Restaurant Calorie Counts May Be Way Off, Study Finds

Posted on January 6, 2010 in Consumer Goods, Health & Medicine, Women's Health

If you’re a calorie counter, you may want to stop reading now, because what follows will blow your mind – and possibly your diet.

A new study has found that calorie counts listed on restaurant foods and frozen meals sold in supermarkets may not accurately reflect the actual calories in the foods. In some cases, there were more than twice as many calories in the meals than the amount listed on the menu or packaging, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

For the study, researchers evaluated 29 quick-serve meals, dishes served in sit-down restaurants, and frozen entrees sold in grocery stores. They found the measured energy values of the quick-serve and restaurant meals were on average 18 percent more than the stated values. The calories in frozen meals from grocery store freezer sections were an average of 8 percent more than listed.

Some restaurant meals contained as much as 200 percent of the stated calorie count and free side dishes offered along with the meals packed an average of 245 percent more calories than was listed, the researchers said.

“These findings suggest that stated energy contents of reduced-energy meals obtained from restaurants and supermarkets are not consistently accurate,” the study’s authors said in a statement summarizing their research. “If widespread, this phenomenon could hamper efforts to self-monitor energy intake to control weight and could also reduce the potential benefit of recent policy initiatives to disseminate information on food energy content at the point of purchase.”