Do We Really Want to Know?

In the grocery store, there are nutrition labels on everything from soup to frozen pizza, but what about the foods we buy in restaurants?

You can spend a little time and look online to find some nutritional and calorie counts for fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Taco Bell, but other fast food restaurants like Taco Time refuse to list their information online anymore because of New York City’s restrictions on trans-fats that require restaurants to post their nutritional information on site.

But do we really want to know what we are eating when we dine someplace other than a fast food restaurant? If you knew that the pasta you ordered had 27 grams of fat and 900 calories, would you order it? How about 45 grams of salt for that Chinese stir fry?

Watching what I eat from calories to fat grams is a natural part of my day, so when I eat out it would be great to have a way to gauge what I was ordering. As a cream sauce junkie, I usually just place my order and enjoy my meal out. Then in an attempt to counteract my mystery meal, I eat salad and veggies for the rest of the week.

Perhaps having quick nutritional counts (calories, fat, sodium, etc) printed directly on all menus would help American’s make better choices as more than 133 million of us eat out everyday. Maybe if we knew the facts of what we were eating, we wouldn’t be so quick to order a 1,200 calorie “salad.”