Fast food is easy to criticize but hard to avoid. Most people who are truthful will admit to eating it, even if only occasionally.
Take Mary Lee Chin, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the Colorado Dietetic Association. She recently went on a road trip with her son and ended up in many a drive-through lane wondering how to pick something nutritious and non-fattening on the menu.
“If only I would’ve done this research before I left,” she said after studying the menus and nutritional data on dozens of items available at a handful of popular fast-food restaurants.
We enlisted Chin to help us find out if it’s possible to feed yourself and your children a healthy meal on the go. The good news is yes, but you’ll need to rethink your approach and do some research.
As bad a rap as they get, fast-food restaurants are serving healthier options and offering abundant nutritional data in brochures and online. Who knew you could get a salad with edamame and snow peas at McDonald’s? Or one with crisp apples, cranberries and walnuts at Arby’s? How about a veggie burger at the bastion of big meat, Burger King? Even Taco Bell is offering popular items “Fresco” style, with salsa subbing for sauce or cheese.
Granted, the word might be spreading a little slowly. Only one other customer besides Chin was sampling an Asian salad with grilled chicken at the McDonald’s she visited on a recent lunch hour. And it can be confusing sorting out calorie and fat content, as well as downright scary reading the sodium statistics on many items.
Chin helped us develop a number of guidelines for selecting fast food.
Do your homework: How how much better for you is a grilled chicken sandwich than a double cheeseburger? Restaurant websites have become a helpful source of information, offering not only nutritional content, but calculators that let you place items on your hypothetical “tray” so you can take a look at the numbers. McDonald’s and Taco Bell’s sites are two of the best, offering not just raw data, but percentages of the “Daily Values” of nutrients that have a significant impact on health and fitness.
Chin is a big fan of having DVs listed on menus for such items as fat, saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium. For example, the Daily Value for fat, based on a 2,000-calorie diet, is 65 grams. So if you eat a Quarter Pounder with cheese and large fries, you’re consuming 55 grams of fat, almost an entire day’s worth.
“DVs are not recommended intakes on amounts of nutrients to eat every single day. They’re reference points,” Chin says.
The dietitian recommends going online to look at menus and making notes on items that will be healthy choices when you find yourself in the drive-through lane. Write the information on index cards or sticky notes and leave them in your car.
Also be alert to new items on menus, particularly those featuring chicken or fish, fresh fruit, yogurt, whole-wheat bread and tortillas, salads with dressing on the side (and fat-free dressings), fat- free or low-fat milk and bottled water.
Many restaurants detail ingredients on every item they offer, including condiments, and list allergens as well. (Quizno’s was the only big chain restaurant we found that didn’t list full nutritionals on its website, giving content for only two sandwiches and some low-carbohydrate options, and requesting visitors send an e-mail for nutrition information.)
Size matters: Downsize rather than supersize your meal and you’ll do your waistline a favor. Triple-meat burgers and French-fry portions that could feed a family of four are now offered to single diners. Bagels today are twice the size they were 20 years ago, Chin says. Scale back on the size of the portions you order and you’ll reduce the amount of calories, fat and other undesirable ingredients.
Hold the mayo, hold the dressing: It might take a minute longer to get your meal, but if you ask that mayonnaise, cheese and various dressings be left off your sandwich, you’ll enjoy a leaner, healthier lunch. Fast-food restaurants typically offer the dressing for salads in separate packets, as they also do with nuts and other add-ons.
Visit restaurants like Wendy’s and McDonald’s where you can get a side salad or fruit salad rather than fries to reduce a meal’s calories and fat.
Eat your greens: The smell of grilled burgers is inviting, but salads are the nutritional stars in fast-food restaurants. If you order one with chicken and refrain from too many add-ons, you can get a meal with decent protein and vegetable content. Just don’t expect heaping portions of the good stuff – the snow peas, red peppers and edamame were meagerly distributed in our salad from McDonald’s.
Salad dressings can add 200 calories and 18 grams of fat (McDonald’s Caesar, for example), but we found using only half the amount in the packet amply dressed our greens.
Also ask about getting an entrée prepared as a salad. Subway offers its sandwich ingredients served over a bed of spinach or lettuce, for example. Order the fat-free Italian dressing (35 calories, no fat) rather than the Atkins honey mustard (200 calories, 22 grams of fat).
Make good choices for kids: Not too long ago, children’s fast food meals consisted of a sandwich, fries and a soft drink. Now parents often have a choice of such side items as a fruit cup, yogurt, applesauce, milk or juice, all items that will raise the nutritional value of a meal and still please young taste buds.
Chin suggests paying attention to fat calories in children’s meals, as they should be less than 30 percent of the total calories. That figure is easy to surpass at such restaurants as Taco Bell, where a recommended child’s meal is two tacos and an order of cinnamon twists, which make up 39 percent of the total fat and 47 percent of the saturated fat a person should have in a day. “You’ll need to make very careful choices the rest of the day,” she says.
Pass on the salt: The levels of sodium in many fast-food items is dangerously high and should be reason enough to keep you from making a habit of eating this type of meal, Chin says.
For example, the Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 milligrams a day. A Burger King Whopper with cheese and a large order of fries have 2,270mg sodium, a shake short of a day’s worth in a single meal.
On average, the higher a person’s salt intake, the higher his blood pressure. “Keeping blood pressure in the normal range reduces a person’s risk of coronary disease, stroke, congestive heart failure and kidney disease,” Chin says.
Liquid diets: It is tempting and delicious to drink your meal at a place like Jamba Juice rather than eating it at a restaurant, but the dietitian offers some cautions.
First, take a hard look at calories and portion control. The “power” size of a Razzmatazz smoothie at Jamba Juice contains 620 calories, almost a third of the 2,000-calorie diet recommended for many adult women. In addition, if you’re worried about calories, watch out for smoothies made with frozen yogurt and sherbet bases.
Also, “Health claims for power, energy, and immune-system boosts have not been evaluated by the FDA,” Chin says. “While research on supplemental ingredients has been promising, it is still way too early” to know if they will live up to the hype, she says.
And don’t be blind to the calories and fat in the sweet treats you pick up at such coffee spots as Starbucks, Chin says.
Overall, use common sense and restraint when eating on the run, Chin suggests. “Considering all nutritional aspects, fast-food meals should not be a recommended everyday activity.”
Staff writer Suzanne S. Brown can be reached at 303-820-1697 or sbrown@denverpost.com.
