THE ARTICLE
A super-sized burger and fries will never be your path to a slimmer waist, but nowadays many fast-food chains are offering healthy-eating menus in an effort to attract more customers. Are these options a viable and safe way to lose weight, especially for those who lack the time to prepare their own meals?
Several fast-food chains have begun to introduce low-fat "healthy" choices in their menus.
One of the chains that for some time has promoted their products as being a healthy dieting option is Subway. As long as customers don't load up on high-fat condiments, Subway claims that the majority of its sandwiches are low calorie. They even have a line of "Fresh Fit" subs in the 230-380 calorie range.
Taco Bell has brought out what it calls the "Fresco" menu consisting of seven options, which include burritos and tacos, all of which come with less than 9 grams of fat. Compare that to the 31 grams of fat for their Express Taco Salad or the staggering 62 grams of fat for the Volcano Nachos.
Unfortunately, both Subway's Low Fat and Taco Bell's Fresco menus don't hold up so well in other measures of healthy eating such as sodium intake. The Fresco burritos, for example, contain between 1290-1410 mg of sodium. Subway's Low Fat Footlongs (not including the Veggie Delite®) are between 1490-2400 mg of sodium!
Considering that the recommended daily allowance for sodium is around 2400 mg for healthy adults, two Fresco meals a day or just one Low Fat Footlong will end up pushing your daily sodium intake well past healthy levels. You might very well lose weight on these diets but they may serious repercussions on your health.
Dr. Stephen Sinatra, a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and former Chief of Cardiology at Manchester Memorial Hospital, calls the 1,410 mg of sodium in the Fresco Burrito Supreme Chicken "a disaster."
"With fast food you get the good, the bad and the ugly. It's like weaving your way through the minefield. You can step on a mine and blow up" says Dr. Sinatra.
A study published in the January edition of The New England Journal of Medicine suggested that reducing salt intake even by small amounts decreases the chance of heart disease and stroke by the same amount as losing weight, lowering cholesterol and quitting smoking.
One of the reasons that low-fat offerings at fast-food restaurants are often salty is because the sodium "makes things taste good", according to Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, the lead author of this study and an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California in San Francisco.
Although most fast-food chains don't explicitly state that their reduced-fat meals are diet plans, the implication is still there. "Making it seem like a fast food restaurant is a place to go when you're trying to lose weight, and making the restaurant itself seem healthier than it really is a violation of the public trust," says Dr. Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.
According to Ruth Carey, a consultant for Taco Bell and a registered dietician, Taco Bell does not contain any trans fats in its offerings and four of the seven Fresco menu items contain 350 mg of sodium or less. She added, "also, not everyone is sodium sensitive and has high blood pressure." This may true but since overweight people form a significant portion of the clientele for these "healthier" meals, high levels of sodium pose a significant risk for the intended audience.
Another concern for those seeking healthy ways to cut down on fact is the fact that nutritional information is being under-reported. In a study to be published in the January edition of The Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers found that 29 Boston chain restaurants and 10 frozen meals from supermarkets under-reported the amount of calories their food contained by an average of 18 percent.
The lead author of the study, Susan Roberts of Tufts University, spent 10 days on a diet aimed toward losing weight, a diet which consisted of a variety of foods but included one fast-food meal per day. She was unable to shed weight on this diet and believes that fast food and commercially prepared meals were to blame.
The advice from nutritionists: be careful of what the fast-food industry claims in terms of healthy, reduced-calorie, and low-fat meals. "Even if they’re offering healthy fare, go into it with a wary eye — more likely they’re tricking you," said Elizabeth Somer, a registered dietician and author of "Eat Your Way to Happiness". She adds, "the fast-food restaurants have not led the troops in healthy eating yet, so there’s no reason to believe they’re going to change their colours now."
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