Ogilvie - Menu confidential: conquer the hidden calories, sodium and fat in the foods you love

Conquer the Calories, Sodium and Fat
Hiding in the Foods You Love

Photography by Christopher Campbell

T his is a book for every Canadian who eats away from home. Thats all of us. For many, dining out is a treat. For others, eating a takeout sandwich is the only way to fit food into a busy schedule. But whether were digging into a creamy pile of linguine alfredo or downing a chicken wrap at our desks, more and more of us want to know what were putting in our bellies.

Its hard to make smart choices, though, when we dont know how many calories and how much fat and sodium lurk in our favourite dishes. Many restaurants do post nutrition information for their meals. But those numbers are not always easy to findor to understand. (How much is 1,200 mg of sodium, anyway?) Some other establishments dont provide nutrition numbers at all, which leaves us wondering how many calories are hidden in an innocent-looking plate of spaghetti.

This is where Menu Confidential comes in. In this book you will find nutrition information for popular fare, from hamburgers and pizza to steaks and saladsand just about every food in between. You will also find out how many calories get crammed into a bag of movie popcorn, how much fat is in a convenience store snack and how much sodium has soaked into a pound of sauced-up chicken wings. When an eaterys owner has chosen not to reveal its nutrition numbers, I have sent the featured food to an accredited laboratory to uncover its calorie, fat, carbohydrate, protein and sodium content. Within these pages, youll find information you cant get anywhere else.

For each of the more than 100 foods included in the book, Ive translated its nutrition information and shown how, with easy tweaks or simple swaps, the food (or a similar choice) can fit into your daily diet.

Dont worry. The idea isnt to make you feel guilty about indulging in the occasional double cheeseburger or regret falling for that fresh-baked muffin you picked up with your morning coffee. Rather, it is to arm you with the information you need to choose more wisely from a menu and to help you easily navigate your local food court.

Sadly (for those of us who dont need to eat like Olympic athletes), almost every food we eat outside our homes will be two to eight times larger than a recommended portion size. That means many additional calories and much more fat and salt. And sometimes the lighter-looking choicethat chicken-topped salad, saymay be the most calorific on the menu. Weve all been fooled many times.

The good news is that you can quickly learn to spot those hidden diet disasters. The even better news is that there are simple things you can do to make just about any food easier on your waistline. Menu Confidential will show you how to do both.

I know you will have fun gathering tips and learning new strategies. Flip through a few pages and you will find facts that will make you chuckle, maybe even shriek. (Would you guess that a platter of nachos has as much fat as 40 strips of bacon?) I also know this is the book you will turn to again and again, either for a quick reference check on fast-food french fries or for inspiration to overcome a particular dining dilemma. And I guarantee that by the end of this book, you will have learned to become a smart diner. Making better, more informed choices every time you dine out is the best defence against incremental weight gain.

The great thing about this approach is that there are rarely big sacrifices. Instead, the strategy is to make small changes each time you order, like swapping cream for milk in your coffee or ditching the bland processed cheese from your sandwich. Over time, these small calorie savings add up. This strategy also allows you to indulge without guilt. Splurging on an 800 calorie entree is okay when youve scouted out the nutrition numbers and adjusted the rest of your mealand your dayto make it fit.

Become a smart diner and you will find it easier and easier to prevent extra pounds from creeping up and settling on your hips and around your belly. I promise.

None of us need to think about glycogen or lipoprotein when we line up for a sandwich. But some basic nutrition knowledge is key to figuring out which meal at a restaurant will best fit into our daily diets. In this short chapter, you will learn why your body needs calories, fat and other macronutrients, why consuming too much of them isnt good, and the amounts health experts say we need to aim for every day for optimum health.

Its a quick crash course, not a chapter out of a nutrition textbook. So it wont be tedious going. But if you are a nutrition whiz, you may want to skim the next few pages. Or if you want to find out right away how much fat is packed into movie popcorn, feel free to skip ahead. Just come back to Nutrition 101, your reference guide, every time you have a question about your daily calorie needs or about why you shouldnt consume 3,000 mg of sodium every day.

In technical speak, a calorie is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a litre of water from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees Celsius. No one other than a lab technician would think of a calorie that way. All we really need to know is that a calorie is a measure of the amount of energy derived from food.

Our bodies need energy to make everything inside us work. We need calories to power our hearts and lungs, to grow new cells and to monitor and adjust hormone levelsas well as to fuel hundreds of other basic body functions. About 60 to 75% of the calories we burn every day are used to keep these systems running smoothly.

Eating, among other things, burns calories. About 10% of our daily calories are used to digest, absorb, transport and store food. (Dont get too excited. This fact is not carte blanche to dig into a carton of dulce de leche ice cream.)

Moving, from playing a vigorous game of tennis to brushing our teeth, is the third main way our bodies burn calories. This is the greatest variable and the main reason why an Olympic cyclist needs to eat 8,000 calories a day6,000 more than what the average office-going citizen requires.

The three main sources of calories are carbohydrates, protein and fat.

Our bodies digest these macronutrients differently, but each has the potential to turn into fat if the body doesnt need it right away for energy.

Very simply, our bodies convert much of what we eatwhether a baked potato or a bowl of chiliinto glucose, then pump this simple sugar into our bloodstream. Some glucose is immediately used to power our cells, and some gets stored in our muscles or liver to be used later. Any remaining glucose is turned into fat and stockpiled in special fat storage cells.

The average Canadian consumes about 2,780 calories per day. Thats about 400 calories more than what the average person consumed in 1991.