Restaurant Meals Have Very High Calorie Content, Study Finds

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Fast food meals have always been blamed for helping cause Americans to be either overweight or obese. However, a new study has found that 92 percent of meals served by either chain or nonchain restaurants have very high calorie contents, sometimes even exceeding the recommended daily caloric requirements.

The findings, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, suggest that this is because of the huge serving sizes that restaurant meals have.

“Although fast-food restaurants are often the easiest targets for criticism because they provide information on their portion sizes and calories, small restaurants typically provide just as many calories, and sometimes more,” senior author Susan B. Roberts, Ph.D., director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University in Boston, said in a press release.

The researchers analyzed the calorie contents of 364 frequently ordered meals taken from 123 different restaurants in Boston, San Francisco and Little Rock, Ark. The researchers ordered meals from different cuisines including American, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai and Vietnamese.

Time reported that the meals were taken to a lab, frozen in bags and then shipped to Boston. Once there, the researchers blended the meals up, freeze-dried, pulverized them into a powder and then analyzed their calorie contents.

The researchers found that some meals exceeded the recommended amount of calories for one whole day. The meals had 1,205 calories on average, which is about half of what is recommended for a typical person for a day. They also found that there is but a little difference between the calories contained in both chain and nonchain restaurant meals.

Overall, 92 percent of the meals exceeded the amount of calories recommended for a single meal, which the researchers set at 570. They also found that meals from American, Chinese and Italian cuisines had the highest amount of calories, averaging 1,495 calories each.

The researchers note that it's not about what is in the food but rather the serving size that matters – and the amount of self-control needed to stop eating when one already had too much.

“Standard meals are sized for the hungriest customers, so most people need superhuman self-control to avoid overeating,” said co-author William Masters, Ph.D., professor of food economics at Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Masters added that women need to be more careful.

“There is a gender dimension here that is really important: women typically have a lower caloric requirement than men, so on average need to eat less,” Masters explained. “Women, while dining out, typically have to be more vigilant.”