Eat Out Eat Well

Turn Your Nightmare Salad Into A Delicious Daydream

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If It Says Salad Does It Mean It’s Healthy?

Short answer:  No.  Maybe your salad is healthy and delicious, or maybe it’s just delicious and far from a healthy meal.

This is something I see all of the time:  You are in line at a buffet or waiting to order your meal in a cafeteria.  The person in front of you hems and haws over his or her choice – mumbling about trying to “be careful about calories.”  He or she then goes on to say, “Oh, I guess I’ll have a salad,” like it’s the best choice of “diet food” even though it’s not really what the belly and mind seem to be craving.

In the pursuit of cutting calories, the salad might be a far worse choice than, for example, a turkey or ham sandwich with mustard and veggies, or grilled chicken with veggies.

There are some very nice choices of healthy salads and there are some pretty bad choices, too.  In many cases you can do well or horribly in the same restaurant, depending on what you select to eat.

Here are some examples of fast/chain food salads — but remember that each is just one menu item.  In each restaurant you have plenty of other options.

Calorically Good To Reasonable Choices:

  • Panera Bread’s BBQ Chopped Chicken Salad, with mild BBQ sauce, no dressing (350 calories, 10g fat)
  • Wendy’s Chicken Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken Fillet, with home-style garlic croutons (490 calories, 32g fat)
  • McDonald’s Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken, without Creamy Southwest dressing (320 calories)
  • Burger King’s Tendergrill Chicken Garden Salad with Ken’s Ranch Dressing (490 calories, 30g fat)

Then there’s the:  “how many calories, you’ve got to be kidding” salads.

  • Outback Queensland Salad with Bleu Cheese Dressing (1075.8 calories, 81.6g fat)
  • Cosi Signature Salad (130 calories, 45g fat)
  • Ruby Tuesday’s Southwestern Beef Salad (1139 calories, 81g fat)
  • Wendy’s Southwest Taco Salad (680 calories, 39g fat)
  • Olive Garden’s Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad, without Caesar dressing (850 calories, 64g fat)

SocialDieter Tips:

If you are putting together your own salad at a salad bar – or making your own at home – here are some tips to keep your salad healthy and delicious.

  • Dressings are not just decorative – they can be disastrous. If you have enough flavorful stuff in your salad, you may not even need dressing.  If you do, the creamy stuff usually is more caloric (you can always dilute it with vinegar).  Most vinegar has almost no calories so pour it on.  There are many choices of light or calorie free dressings.  Most places glop on dressing – you’d be surprised how little you need for taste. A dieter’s trick is to ask for dressing on the side and dip your fork into the dressing before you snare a mouthful of salad.
  • Mayonnaise has around 90 calories a tablespoon.  Think about how much goes into chicken or tuna salad.  Use light mayo, mustard, or low fat yogurt instead.
  • Go for reduced fat or fat free cheese instead of liberally sprinkling on the full fat stuff. ¼ cup of reduced fat (2%) shredded cheddar has 80 calories, 6g fat, 7g protein; fat free feta has  40 calories, 0g fat, 7g protein.
  • If you are going out to order a salad order from a place that has low fat dressing choices and lean proteins (grilled chicken, tuna without mayo).  You can always use only half a package of salad dressing instead of a whole one.
  • Lay off the croutons and wontons.  Sure, they’re crunchy, but you’re not getting anything nutritious from them.  Get your crunch from carrots, cucumbers, or a very light sprinkling of sunflower seeds or nuts (caloric but healthy).
  • Salads with dark green lettuce and colorful vegetables add more vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals.
  • Make your salad more of a meal by adding lean proteins: poultry (grilled), seafood, a hardboiled egg, or beans. Add whole grains like brown rice or quinoa, without dressing, to really beef it up. Leftover lean proteins and veggies can be chopped up and added to salad the next day. Keep a supply of canned tuna, anchovies, and beans for quick calorie sparing protein additions.
  • Certain extras pile on calories.  You could have fries and a bacon cheeseburger for the same calories as a salad loaded with creamy dressing, shredded or crumbled cheese, bacon, avocado, mayonnaise salads, meat, nuts, and croutons. Instead, heap on tomatoes, asparagus, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, scallions, onions, mushrooms, peppers, cucumbers, arugula, spinach, and herbs. Olives add about 4 calories apiece – but, add an enormous amount of flavor and may help you forego dressing.
  • Check out the nutritional info before you order – and remember to add in the totals for dressing, croutons, and other “extras.”  Some municipalities currently require calorie counts to be posted in fast/chain food restaurants.  The new health care bill will require posting in fast/chain food restaurants with more than 20 outlets. Almost all chain restaurants list their nutritional stats online.

