Eating out is pure pleasure: You don’t have to cook, and somebody else washes the dishes. The challenge? To avoid letting luxury lull you into ceding responsibility for your food choices to some chef whose heart belongs to butter.
This chapter lays out strategies for making your adventure nutritionally sound. One trick is to edit a menu in a white-tablecloth restaurant (the food professional’s description of an upscale eatery), balancing gustatory pleasure with common-sense nutrition. A second is to juggle fast-food choices to fit them into a healthful diet. And the third is to manage the ubiquitous vending machines that are so often the source of last resort.
In all three cases, no cooking, no dishes, no guilt. Who could ask for more?
Reading a Restaurant Menu
Restaurants are businesses; they respond to consumer demand. Unfortunately, what consumers have demanded for years are rich foods and big portions. Does that mean you should stop eating out? No. But it does mean you need to use caution when ordering from the menu.
Apportion the portions
Restaurants don’t make friends by serving up teensy little portions. In fact, tiny servings probably sank nouvelle cuisine, the 1980s fad that put one string bean, three garden peas, half an artichoke heart, and one sliced cherry tomato on a lettuce leaf and called it the salad course.
Reality dictates that the portions on most restaurant plates rarely come within striking distance of the official serving sizes issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To protect yourself from humongous servings, you need to fix a picture of real-life versions of the recommended portions firmly in your mind.
The task requires an 8-ounce measuring cup, a kitchen scale, and some basic foods.
Meat, fish, and poultry: Broil a small steak or roast a chicken breast. Use a kitchen scale to weigh a 3-ounce portion. Does the steak look like a deck of cards? How about a small calculator? That’s one serving.
Rice and pasta: Boil some rice or pasta. When it’s done, fill the measuring cup to the halfway mark. Take out the rice or pasta and roll it into a ball, about the size of a tennis ball or a billiard ball. That’s one serving.
Salads: Shred, tear, or chop some greens, such as lettuce, spinach, or kale. Fill the measuring cup to the 8-ounce mark. Turn the greens out onto a salad plate. That’s one serving.
Fruits and veggies: Dice some fresh apples or carrots or open one can of beets or fruit cocktail. Fill the measuring cup to the halfway mark. Spoon the fruit or vegetables onto a plate. That’s one serving.
Beverages: Open a can of soda or a box of juice. Pour the liquid into the measuring cup, right up to the 8-ounce mark. Pour that into a glass. It’s probably more than you get in an upscale restaurant, less than you get at the burger barn. No matter: It’s still one serving.
Now that you know what a serving looks like, you can slice away the extra from your restaurant plate and take it home for lunch or dinner the next day. That’s what doggie bags are for. (Cat owners will know that doggie bags are called doggie bags because cats are too smart — or too finicky — to eat someone else’s leftovers.)
Ask for proof
When the menu says, “Eat me! I’m healthy,” you want proof. The people who make and market processed foods are required by law to provide detailed ingredient labels on their packages.
Legislators have been moving to pass laws that regulate healthful eating in restaurants. For example, chain restaurants must now post the calorie counts and ingredients in their dishes online or at the store. Now the open listing wave is lapping at the doors of those chic, white-tablecloth establishments. But very gently.
True, glorious establishments, such as Per Se and Le Cirque in New York, Vetri Ristorante in Philadelphia, or the Mansion in Dallas, each with the symbol $$$$$ after its name in dining guides, still don’t have to tell you exactly what’s in the truffled gnocchi or the foie gras (well, okay, that one’s obvious). But if there’s a health claim such as “low-fat” or “heart-healthy” next to an item on the menu, the Nutrition Education and Labeling Act says the restaurant has to back up that claim. The law doesn’t require an ingredient listing on the menu. The restaurant can comply by keeping a notebook available at the front desk that shows the healthful dish was made according to a recipe from an authoritative professional association or dietary group, such as the American Heart Association, or has nutritional values based on a reliable nutrition guide, such as USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference or any of the other websites listed in Chapter 27.
Editing Your Menu Choices
From a nutritional point of view, after you get past the serving size, restaurant dining has two other basic pitfalls:
Garnishes and side dishes are too rich.
Meals have too many courses.
Not to worry. The following tricks solve these two problems.
Start simple
Set the nutritional tone of dinner right off the bat with your choice of appetizer. Your first alternative is to opt for a really rich, high-density food, such as a cream soup, and then coast downward, calorie-fat-and-cholesterol-wise, for the rest of the meal.
