'Healthy' Restaurants Not Necessarily Good For Health

Of course not.

"If you're like most, you eat worst at healthy restaurants.

The 'health halos' of healthy restaurants often prompt consumers to treat themselves to higher-calorie side dishes, drinks or desserts than when they eat at fast-food restaurants that make no health claims, according to a series of new Cornell studies.

The research, published in the October online version of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that many people also tend to underestimate by 35 percent just how many calories those so-called healthy restaurant foods contain."

These folks are late out of the gate as we have been alerting people to this for years, including deaf and dumb politicians.

NAAAFP, the National Association for the Acceptance and Advancement of Fit People, has called for an end to the misleading and inappropriate use of the term "healthy" as it is currently applied to food.

"'We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy, such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131 percent more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald's, that don't make this claim,'...

'In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at McDonald's,'...Since it takes an energy imbalance of 3,500 calories to put on one pound, that extra 159 calories could lead to almost a 5-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway twice a week compared with choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's with the same frequency..

These studies, he says, help explain why lower-calorie menus at fast-food restaurants have not led to the expected reduction in total calorie intake and in obesity rates."

However, their proposed solution: "...that public policy efforts help people to better estimate the number of calories in foods," will meet with real resistance as innumeracy will always trump efforts at "estimat(ing) the number of calories in foods."

The better approach is to cut-off the fat from the ever strengthening safety nets the rest of us pay for.