Is Your Salad A Nightmare?

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A Healthy Meal Or A Caloric Fat Fest?

It’s time for lunch or perhaps to pick up a bite for dinner on your way home.  It’s Monday after a weekend of a bit of overeating.  Time for something light and healthy.

How about a salad?  Here’s a chance for plenty of vegetables, other healthy stuff, and a chance to save some calories, too.  Yeah, right!!!  Think again and read on.

Wonderful Reasons To Have A Salad

There are a whole bunch of good reasons to chow down on a nice big salad.

  • It’s easy to make your own from the salad bar at the local market, to order one for delivery, or to rip open a bag of lettuce and plop a piece of grilled chicken on top.
  • The nutrient rich plant foods that make the base of a salad are high in antioxidants — especially the dark green and orange vegetables, and legumes.
  • Most of the vegetables are full of fiber – good for your cholesterol, your GI functioning, and as a way to feel fuller for a longer period of time.
  • Salads take a long time to eat – much longer than sandwiches or pizza that you can scarf down far more quickly.
  • Salads can look really appetizing and can cost very little (they can cost a lot, too, depending upon the add-ons).
  • Salads are a great way to recycle leftovers – just toss them in the mix.

Where’s The Nightmare?

Answer:  Hidden in the fatty and sneaky high caloric add-ons and dressing.

  • Generally, at least ¼ of a cup (frequently more) of dressing is added to a tossed salad. A ladle of creamy dressing has about 360 calories and 38g of fat (a cheeseburger’s worth).  Vinaigrette dressing, usually 3 parts oil to one part vinegar, adds its own fat blast.
  • Tuna, macaroni, and chicken salads, the holy grail of delis and salad bars, are loaded with mayonnaise, which of course, is loaded with fat.  On average (for a half cup):  chicken salad has 208 calories, 16g of fat; tuna salad  has 192 calories, 9g fat; tuna pasta salad has 397 calories, 9g fat; macaroni salad has 170 calories, 9g fat.
  • Cheese, please – or maybe not. For a 1/4 cup serving:  Shredded cheddar has 114 calories, 9g fat;  blue cheese has 80 calories, 6g fat;  feta has 75 calories, 6g fat.
  • Portions:  The calorie counts above are for ½ cup of salad, ¼ cup of cheese.  Those are pretty small portions.  Do you have that kind of restraint?
  • Croutons and Crispy Noodles: ¼ cup of plain croutons has 31 calories, 0g fat; 1 serving of  McDonald’s Butter Garlic Croutons  has 60 calories, 1g fat;  ¼ cup of crispy noodles has 74 calories, 4g fat
  • Dried cranberries: ¼ cup has 98 calories, 0g fat
  • Nuts and Seeds (1/4 cup): Sunflower seeds have 210 calories, 19g fat; chopped walnuts:  193 calories, 18g fat
  • Avocado (1/4 cup) have 58 calories, 5g fat
  • Bacon: 1 tablespoon of bacon bits has 25 calories, 2g fat
  • Bread (often used to sop up leftover dressing):  1 piece of French bread has  82 calories, 1g fat; 1 dinner roll has 78 calories, 2g fat
  • Dressing sopped up by the bread or roll:  lots of extra fat calories!

Should Salads Go On Your “Do Not Touch” List?

No way, absolutely not. The healthy stuff in salad tastes great, fills you up, and is good for you.  There are plenty of ways to cut down on the fatty and caloric add-ons and still end up with a really tasty meal.  There are even good choices in fast food and chain restaurants (and plenty of really, really bad ones).

SocialDieter Tip: don’t stop eating salad, just be aware of what add-ons and dressing can do.  Check my next post for some very helpful info on choosing and making salads and for the low down on a few fast and chain food “good” and “don’t even think about it” choices.

Can You Guess How Many Calories You Consume In A Day?

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How Many Calories Do You Eat In A Day?

