What’s Your Kid Really Eating?
Have you ever looked at the nutritional information for restaurant meals, even kid’s meals that sound healthy (such as pasta with a tomato-based sauce)? I’ve always been shocked by just how fattening and high-calorie some of these meals are, as I discussed a while back about the nutritional values of children’s meals. I don’t plan to give my 5-year-old a meal that has 1,200 calories and 40 grams of fat, but it’s certainly possible to do.
Still, you presume you can at least depend on what the restaurant states is the nutritional information. Maybe you shouldn’t.
If you regularly eat out with your kids, be sure to see a great investigative report, “What’s On the Menu?” from ABC’s Phoenix station. They tested meals from various restaurants that are described as diet or healthy.
Here is just a sampling of the findings:
- Chili’s Guiltless Grill Salmon, which is supposed to have 14 grams of fat and 480 calories, showed in testing that it had 35 grams of fat and 664 calories.
- Taco Bell’s Fresco Grilled Steak Soft Taco is advertised as having 4.5 grams of fat and 160 calories, but the station’s testing showed it had 19.6 grams of fat and 297 calories.
Considering the childhood obesity epidemic we currently have, it’s important to be as educated as possible about the foods children eat. It is especially disconcerting that a child might order a dish that is described as diet or “guiltless” only to scarf down as many calories and fat grams as they would find in a typical fast food joint meal.
[…] My recent post, “What’s Your Kid Really Eating?” showed that we parents really need to think twice before we order our children food at a restaurant. In that, I cited an investigation that showed restaurant meals often had more calories and higher fat content than advertised. But that got me really thinking about the subject, because many times I eat out with the kids and look for kids’ meals that sound healthy. […]