When you go shopping, you start out with a certain amount of cash in your wallet (or ATM account!). Your goal? Get as much as you can for as little cash as possible. You’re hunting for bargains.

When it comes to making food choices, you should be a “bargain” shopper, too. No, we are not talking about a grocery cart full of 99-cent ramen noodles. The bargains we mean are “caloric bargains.”

Think of your daily calorie allotment as the same as the money in your wallet. Each day, you only have a certain amount of calories you can “spend” on your food allotment. So you want to spend your calories wisely on low-calorie, nutritious foods. What are “caloric bargain” foods?  Generally, foods that are minimally processed and rich in fiber or have a lot of water. For example:

•    Fruits - fresh, frozen, and canned without added sugar or syrup
•    Vegetables – especially high water content vegetables such as tomatoes, greens, squash
•    Whole grain pastas, rice, cereals (ready-to-eat and cooked) and breads
•    Very lean meat, poultry and fish
•    Nonfat dairy products
•    Broth-based soups

Remember, not all low-calorie foods are nutritious. Take jelly beans for example. Ten jelly beans have only 103 calories. But other than a simple carbohydrate, sugar, the jelly beans don’t provide any nutrients. Not all high-nutrition foods are low in calories either. The avocado, for example, is a wonderfully nutritious fruit packed with healthy oils, vitamins, and minerals but a medium avocado has 306 calories.  

We’re not saying you should never eat these foods, just in moderation. Spend most of your daily calories on the “caloric bargains” described previously.  

What are “caloric bargain” foods that you like?

 

If every person living in New York City chose a McDonald’s cheeseburger instead of a Big Mac for lunch today, they would save over 1.9 billion calories — IN ONE DAY! That’s equal to about 274 tons of body fat. Can you see why the NYC public health department has just legislated the listing of calorie counts on restaurant menus? Read the full article.
 
While this is a great step, we argue that this is only part of the solution. The other part is that people need to know what their daily calorie limit is so that they can know how a 1,420 calorie lunch fits – or not – into their total calorie allotment for the day. Let’s look at this more closely:

A man walks into a Burger King in Chicago. He orders the combo meal with the Whopper, large fries and a large soft drink. Grand total: 1,550 calories. He doesn’t even have a clue that he just ate 74% of his total daily calories in one meal.

A second man walks into a Burger King New York City. This restaurant lists the calories of each food item on the menu board. He sees that the Junior Whopper, medium fries, and a medium soft drink all have fewer calories than the big combo meal. Grand total: 970 calories. Better than the guy in Chicago but he still ate nearly 50% of his daily calorie total at lunch.

A third man walks into the same Burger King in NYC. He has learned from the Stand Up & Eat web site, that he needs about 2,000 calories per day to stay in calorie balance. He decides that he wants to keep his calories about 1/3 of his daily calorie total (about 660 calories) so he orders the grilled chicken salad and uses ½ of the ranch dressing. That adds up to only 335 calories so he orders a diet coke and a small fries for a grand total of 565 calories. He has about 100 calories leftover to add to another meal or snack.

Here’s our argument. Providing calorie information on menus is a good idea. At least people can see and compare the low to high calorie options. But a recent report from the International Food Information Council stated that only 11% of American adults know how many calories they need in a day. So we need to make people aware of just how many (or for most of us, how few) calories we need each day.  

Let’s hope NYC – and other places – are successful in getting calorie labeling in restaurants. In the meantime, calculate how many daily calories you need. Send the calculator to people whom you think need to know their calorie limits.  

Would it make a difference to YOU if restaurants listed calorie information on the menus?