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February 21, 2007 | Issue 104 |
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Restaurant Dining: Beyond Trans Fats
Though it’s great that New York City has banned the use of artery-damaging trans fats in its restaurants and companies like Starbucks have done the same, don’t be fooled into thinking that trans-fat-free menu choices are necessarily healthy.
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“A claim like ‘trans-fat-free’ doesn’t tell you the whole story,” explains Jeffrey Novick, RD, MS, Director of Nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center. “It’s never a good idea to evaluate a product based on one item. Remember ‘fat-free’ foods that were full of sugar and calories? To be truly healthy, a menu choice must pass several criteria, as you learned in label reading class at Pritikin.”
Troublesome, too, are the ingredients that some restaurant chefs are replacing trans fats with, like butter or lard. They are just as artery-damaging as trans fats. Often, too, the calorie content of a menu item hasn’t changed.
In short, cautions registered dietitian Jeffrey Novick, “you can still do harm to your arteries – as well as gain weight – by eating foods marketed as ‘trans fat free.’”
Never before has it been so important that we watch what we eat when dining out simply because we dine out a lot. According to a report in 2006 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called “Let’s Eat Out,” Americans now get a whopping 32% of their daily calories from restaurant food, up from just 18% in the 1970s.*
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Numerous studies, including the USDA report, have shown that the more we eat out, the fatter we get. No surprise, really. Restaurant fare tends to be far more calorie-rich than foods prepared at home partly because of richer, calorie-laden ingredients but also because portion sizes are often huge.
The unhealthiest of Asian-style restaurants in the U.S. are Thai restaurants. That’s because Thai-American chefs often cook with coconut milk, which is very high in saturated fat. (In Thailand, food is usually cooked, not with coconut milk, but with soybean or peanut oil.)
Many restaurant foods, especially soups and sauces, are also loaded with sodium, which increases the risk of a multitude of diseases, including high blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease.
To eat out more healthfully, here are five tips, from Dr. Gayl Canfield’s “Dining Out” workshop at the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa.
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Copyright 2007 Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa. All rights reserved.
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Pritikin Perspective - Healthy Living Made Easier
Pritikin Perspective is a publication for Alumni of the Pritikin Longevity Center. It is dedicated to helping people make healthy changes in their lives. The articles in this publication should not be considered specific medical advice, as each individual circumstance is different. You are strongly encouraged to seek medical advice before beginning a program of diet and exercise.
Editor/Writer: Eugenia Killoran.
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