If you don’t have a clue, you’re not alone.  A lot of us don’t know how to estimate the number of calories in a meal – and on top of that, according to a Cornell study, almost everyone consistently underestimates calories as the meal size gets larger.  Accuracy in estimating the number of calories we’ve eaten is determined by meal size, not the size of the person eating it.  The smaller the meal, the more accurate the estimation, the larger the meal and the more people eat, the less accurate they are in estimating the number of calories. To add insult to injury, Brian Wansink, author of the book, Mindless Eating, says, “When people are eating in a restaurant that they think is healthy, people grossly underestimate how much they eat by about 50 percent.” Ouch!!!

Posted Calorie Counts Go Big Time

The health care reform act (Public Law 111-148) contains a mandate for chain restaurants to list calorie counts on their menu boards and for calorie counts to be posted next to food sold in vending machines and in retail stores. Places with 20 or more nationwide locations have to post calorie counts “in a clear and conspicuous manner,” with “a succinct statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake.” The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 required the nutrition labels that you are used to seeing on food packages purchased in markets. That law exempted restaurants, the new law doesn’t. Some cities and states already have local laws requiring posted calorie counts. New York City was the first to require chain restaurants with more than 15 outlets to post calorie counts on their menu boards.

What Will The Labeling Law Do (or hope to do)?

Perhaps the new law will make us aware of what we’re eating and the food providers aware of what they’re serving. Improved food choices and better portion control – and menu offerings – will go along way toward healthy eating and weight management.  Associating a calorie count with a portion size and meal type (big, greasy sandwiches do have lots of calories) will help educate both adults and kids.  Then, perhaps, consumers will put pressure on food vendors to offer healthier choices.

Is Calorie Counting Hard To Do?

With the right tools, calorie counting isn’t difficult — although accuracy can be a challenge.  There are all kinds of tools, too.  There’s an array of books listing calorie counts and nutrients.  There are tons of websites and phone apps that can do it for you with a minimum of effort.  All packaged foods are required to have food labels and many prepared foods do as well.  Posted calorie counts will be a big help.  The biggest challenge is guesstimating the calories in restaurant and prepared food that doesn’t come under the calorie posting requirement.  This requires guessing portion sizes – or pulling out scales and measures in a restaurant – and also guessing about a dish’s ingredients and how heavy the hand is of the person pouring the oil and greasing the griddle in the kitchen.  The key is to accurately and completely write or log the accurate amount of food when you eat– not at the end of the day when it’s tough to remember the random handful of bar nuts or the snagged candy from someone’s desk.

SocialDieter Tip:

In his blog, Weighty Matters, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff calls calories “the currency of weight.” Calories are the most important factor regardless of whether you want to maintain, gain, or lose weight.  You can’t see calories, or touch them, or feel them. A dish of food doesn’t sit there and say I have 549 calories in me. Instead, calories can be downright elusive. Counting calories is work – but work that can take a minimum of effort once you get the hang of it and in the habit of doing it.  We don’t eat all that many different kinds of food.  By measuring and learning portion sizes, then looking up calorie counts, you soon will be able to reel off the calorie counts of the food you eat all of the time. There are plenty of visual aids to help with portion eyeballing – eventually you get pretty good at it.  Like so many other things, habits play a big role in what you eat, where you eat it, and how much of it you eat.  Your brain is on your side, however – it likes habits – they make life easier.  So, create some healthy new ones around evaluating the caloric content of what you eat.

Honestly, Do You Know What A Calorie Is?

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What the heck is a calorie?

Technically, it’s the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at one atmosphere of pressure.  (Aren’t you happy you now know that?)  When we talk about the Calories in food we’re actually talking about kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie).  It gets kind of confusing because food labels and diet plans rely on the word calorie.  Calorie with a capital C means kilocalories (sometimes you see kcal for kilocalories) but it frequently appears in the lower case form.

What’s The Purpose of Measuring Calories?

Humans get the energy necessary to survive from food — which powers us like gasoline for a car.  Food is made up of different nutritional components, or building blocks, each with a different amount of energy. These components, sometimes called macronutrients, are carbohydrates, protein, and fat.  A gram of carbohydrate contains 4 Calories, a gram of protein has 4 Calories, and a gram of fat has 9 Calories. (FYI, alcohol has 7 Calories per gram.)  So if you know how much carbohydrate, fat, and protein is in a food, you can figure out how many Calories, or how much energy, is in it.