Your second alternative is to go the other way, choosing a tasty but low-calorie, low-fat appetizer, such as clear soup, a salad with lemon juice dressing, or shellfish — shrimp cocktail comes in a cost of just 10 to 30 calories per shrimp — with no-fat (catsup/horseradish) sauce, thus allowing yourself richer choices later in the meal.
Is there a nutrition advantage to either choice? No. The plus lies in pleasing your taste buds since you get to choose the menu you like best.
Elevate appetizers to entrees
For smaller portion sizes or to skip the calorie-laden sides that come with most entrees, order an appetizer as your main course. For example, many restaurants serve an appetizer consisting of a really big bowl of maybe 30 steamed mussels in their shells in a low-oil, fresh tomato sauce with perhaps one crusty piece of French bread underneath to sop it up. Add a glass of dry white wine plus one more piece of bread, and this appetizer becomes a meal in itself with fewer calories and less fat than most any entree on the menu. It’s often less expensive, too.
Skip the fat on the bread
Don’t butter your bread. Don’t oil it, either. True, that little bowl of olive oil serves up less saturated fat than butter, but ounce for ounce the calorie count is exactly the same. All fats and oils (butter, margarine, vegetable oils) give you about 100 calories a tablespoon. And you may get even more calories from the oil if you do a lot of dipping.
Don’t assume that your bread is low fat just because you didn’t butter it. Many types of bread, such as savory focaccia or deceptively plain popovers come already buttered (or oiled). To test your bread, pick up a piece or put it on your napkin. If your hand feels greasy or the bread leaves an oily spot on your napkin, you have your answer.
Undress the veggies
Victorians boiled vegetables practically into oblivion — no color, no texture, no taste. Then came 20th-century butter, cheese, and cream sauces, often burnished to a browned crust by the broiler.
Then natural became the watchword, often translated as raw, a trend not favorable to veggies, such as uncooked cauliflower with all the gustatory charm of cardboard. That brought on steamed, a good thing because the difference between raw cauliflower and cauliflower that’s been steamed and dusted with, say, dill is so vast that people who insist on passing out the stuff cold should be charged with vegetable abuse.
Now smart restaurant cooks rely on herbs and spices, reduced (boiled down and thickened) fat-free bouillons, unusual salad combinations, and imaginative treatments, such as purees and kabobs, to make their vegetables tasty but trim. The result? Food heaven and nutrition joy as the vegetable flavors come through, and the calories stay very, very, very low.
To reap the rewards, avoid veggie dishes labeled
Au beurre (with butter)
Au gratin (with cheese sauce)
Batter-dipped (eggs, oil, fried)
Breaded (breadcrumbs, oil, fried)
Fritters (fried)
Fritto (fried)
Tempura (battered and fried)
Minimize the main dish
From a nutritionist’s point of view, the most sensible dinner choice may be something broiled, baked, or roasted — without added fat, and with the drippings siphoned off. But you can also lower the fat content of any main dish simply by wielding a mean knife and fork to cut away the vestiges of visible fat on your chops or steak or the skin on poultry.
Another approach is to order a main course meat dish without the “main” part. That is, order your meat, fish, or poultry as a small-serving appetizer and then ask your waiter for a veggie entree. Or opt for an assortment of the side dishes that usually accompany the meat course instead of a veggie entree.
Demand tiny boiled onions, baby peas with mint, pickled beets and red cabbage, sugared carrots, sautéed spinach, or darling little boiled or baked potatoes with a crust of paprika or cumin — the more, the merrier. The result: fewer calories, more dietary fiber, and a wider variety of nutrients than plain meat or poultry.
Sideline sauces
Dining out is a treat, so treat yourself — within reason. Have your béarnaise (egg yolks, butter), béchamel (butter, flour, heavy cream), brown sauce (beef drippings, flour), and hollandaise (butter, egg yolks), as long as you have them in reasonable amounts.
Ask the waiter to bring the sauce on the side, take a tablespoonful (about a soup spoonful), and hand back the rest.
When ordering from an Italian menu, the general rule is to avoid the olive-oil-based sauces and choose the tomato-based red sauce because many restaurants now make their red sauces skinny — all tomato, with little or no oil.
Satisfy your sweet tooth
After a heavy meal, your body often craves something sweet. To satisfy that sweet tooth but lower your calories and fat totals, split a dessert with your dinner partner. Or pick a rich but fat-free sweetened coffee, such as espresso or a Greek or Turkish brew, or tea, or a diet cola, or, on special occasions, a small after-dinner wine or liqueur, about 100 to 200 fat-free calories per ounce.
