Health magazine chose five restaurants to honor for making fast food a little healthier. While on the road this week, I had a chance to try a couple of the magazine’s selections. At Au Bon Pain (in Washington’s Union Station and other locations throughout the city) hungry travelers can choose between more than a dozen different little packages of marinated vegetables, crisp greens, cut-up fruit, lean meat and bits of flavorful cheese, all for less than 200 calories. I grabbed the smoked turkey, asparagus, cranberry chutney and gorgonzola package – about 10 flavorful bites for 140 calories. This is a good start, allowing customers to see a exactly how those bites add up. But I had a few questions: you can look at a couple of pieces of smoked turkey wrapped around asparagus and assume it’s pretty low-cal. Other choices are more ambiguous: Surrounding the perimeter of the restaurant were piles of gorgeous muffins, scones, bagels and cookies, chocolate-dipped shortbread, huge meat and cheese wraps and thick, beautiful sandwiches, each lacking any nutritional information. It would be easy for you to grab a cranberry walnut muffin, for example, thinking it a better calorie choice than, say, a breakfast quesadilla sandwich. You’d be right, but just barely (500 and 590 calories, respectively.) Au Bon Pain has a web site with lots of nutritional information, but only the low-calorie choices were labeled at the restaurant. This seems backwards to me.
People make bad choices partly because it’s so confusing to make the right ones.
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Such initiatives are realy welcome as junk food & unbalanced meals are found their ways to our plates.
This important:
- to have healthy choices available
- to know exactly how many calories are inside each thing we eat either at home or in restaurants
AO.