Many national restaurant chains these days are trying to adjust menus to offer what they call healthier or leaner meals. It’s a tall order to full when their menu planners remain addicted to salt! I ran into this with Applebee’s last year and just came face-to-face with it again recently when I went to a local Denny’s for breakfast.
Denny’s has what it has dubbed its Fit Fare menu. Items are labeled as “lite” and their protein amounts are highlighted as well. But when you dig into the nutrition info on Denny’s website, you see the sad salt stories.
Take the Fit Fare veggie omelet made with egg whites as an example. I planned to get this, but then saw it contains 820 mgs of sodium, basically half my daily limit! Where is all the salt? I discussed it with a very helpful waitress. We agreed the Swiss cheese used and the English muffin that could be a side likely accounted for most of it.
So I had mine without the cheese and with wheat toast instead of the muffin. Now bread is normally high in sodium too, so I’m not sure how much sodium I saved with that move. I ate only one of the two slices of toast that came with it.
The waitress also luckily mentioned to me that the veggies in the omelet grilled in margarine on the grill top in the kitchen! That could account for some of the 7 grams of saturated fat in this dish. She offered to have the cooks steam them instead, which I gladly accepted.
The bottom line here is the same as always, beware any hype that claims something is healthier or fit or whatever. Always check nutritional info before you go out to eat, even for breakfast.
John
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 