If you’re like me, you’re probably trying to lose some weight. Everyone tells me that this means no more going out to restaurants. Restaurant meals are diet booby traps because you don’t really know what ingredients went into your meal and the amount of food you get is usually way more than anyone should eat at one sitting.
This is all changing rapidly as more and more restaurants are now including nutritional information right on their menus. In some states, this is mandated by law and in others the more forward thinking restaurants are taking it on themselves to be up-front about what you’re getting in that lasagna you just ordered.
In many restaurants it’s now becoming common to see a wealth of detailed information on menus such as calorie counts, sodium levels and amount of saturated fats. Now, along with the ingredients that went into your lasagna you can also see how much salt you’re taking in as well. You have to be a little careful though to make sure that just because it says “low fat” next to a menu item that there isn’t a high level of other undesirable ingredients such as sodium or cholesterol. Low fat is a good idea but not if it’s at the expense of other nutritional goals.
Food makers have responded to the requests for more labeling information with some creative marketing campaigns that you should watch out for. Putting “low fat” or “low sodium” on packages of food that never contained fat or sodium is somewhat misleading to people who think they’re now getting a superior product. Claims of the healthy benefits of package ingredients with only sketchy amounts of supporting evidence is also unfortunately becoming common.
The goal of all this increase in information is to make consumers more aware of what they’re eating and how healthy their food choices are. This effort seems to be succeeding, too. The Food and Drug Administration did a survey of health and diet in 2008 that seems to indicate that people are becoming much more label savvy. Over half of the people surveyed answered that they read nutritional labels in the grocery store and almost 40% of respondents claimed that they weren’t fooled by spurious claims of “low fat” or “high fiber”.
Business owners in the food and beverage industry are now getting clued in to the benefits of consumer education to their bottom lines as well. The recognition that giving the customer what they want by offering specialty menu items that appeal to people who had few choices in the past is helping to drive up sales. This works out well for the customer and it’s good for the business as well.
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