the wise: limit all-you-can-eat restaurants and other settings that simply promote overeating, such as hotel breakfast buffets or salad or food bars. This is particularly wise if you don’t have much willpower or if you like to “get your money’s worth.” However, if you feel these settings work well because they help you control portions, use them to your advantage.

6 Fats and oils are in, on, around, and through everything:

Fats and oils make foods taste good and stay moist for longer. That’s just a fact about fats. It’s a big reason why you see a wide variety of oils, fats, and high-fat ingredients used in restaurant foods from the start of the meal to the finishing touch. You may start a meal in a sit-down restaurant with bread and butter or olive oil. In a Mexican restaurant, it may be chips and salsa. Going Chinese, you may see fried noodles. The butter, chips, and fried noodles all contain a lot of fat, which means a hefty bunch of calories before you even take a bite of the food you’ve ordered.

In the kitchen, chefs use oil or butter to sauté or cook vegetables, grains, and starch dishes. Some even put pads of butter with herbs on a piece of beef to soak in when on the grill. Burgers and sandwiches often partner up with high-fat ingredients, such as cheese or bacon. Then a “special” or signature sauce may be added, which is usually mayonnaise-based and finishes off the dish with a flourish of extra calories.

Salad dressing gets tossed into salads and quickly raises the calories of a healthy fresh or cooked vegetable. Sour cream and butter get added to baked potatoes and cream and cheese sauces get added to meats, pastas, or sandwiches with the same disastrous results. Many foods, even healthy vegetables, are served fried, stuffed, and smothered, typically with high-fat ingredients that pack on the calories. Controlling the amount of fat in your restaurant foods is another BIG key to healthier restaurant eating. Stay tuned for plenty of tips and tactics on controlling fat in Chapter 4.

7 Unhealthy fats and oils abound:

Not only is it important to not eat too much total fat, but research has shown it’s even more important to eat more of the fats and oils that contain the healthier fatty acids—polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat—and less saturated and trans fats. Diabetes and general nutrition guidelines encourage you to eat less saturated fat due to its negative effects on our circulatory system. Read more on trans and saturated fats in Chapter 2.

When it comes to trans fat, you’re advised to eat as little as possible, especially if you have diabetes. In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began requiring trans fat to be listed on the Nutrition Facts panel of packaged foods. The restaurant industry and the food manufacturers that supply the industry have been working to reduce the use of trans fats, also known as partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), with some success. For example, cooking oils with zero trans fat are more commonly used today. But restaurant foods such as cinnamon rolls, pies (in the crust), cookies, pancakes and waffles, and non-dairy coffee creamers may still contain these PHOs. (We also eat a small amount of trans fat from animal-based foods, such as meat and dairy foods that contain fat.) As a result of these changes, our intake of trans fat has decreased, but not enough. In late 2013, the FDA announced further efforts to reduce trans-fat intake. This plan will likely take a few years to go into effect.

The cholesterol count from the foods you eat, though it is not fat per se, is another nutrition factor to consider. Limiting cholesterol from foods to less than the recommended 300 milligrams per day helps keep total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol levels down. Cholesterol is only found in animal-based foods, such as egg yolks, cheese, bacon and sausage, red meats, poultry, and seafood. Keeping portions of these foods small, and enjoying some of them only occasionally, helps reduce cholesterol intake.

8 Sodium levels can skyrocket:

When you consider the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommendation of 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day and then observe the sodium counts of many restaurant meals, you’ll understand why we eat way over the recommended sodium level. Many restaurant meals can total 2,300 milligrams or higher on their own. Added salt in foods is not as much the sodium villain today as are processed and restaurant foods. While fine dining restaurants use mainly from-scratch ingredients, American, family, and fast-food restaurants use a number of processed foods. (Think cold cuts in sub sandwiches and chicken breasts in a grilled chicken sandwich.) These are often higher in sodium and add to the high sodium count of the meals. Sodium is used in excess because, just like fats and oils, it makes foods taste good. It’s also used as a preservative to extend the shelf life of foods.

You’ll learn to control the amount of sodium in your restaurants foods. For starters: limit known high-sodium foods, such as soup, cold cuts, and fast-food chicken products and french fries. Limit known high-sodium ingredients, such as anchovies, olives, and pickles. And limit high-sodium toppers, such as salad dressing, cheese sauce, or mayonnaise sauces. Limit servings of what the American Heart Association calls The Salty Six (see Chapter 2). Don’t shake the salt shaker. And keep in mind that if you eat fewer total calories, you’ll also likely consume less sodium.

9 Beverages (nonalcoholic) are big, bigger, biggest:

The selection of nonalcoholic beverages in most fast-food and sit-down family restaurants seems to focus on sugar-sweetened (usually made with high fructose corn syrup) drinks, such as soda, lemonade, sweetened ice tea, and fruit drinks. And the portions have become big, bigger, and biggest (even though they’re called “small,” “medium,” and “large,” or sometimes “jumbo,” or “giant”). These giant portions of sugary drinks add a large amount of undesirable added sugars and hundreds of calories to your meal but have no nutritional value. In addition, the onslaught of hot and cold coffee beverages has upped our intake of added sugars and unhealthy fats (low-fat or whole milk, half and half, or whipped cream and non-dairy creamers). Explore options for healthier nonalcoholic beverages in Chapter 9.

10 Alcoholic beverages can run up calories and run down your resilience:

Alcohol seems to go hand in hand with sit-down meals. You may enjoy a cocktail, one or more beers or glasses of wine, or perhaps an after-dinner drink when out for a business dinner or special celebration. When you total the calories from alcohol, the calorie count can easily be in the hundreds. Another downfall of consuming alcohol for some people is that it can weaken your resolve to eat healthfully. Learn the best ways to enjoy minimal amounts of alcoholic beverages in Chapter 9.

Now on to Chapter 4: The 10 Skills and Strategies for Healthier Restaurant Eating, to begin to master the skills and strategies that will help you combat these 10 pitfalls.