"Calories are a questionable proxy for deciding what's worse for you."  Exactly.  Until you start talking about what else is in the meal - fat content, protein, etc - you can't judge a meal just on calories.

And I'm no big believer that sugar is evil (except for maybe HFCS).  Yes that smoothie may have more sugar than a chocolate frosted donut, but it probably has 0 grams of fat compared to the 2 grams in the donut.  How about bagels?  A bagel with cream cheese can pack a whopping 13 grams of fat and twice the calories of a donut.

Overall I agree with the message though. All restaurants should do better at letting you know exactly what you are eating.  But expecting to eat a healthy meal at just about any chain restaurant is foolish, and hopefully if you are an adult you've learned that you can't trust ads or marketing to tell you the truth.  

Consider this fact: a gram of fat has 9 calories versus 4 calories per gram for protein or carbohydrates.  So any meal or food serving that is high in calories, is probably high in fat and unhealthy.

Healthy food tends to be low in calories so calorie count data (which is more often known than any other measure) is a fairly good quick & dirty measure of the healthiness of what we eat.

cmello

Ron Michael,

I agree with your last statement that "hopefully if you are an adult you've learned that you can't trust ads or marketing to tell you the truth". Its very surprising that many people - even adults have do believe those unhealthy fast food ad's -.

Recently I was watching TV in the evening, - prime time - and I saw that most of the commercials were showing foods that were - crap! I see so many American adults, eating fast foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Then they complain about health issues. - gosh, maybe if they did not treat their bodies as a dumping ground for foods that have no value, their bodies would not be in such a bad sharp!

Common sense seems too difficult to practice!

I hate to be the one to say it but this falls in the category of consumer responsibility. In no way should a restaurant be required to say "Here's your menu, and by the way this has so many calories/fat/etc." The only one who has any real affect on your diet is yourself. So stop whining because your burger was high fat and they didn't tell you (did you think to ask?) and ride your bike to work. You need to attend your own health rather than expecting someone else to do it for you.

... and it's not just fast food. The restaurant, the grocery store, everywhere we go we are presented with industrial products that resemble food, but aren't. Ultra-refined parts of wheat, corn and soy are combined into substances that constantly strain our systems, resulting in, among other things, nearly 1 in 5 of us having diabetes by the time we're 60. It's time we stopped going along with it, and started eating real food.

lifelovefood.com