America's Best and Worst Restaurants
from Men's Health
We're fighting a battle for our waistlines. Here's the lowdown on our allies—and our enemies
By Clint Carter, Posted Date: December 18, 2010
Walking into a restaurant these days is like stepping onto a nutritional minefield. Safe passage is elusive, and dangers abound on all sides: sandwiches made with fried chicken instead of bread, pasta that packs over 1,500 calories in a single bowl. The edible enemies that hide in the shadows, masquerading as wholesome dishes, are even worse. The danger of a misstep? An exploding waistline.
The fact is, most restaurants are dangerous to your health. Every meal we eat out adds an average of 134 calories to our daily intake. And if you eat out as often as the average American man does (at least three times a week), those calories could tack on at least 6 pounds of mass every single year. Let's be clear: That's flab—not muscle. And if you eat out more, you gain more.
So what's the solution? We're not going to give up restaurants anytime soon. In 2009, 49 percent of the money the average American spent on food went toward dining out—that's about nine times what we spent in 1975. We're also not interested in spending our hard-earned cash on bland diet fare. A 2009 consumer research report found that even though most of us want to see healthier items on menus, only 20 percent of us actually order food based on nutritional considerations—probably because few of the options billed as "healthy" are as appealing as the other choices. Restaurants need to offer alternatives that are not only good for you, but also tasty enough to rival the calorie bombs ticking alongside them.
And that's where this list comes in. We're naming the best restaurant chains, the ones that make scoring a healthy meal a deliciously easy task. We're also exposing the worst ones, where finding a decent entree is an achievement worthy of a bloodhound. Follow our lead, and you'll enjoy the tastiest lean meals from America's biggest restaurants—and save your waistline and tastebuds from mutually assured destruction.
Seafood Place
Best: Red Lobster
Red Lobster not only ranks highest in the seafood category, but our nutritional analysis also taps Red Lobster as the best all-around sit-down restaurant. And it's not just the Lobster's abundance of heart-healthy seafood that helps it edge out the competition. See, even though seafood chains like Bubba Gump's and Captain D's also offer fish prepared in healthier ways, their options are typically limited to just a few varieties of seafood. At Red Lobster, on the other hand, you can always order any one of a dozen or more varieties of fish on the menu. And the chain relies primarily on simple cooking techniques, like broiling, blackening, and wood-fire grilling, to accentuate the fresh flavor. One caveat: Unless you order from the Fresh Fish Menu, expect a heavy dose of sodium. Sorry, can't win 'em all.
Top Pick
Blackened Rainbow Trout with Fresh Broccoli and Coleslaw
610 calories
34 grams (g) fat
830 milligrams (mg) sodium
Rainbow trout is a sustainable fish with low contamination levels. Wood-fired or broiled both work fine, but ask for it blackened—you'll enjoy a robust coat of smoky spice without extra calories.
Worst: Long John Silver's
It's fitting that this seafood chain was named after a nefarious pirate. Long John is perhaps the biggest villain in the restaurant industry. Why? Because of the restaurant's preferred method of cooking seafood: boiling nearly everything in a hot bath of partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
That means any heart-health benefit you might receive from the seafood is negated by a boatload of nasty trans fats. Order a Fish Combo Basket and you've just dropped a 12.5-gram trans fat mortar shell right into the depths of your belly.
Survival Strategy
If it's fried, you don't want it. You can head off the relentless trans fat assault (and save on calories) by ordering from the Freshside Grille menu, which pairs grilled seafood—salmon, tilapia, or shrimp scampi—with rice and vegetables.
Want more Men's Health? Subscribe today and get 2 Risk-Free Trial Issues
click the numbers for more...
No comments:
Post a Comment