Better than Florida vote counts, perhaps, but far from exact
As more and more restaurants volunteer, or are required, to post the calorie counts of their various offerings, it is only natural and prudent to wonder just how accurate these postings are. Not that your friendly local drive-through would con you on the numbers, but mass marketing strategies often involve bending the truth a wee bit.
Some nutritionists at Tufts University decided to look into this, and conducted a caloric analysis of menu items from 10 chain restaurants in the Boston area. As a kind of control study, they conducted the same tests on a sample of “diet friendly” frozen supermarket meals from the likes of Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine.
The general findings: 29 of the fast food menu items tested contained more calories than they claimed, by an average of 18 percent, while the frozen supermarket meals had an average of 8 percent more calories than their labels stated. Individually, the discrepancies ranged from P.F. Chang’s large Sichuan-style asparagus, which had more than twice the 200 calories claimed, to the Domino’s large thin-crust cheese pizza, which actually had one-third fewer calories than the stated 180 per serving.
It may not be deliberate, but that’s not much help if you’re a strict calorie counter
All in all, the results did not particularly trouble the researchers, who ascribed most of the calorie-gaps to normal variations in portion sizes and ingredients, often coming down to a teenage food preparer being a bit heavy handed with the mayo or cheese sauce or gravy.
Fast-food outlets that prepare items to order are especially vulnerable to caloric inconsistency, as are those that use local vendors for bread and dairy and other food items.
As for the frozen supermarket meals, their 8 percent overage is well within the 20 percent range allowed them by the Food and Drug Administration, a fact to bear in mind when comparing such “low-cal” products.
The conclusion of the experts seems to be that all calorie statements, whether on fast-food menus or supermarket packaging, should be regarded merely as approximations. A wise move may simply be to automatically add 10 to 20 percent to any calorie number in question. But if you really want to follow a calorie-certain diet, you’re going to have to prepare the food yourself.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Just how accurate are those posted fast-food calorie amounts?