Exactly. From the list up there, both eggs & shellfish do have cholesterol, but it hasn’t been proven they will actually raise your levels of bad cholesterol.
As purely anecdotal evidence, I eat eggs and shellfish all the time, and my cholesterol levels are fabulous. Vegetables are also carbs, but would most people say vegetables are bad for you?
I think restaurants should be able to serve whatever food they want - it’s up to the consumer to decide what they want to eat. Just because someone eats healthy 95% of the time doesn’t mean they don’t want a deep-fried burger topped with a wedge of cheese, and sandwiched between two Krispy Kremes every blue moon.
I do think they should have to disclose what’s in it though. Sure, it’s easy enough to say, “Of course fast food burgers and deep fried restaurant foods are bad for you!”, but the supposedly healthy stuff at restaurants have a lot of hidden ingredients, too. I’d at least like to know if the veggies I ordered are going to come slathered in butter, or if that baked potato is going to be loaded, even though it doesn’t say it on the menu.
I can see where having a rough estimate of calories might help diners make more informed choices, and I’d be all for that if that’s where it stopped.
I’m afraid that human nature will intervene and people who are outraged that their favorite salad has 1500 calories will pressure the restaurant to make their favorite salad have only 150 calories, at the expense of the original flavor of the salad.
Now I go to the restaurant maybe once a month, expecting to get my decadent pleasure salad (or any other tasty dish that I like as a infrequent treat) and am told that they no longer have that item, would I like the bean sprouts tossed in spring water instead. No, I came here for the Death Salad.
I do almost all of my own cooking. I eat almost zero fast food. When I go to a good restaurant, I want the flavor bomb. Am I enjoying an unhealthy meal? Maybe, probably. Would I order the same thing if the calories were posted? Absolutely. Would I try to influence the restaurant to compromise their recipe? Absolutely not.
I don’t really want to get into a political debate, but I’ve heard rumblings of a “soda tax”, or something like that, to help pay for universal health care. If calories are posted, is it unreasonable to imagine that the government might try to get involved with the menu options? Certainly sir, here is your Death Salad, that comes to $78.95 with tax. Or I can get the bean sprouts tossed in spring water for $1.98 and chug a pint of Haagen Dazs on the way home and avoid the tax. Just as unhealthy, just as much my personal decision, I’m just as much an added risk to the healthcare system as Death Salad guy.
So I don’t know. On the surface, it sounds like good intentions. In my Death Salad stuffed gut, I think it’ll be misused eventually.
No, restaurants should serve whatever high calorie item they can make a profit off. If they can profit off people not giving a shit about their health, so be it.
However, I would support any regulation, local or federal, requiring restaurants to provide, on demand, nutritional information and ingredients of what they serve. Seeing as how they have specifically chosen to keep consumers uninformed*, it appears that in the interest of consumers, the government should step in. That is, after all, it’s job.
I no longer eat at TGI Friday’s because the company refuses to provide nutritional information, making it impossible for me to meet my own nutritional goals if I dined there. Yes, sometimes I like to splurge a little, but having nutritional information at least allows me to make informed choices about how much splurging I can do.
I don’t really care, but I do think they should be clear and up front about the contents of whatever they are giving you.
Generally you can guess but some things should be made clear so you know what you’re putting into your body.
Wait, half? The Canada Food Guide suggests 2000 as a reasonable daily caloric intake for the average adult. A 2310 calorie single-serving dessert item is insane.
Nitpick - as someone who is counting calories, I still don’t believe that I ‘should order’ the choice with the lowest calorie count. The difference between those two items is very small, and I can certainly see how someone might find the chicken mcgrill more satisfying than a fairly small hamburger.
I have my target as 2500 calories per day at the moment (in conjunction with walking at least one hour per day for exercise,) and my usual choice if I go to mcDonalds lately is:
6 mcnuggets (310 calories)
medium fries (360 calories)
1 pack sweet and sour sauce (50 calories)
bottled water (0)
That adds up to 720, about 30% of my daily goal.
And yes, I definitely support anything that would make nutritional information more available, and not just on websites.
Just to clarify, a McDonalds’ “regular hamburger” is not a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder. The reason it has less Calories than the chicken sandwich is that it’s about half the size of most of their sandwiches. Sure, some foods have more or less Calories than others, but the biggest determiner of how many Calories something has is just its size.
Back to the OP’s idea, even if restaurants had no single item above X Calories, you could still order an appetizer, a side salad, a sugary drink, and a dessert with your main course, and get yourself way too many Calories anyway.
They have the same rule here. Opening up the menu at the Cheesecake factory was not a good moment.
As no one is stopping them from selling a 3000 calorie item or stopping me from buying it, I don’t think it’s that interfering. Now, I have to take the responsibility for the fact that I ate all those calories. If anything, it’s putting the responsibility back on me. That Burgerville receipt is awesome, too bad their food isn’t.
As someone with IBD, I would love to know if foods contain one or more of my triggers before I order them…and especially before I eat them, and before my body reacts to them. One of my triggers is black pepper, and sometimes I can eat some without triggering an attack, and sometimes I can’t, but I’d love to know if some dish contains it, so I can avoid it if my bowels have been particularly touchy lately.
And, of course, anyone with a food allergy needs to also know this, even more than I do.