How Many Calories Are In A Pound?

There are 3500 Calories in a pound.  If you take in 3,500 extra Calories your body stores it as a pound of fat – its way of saving energy for the next theoretical lurking famine. Your body needs a certain number of Calories to sustain itself  — for the energy used for metabolism and physiological activity.  If your body uses  3,500 calories more than you take in and use, you lose a pound.

Energy In And Energy Out

To keep in your body in balance and not lose or gain any weight, the magic formula is: energy in = energy out. If you take in (eat) the same number of calories that you burn (through activity and physiological processes) you maintain your weight.  If you eat more than you burn you gain weight, if you eat less than you burn, you lose weight.

Does The Type Of Calorie Make Any Difference?

SocialDieter Tip:  The short answer is NO.  When Calories are used as an energy source, it doesn’t matter whether they come from carbs, protein, fat, or alcohol.  When consumed they are converted to energy. If they’re not used for energy, they’re stored as fat. Understanding your body’s energy requirements can help you figure out your food choices. Your caloric needs are a product of your age, weight, gender, and amount of physical activity. (Any physical activity burns calories.  The average person (155 pounds) burns about 100 to 105 calories for every 2000 steps.)

Double Down: KFC Not Blackjack

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KFC’s One-Of-A-Kind Bunless Sandwich

D-Day:  April 12th, the premier day for KFC’s Double Down one-of-a-kind sandwich.  What is it?  A bunless sandwich made of two boneless white meat chicken filets stacked around two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese, and Colonel’s Sauce (mayonnaise based). As KFC says in its promo:  “this product is so meaty, there’s no room for a bun!”

Double Down, Two Ways

There are two versions of the Double Down: Original Recipe® or Grilled. According to KFC’s nutritional information:

Sandwich Calories Fat (g) Sodium (mg)
KFC Original Recipe® Double Down 540 32 1380
KFC Grilled Double Down 460 23 1430

Is This Accurate Nutritional Information?

Aside from raising the hair on the back of the necks of  health conscious eaters, the accuracy of the caloric listed count is being disputed. KFC says that the Double Down has 1,380 milligrams of salt and ten grams of saturated fat — already 60 per cent and 50 per cent, respectively, of the U.S. government’s recommended daily allowance. An analysis done by the Vancouver Sun estimates that the sandwich logs in at 1,228 calories and more than an entire day’s worth of the recommended allowance for fat, cholesterol, sodium, and protein. It is, what Kelly Brownell, director at Yale University’s Rudd Center For Food Policy And Obesity, calls a salt bomb. Men’s Health Food and Nutrition editor and co-author of “Eat This, Not That: Best and Worst Foods in America, says that “independent labs are estimating that it has around 1,200 calories and over 50 fat grams, based on what’s in the other KFC sandwiches.”

What Does This Nutritional Gamble Cost?

The Double Down costs $5 or $6.99 as a meal deal with fries and a soda.  In a marketing move — maybe to show community commitment, KFC says that all the buns that would have been used if Double Down was not bunless will be donated to help feed America’s homeless.  It is interesting that KFC, previously called Kentucky Fried Chicken, trying for a healthier image, changed their official name to KFC, taking out the prominent “fried” and offering grilled choices. What, then, is this fatty and salty menu item?

SocialDieter Tip:

Double down is high in fat, a good deal of it saturated, and a pillar of salt.  It may also be a caloric nightmare depending on which analysis is accurate.  It certainly is a cardiologist’s nightmare.  Who knows what additives there are in the preformed chicken filets, the processed cheese, bacon, and sauce?  There are other healthier options on the menu at KFC:

Grillled chicken:  190 cal, 6g fat, 1.5g sat fat, 550mg sodium

Tender Roast Sandwich (no sauce):  300 cal, 4g fat, 1.5g sat fat, 660mg sodium

Tender Roast (with sauce):  410 cal, 15g fat, 3g sat fat, 790mg sodium

Grilled Chicken Ceasar Salad (without dressing and croutons):  200 cal, 6g fat, 3g sat fat, 570mg sodium

KFC Creamy Parmesan Caesar dressing (1 pkg):  260 cal, 26g fat, 5g sat fat, 540mg sodium

Parmesan Garlic Croutons (1 pouch):  70 cal, 3g fat, 0g sat fat, 140mg sodium