Strive for balance when eating out

Restaurant food has increasingly become a major part of the average American’s daily diet — one meal out of three daily meals is now eaten outside of the home.

But even as people are eating out more, the National Restaurant Association has also noted an increasing number of adults (nearly 75 percent of customers) expressing a preference for healthier food choices, compared to two years ago.

In some ways, legislators are helping them get the information they need to make better decisions about their restaurant food. New York City banned the use of trans fats in the city’s restaurants, and since then many other major cities (eight, at last count) have passed similar legislation. Recently, California legislated a statewide ban on trans fats.

More recently, the New York City board of health required fast-food restaurants (characterized by have standard methods of food preparation) and similar food service establishments to place calorie information right on their menus to enable customers to check the nutrition analyses and calorie content before they order.

Seattle is requiring chain restaurants by next year to post information about calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium content on their menus. Similar legislations have been proposed in many other cities and states.

It is doubtless beneficial that health consciousness is being legislated, and that restaurants are also becoming more aware of the need to offer healthy options. Still, the benefits of these initiatives will actually happen to individuals only if they do ask for healthier food.

Some things consumers can do to support these health-oriented initiatives:

* Avoid over-dressing health foods. You may choose healthful food, like baked potato, a salad, or whole grain pasta. But if you over-dress these foods, you’ll be adding mounds of extra calories, fat and sodium anyway. For example, one baked potato by itself (168 calories, 0 fat, plus 14 mg sodium) is great for a healthy meal, but adding sour cream and bacon bits (just 1 tablespoon each) increases your intake to 227 calories, 4 g fat, plus 144 mg sodium. Or, adding just 2 tablespoons of Caesar dressing to your romaine lettuce (2 cups = 16 calories, 0 fat, 8 mg sodium) boosts your total intake to 160 calories, 17 g fat and 325 mg sodium.

* Beware of portion sizes. Though the food may be healthful, the portion sizes on entrees may continue to be massive. Perhaps you can have half of the order boxed, or share it with someone, or instead of ordering the entrée, you could downsize the order.

* Strive for balance. You may want to look for restaurants which have learned to “flip” their plate contents. Essentially, protein flipping means reducing protein to a secondary role (down to one-third) and making vegetables and carbohydrates the primary role (up to two-thirds).