Writing Rules for Chain Restaurants
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Americans eat and drink about one-third of their calories away from home, lots and lots of them in chain restaurants (a company with more than 20 outlets doing business under the same name and selling pretty much the same products) and what FDA calls “similar retail food establishments,” such as the corner deli that makes your ham-and-Swiss sandwich at lunch or the movie theater, sports venue, or amusement park that sells “made on the premises” items such as popcorn.
The latest rules require these restaurants and stores to post calorie counts, calories from fat, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, fiber, sugars, and protein — everything you expect to see on an ordinary package Nutrition Facts Label (more about that in Chapter 17), menus, and on menu boards. Consumer nutrition alert: You will find more about the Nutrition Facts Label in Chapter 17, including the fact that you may soon see one figure for the sugar that occurs naturally in the food and a second for added sugar.
The covered foods include
Meals from sit-down restaurants
Foods purchased at drive-through windows
Take-out food, such as pizza
Foods such as made-to-order sandwiches ordered from a menu or menu board at a grocery store or delicatessen
Foods you serve yourself from a salad or hot food bar
Muffins at a bakery or coffee shop
Popcorn purchased at a movie theater or amusement park
A scoop of ice cream, milkshake, or sundae from an ice-cream store
Hot dogs or frozen drinks prepared on site in a convenience or warehouse store
Certain alcohol beverages, such as coolers
What’s not on the list? “Certain foods purchased in grocery stores or other similar retail food establishments that are typically intended for more than one person to eat and require additional preparation before consuming, such as pounds of deli meats, cheeses, or large-size deli salads.” In other words, the meat-and-cheese platter for your office bash is nutrient-label free. You can either approach it with a calorie and nutrient guide in hand or just forgo nutrition perfection for one moment of unbridled gorging.
FDA expected these rules to become effective in December 2016, but the implementation dates for federal rules can be, to put it mildly, elastic. Stay tuned. Or better yet, check out the next section to find food facts on your own.
Finding Fast-Food Ingredient Guides
All fast-food restaurants make nutrition information widely available, often in handy brochures you can fold, put in your pocket, and review carefully at home. If your local eatery doesn’t have brochures on hand, don’t be shy: Go online and look it up.
Table 18-1 is a quick guide to chain restaurant websites where you can find the nutrient content for every item on the restaurant’s in-store menu. Not all make it easy, so you may have to finagle your way around the site, clicking on a button marked Food or Our Menu or — surprise! — Nutrition and following the prompts.
When you get to the online nutrition content, you discover that restaurants present the info in two basic ways. One method is to draw a chart that lists basic nutrients (calories, fat, protein, and the like) for every single menu item. A second method is to describe the ingredients one item at a time, like this entry for Arby’s Crispy Onions:
Crispy Onions: Onions, Wheat Flour, Vegetable Oil (soybean and/or canola oil), Corn Starch, Contains 2% or Less Of: Annatto Extract (color), Dried Egg Whites, Dried Garlic, Dried Onion, Paprika Extract (color), Salt, Spices, Spice Extract, Sugar, Turmeric Extract (color), Water, Whey, Yellow Corn Flour. Breading set in vegetable oil. Cooked in corn oil. CONTAINS: EGG, MILK, WHEAT. May be cooked in the same oil as menu items that contain Soy and Fish (where available).
Notice that Arby’s has posted allergens in capital letters in the regular listing. Some chains, such as Little Caesar’s, add an allergen alert box at the end of the listing for each item on the regular chart.
Finally, there’s the special chart, such as Domino’s listing foods with gluten or the Chipotle’s “Allergen and Special Diets” chart, showing which foods contain milk, soybean, wheat and gluten, and sulfites as well as which are vegetarian and vegan offerings. Did you notice some common allergens, such as peanuts, are missing from that list? Not to worry. Chipotle puts this statement in capital letters right next to the chart: WE DO NOT USE EGGS, MUSTARD, PEANUTS, TREE NUTS, SESAME, SHELLFISH, OR FISH AS INGREDIENTS IN OUR FOOD.” (For more on food and allergies, turn to Chapter 23.)
The exact web addresses for nutrient info on each fast-food site may change, so consider the whole-site addresses on Table 18-1 as step one. The numbers on the nutrition charts are flexible as well, so you can’t assume that because something delivered 120 calories and 3 grams of protein yesterday it will do the same tomorrow. The recipe may change. The size of the item may change. Or the rules on what to say and how to say it may change. If you’re really, really curious about your food, check, check, check, and check again.
