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Chain Restaurants Fail to Meet Federal Nutrition Guidelines

Researchers say nearly all entrees they reviewed at 245 U.S. chains fail to meet USDA rules for the combination of calories, sodium, fat and saturated fat.

By Marcus Williams, BlackDoctor.org

Posted: 05/21/2012 11:38 AM EDT

Filed Under Health News, nutrition

Plenty of restaurants have been advertising their efforts to offer healthful choices, and it’s possible to eat carefully just about anywhere. But researchers say nearly all the entrees they reviewed at 245 U.S. chains fail to meet federal guidelines.

Think about it, and you can figure out some likely culprits: burgers with cheese, bacon and sauce; pastas with four cheeses and sausages; outsize servings of meat; salads covered in fatty, salty dressings.

For a study published online in the journal Public Health Nutritionn, researchers looked at the nutritional content of 30,923 menu items, including those from children’s menus, from 245 brands of restaurants. They found that 96% of them failed to meet recommendations for the combination of calories, sodium, fat and saturated fat set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The restaurants included fast-food, buffet, takeout, family style and upscale restaurants, said Helen Wu, one of the authors and an assistant policy analyst at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. The study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The majority of the entrees did not exceed 667 calories – one-third of the calories the USDA estimates the average adult needs each day, said Wu and Roland Sturm, senior economist at Rand. They looked at restaurants’ websites from February to May 2010.

But they found that few of the entrees met recommended limits when considering calories, sodium, saturated fat, and fat combined.

“Many items may appear healthy based on calories, but actually can be very unhealthy when you consider other important nutrition criteria,” Wu said.

The sodium count often put a restaurant over the limit. (The USDA’s daily recommended limit for most adults is 2,300 milligrams.)

For more on chain restaurants and health guidelines, visit BlackDoctor.org.

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