Eating out and staying healthy.

 

While you are at home and in control of what goes into your cooking, it is relatively easy to stay on top of what you are eating. When you eat out however it’s easy to have more calories, fat or salt than you’d like especially as portion sizes seem to get bigger and bigger. Most of the major restaurant chains offer lower fat alternatives to their main menus and it’s a good idea to look at their websites before you go to check. Most of the major chains have a breakdown of the nutritional value of their meals and some like MacDonald's have a nifty device to calculate just how much fat you have [or may] consume. -[http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/food/nutrition/nutrition-counter.mcd.]

The Food Standards Agency here in the UK offers advice on their website including the types of menu items you should choose over less healthy alternatives. It even goes through the main restaurant types found here such as Indian, Italian, Chinese etc. and suggests menu items that are good and those you should probably avoid.Their address is [http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthydiet/eatingouthealthily/healthierchoices/.]

It’s no good knowing how much fat there is in your burger if you don’t know how much you should eat. Here are the guideline daily amounts of the major nutrients as supplied by the British Heart Foundation.

Nutrient	Men	Women
Energy	2500kcal	2000kcal
Sugars	120g	90g
Fat	95g	70g
of which saturates	30g	20g
Fibre	24g	24g
Sodium	2.4g	2.4g
Salt	6g	6g

 

Today we went into Cardiff as Sylvia need a hair cut and likes the hairdresser in the new St. David’s Centre and as we were out at lunchtime we needed to make a decision on where we would eat. We choose Nando’s.

We both choose to have a 1/4 chicken, Sylvia added spicy rice and macho peas to hers while I just had sweet potato mash. Checking in on the Nando’s website  [http://www.nandos.co.uk/index.cfm?fuseaction=model.default&cat=FEM6&description=Eating_Well ] on our return home revealed the following about the fat we had consumed.

	Sylvia	Ken
Peri-Peri 1/4 Chicken – Total Fat	15g	15g
Saturated Fat	4.5g	4.5g
Spicy Rice Total Fat	5.3g	-
Saturated Fat	0.9g	-
Macho Peas  - Total Fat	10.4g	-
Saturated Fat	3.8g	-
Sweet Potato Mash – Total Fat	-	4.8g
Saturated Fat	-	2.8g
Grand Total - FAT	30.7g[43.86%]	19.8g[20.84%]
Saturated Fat	9.2g[46%]	7.3g[24.33]

The figures in brackets indicating the percentage of the daily total.

In fairness Sylvia removed the skin from her chicken which probably contains a lot of the fat and I did eat about half her peas, but this does show how difficult it is to eat healthily when eating out.