Exploring the Healthful Side of Fast Food
Fast food can be good food. By choosing carefully, you can enjoy burgers and sandwiches and pizza while still meeting recommended dietary allowances for all important nutrients plus vitamins and minerals.
Choosing wisely at the drive-through
The greatest problem with fast food, as with all restaurant food, is very big servings with very high calorie counts and very scary fat content. Case in point: McDonald’s Bacon ClubHouse burger clocks in at 760 calories, 40 grams of fat (15 of them artery-clogging saturated fat), or Papa John’s Pizza for One with the same 760 calories per whole pie plus 28 grams of total fat and 12 grams of saturated fat.
On the other hand, who says you have to choose that burger or that pie? As you can plainly see in Table 18-2, both chains and the fat-and-calorie conscious Subway offer servings to meet anybody’s nutrition standards.
* Based on company listing 16% DV for adult: 60 mg vitamin C, 1,000 calcium
Sources: Company websites as of July 23, 2015
In the past several years, McDonald’s, once the undisputed fast-food champion, has lost ground as a customer favorite with new contenders, such as Chipotle and Panera, filling in former blanks in the fast-food experience. So why is it on Table 18-2? Because McDonald’s, along with Papa John’s and Subway, have more stores in the United States and around the globe than their competitors. That means they are the places you’re most likely to find when you’re hungry anywhere in the whole wide world.
Finding a guilt-free, 300-calorie snack solution
As Chapter 14 explains, each time you eat, your pancreas secretes insulin, the hormone than enables your body to turn food into glucose, the sugar fuel on which you run. The insulin temporarily tames your appetite, but over the next three or four hours, the insulin level falls and — bingo! — you’re hungry again.
Even before the science of why you’re hungry was identified, the rest of the world scheduled an afternoon tea-type snack to cope with the mid-afternoon hungries. Americans, however, were left on their own to grab whatever’s close at hand. In other words, the lunch to dinner stretch can be a diet disaster.
It doesn’t have to be because guilt-free, 300-calorie-and-under snacks abound to break the hunger without breaking the diet budget. For example, say you’re on the road heading from one meeting to the next and what you crave is meat, plain and simple. Head for Burger King where the plain flame-broiled burger is a measly 230 calories or McDonald’s (10 calories more) or Wendy’s (30 more). Want chicken? Wendy’s wins. Its 4-piece chicken chunks, sorry, nuggets, cost you just 180 calories, 10 fewer than McDonald’s and Burger King.
If sweet’s your treat, Dunkin’ Donuts is your guide. The basic no-frills Dunkin’ sugar raised donut is a measly 230 calories. The Bavarian Crème and the Chocolate Frosted versions are both 270, 30 under the 300-calorie cutoff. The fruit donuts, though, are definitely not. And, no, the blueberry crumb (500 calories) and the apple crumb (490) don’t count as one daily serving of fruit. But one apple or one banana, sometimes found at a fast-food parlor, do. One medium banana has about 105 calories; one medium apple has about 80. You can have both plus a 1-ounce box of raisins (85 calories) and still beat the 300-calorie benchmark.
Managing the Mechanical Menu
When it comes to gracious dining, vending machines are so low on the list that they’re practically sliding off the bottom of the page. Nonetheless, they do sell food, which means the FDA isn’t about to ignore them.
Much of the snack food sold in vending machines is prepackaged and already labeled within nutrition information. And many items do fit into the 300-calorie snack class. For example, a 1-ounce bag of Lay’s Oven-Baked Potato Chips is just 120 saturated-fat-and-cholesterol-free calories. You can have two bags and still stay under 300 calories. But you can’t read that on the label while the bag is still in the machine, and other foods in packages behind the glass may come with an unpleasant calorie surprise.
To prevent that, the FDA has written new rules requiring individuals and companies owning or operating more than 20 vending machines to post a written, electronic, or digital calorie sign near each food in the machine or next to the button you push to purchase it. In a gentle note to vendors, the FDA pointed out that the calorie label requirements will enable the agency to contact vendors “for enforcement purposes.”
Reality dictates that the portions on most restaurant plates rarely come within striking distance of the official serving sizes issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To protect yourself from humongous servings, you need to fix a picture of real-life versions of the recommended portions firmly in your mind.
In the past several years, McDonald’s, once the undisputed fast-food champion, has lost ground as a customer favorite with new contenders, such as Chipotle and Panera, filling in former blanks in the fast-food experience. So why is it on