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1 February 2010
The Real Truth About Calorie Counts:
Packaged Foods, Restaurant Meals and Accuracy
Susan Rodrigues
If you can't figure out why you're not losing more weight? Or why you're gaining despite your best attempts? It all boils down to one reason: The calorie counts of restaurants and packaged foods are incorrect -- sometimes wildly so. And it's playing havoc with your sincere attempts to stay healthy, burn fat and build muscle.
Imagine walking into a restaurant, ordering a healthy meal based on the calorie and nutritional counts supplied by the establishment only to discover later that the estimated information was wrong -- woefully wrong.
Imagine pulling a packaged food from your shelves making it for yourself and maybe your family, confident that its contents are within the day's calories and nutritional needs. Now you've discovered that the information on the label grossly underestimated the number of calories you're consuming.
Impossible? Hardly. It may have already happened to you -- without you even realizing it. No wonder you're not losing weight, burning fat or building muscle like you thought you should be!
Consider this. The calorie counts provided on the labels of the packaged foods we eat and the estimated counts provided by restaurants may not be accurate. And they could be off from a minimum of eight to 18 percent!
That's if a new study, published in the Journal of the American Diabetic Association, is correct. But that's only half the story. The kicker is that this large variation in actual calorie counts aligns quite nicely with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines. Now, what's up with that?
The study took meals from 29 restaurants and 10 frozen-food products. All meals were those that were intended to appeal to the weight conscious. The frozen food claimed to contain 500 or fewer calories. The restaurant meals were among the lowest-calorie containing foods on the menus. Researcher Susan Roberts, professor of nutrition at Tufts University, took the meals back to the laboratory for analysis . . .
On average, she found the restaurant meals underestimated the calorie count by 18 percent. The frozen foods were approximately underestimated by eight percent.
Now, before you shrug off that eight percent. Let's do some math. If the entrée is 500 calories, then you're only receiving an extra 40 calories. Remember, up until now, you didn't know that it existed. But over the course of a year, if unaccounted for, it can spell a 10-pound weight gain for a person restricting themselves to a 2,000-calorie die.
According the FDA, calorie counts on packaged foods can be off by as much as 20 percent and still meet their requirements.
Restaurant meals don't fall under the umbrella of FDA inspection, so the individual states regulate these. And the results are, at best, spotty. "It is really the Wild West when it comes to this," Roberts said. "When state inspectors do visit, they have other issue to worry about -- like making sure there are no mouse droppings in the kitchen."
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