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Eating on the go
Fast food nutrition labels
By Rebecca Kolar
Nowadays, almost all restaurants have nutritional information guides online. For example, Qdoba’s nutrition page lets you customize your order so you know exactly how many calories you will be eating.
As a college student, it’s difficult to resist fast food eating. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it beats cooking at home. With busy schedules filled with classes, exams, and working, fast food restaurants make eating out almost irresistible. But is grabbing food on the go the best way to fill your stomach? Actually, it can be. But you need to do a little research before hitting up your favorite hot spot.
We all know that if we eat too many calories, we’ll gain weight. So how do we know how many calories are in that slice of pizza from Pizza Hut or in the burrito at Qdoba? Nowadays, almost all restaurants have nutritional information guides online. For example, Qdoba’s nutritional page lets you customize your order so you know exactly how many calories you will be eating. Let’s say you are going to eat tacos later and you want to know how many calories you will be consuming. After going to www.qdoba.com/Calculate.aspx, click on ‘tacos’. From there you can customize your order, first by choosing if you’re going to have the crispy taco shell or the soft flour shell. Then you can choose between meat or vegetables, salsa and cheese or sour cream. Click on calculate, and there you have it--a complete breakdown of those tacos. The breakdown looks exactly like a nutrition label you would read off of say a cereal box.
I used Qdoba’s website as the example because they have by far the easiest nutritional Web site to navigate. Unfortunately, not all restaurants make finding out calorie content this easy. Most times you need to estimate what you’ll be eating. But that’s definitely better than blindly eating 1000+ calories in one sitting just because you weren’t a smart consumer.
Another helpful resource is www.calorieking.com. This site is also simple to use; all you do is search for your favorite food or restaurant and it tells you how many calories are in one serving of that particular food. The tricky part here is deciding on how many servings you will be eating.
When reading nutrition labels look for a low saturated fat count (preferably under 7 grams per serving) a high fiber content (4 grams per serving or more). Always keep in mind how many calories you are eating.
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