McDonalds & Burger King are Healthier than Applebees, Chilli’s & Ruby Tuesday

January 30th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

After the release of the documentary Super Size Me, there was not a shadow of a doubt in our nation’s collective minds that the food we eat from McDonalds on a weekly basis was any bit healthy. We spend a lot of time demonizing fast food restaurants for the unhealthy products we voluntarily purchase from them, but did you know there is are restaurants that are much less healthy for you than the major chain fast food restaurants? It turns out that many of our nation’s upscale restaurants, places such as Applebees and Chilli’s are actually a lot less healthy for you than if you were to go down to McDonalds and get your favorite meal.

Our nation’s finer eateries are much less healthy for us because they offer such substantial portions, often well more than any of us should reasonably eat for one meal. At McDonalds if you order a hamburger and fries, you’ll eat a combined 630 calories. If you go to Ruby Tuesday and order their “Ruby’s Classic Burger” and a side of fries, you’ll eat a whopping 1,372 calories! If you go to Chilli’s and order their “Oldtimer Burger” and an order of fries, you’ll be taking in 1,320 calories!

Applebees doesn’t even post their nutritional facts on their website for their regular menu. Their website claims that having so many locations and vendors would make it “extremely difficult to obtain nutritional information on our items.” It seems that all of the other major restaurants in this country were able to come up with reasonable estimates of how many calories are in their food, what makes it so much more difficult for Applebees to provide this data? Is it perhaps that their regular menu items might not be very healthy at all?

We expect burgers and fries not to be healthy for us, but what about things such as pasta’s and salads? It turns out that Ruby Tuesday’s Carolina Chicken Salad contains a whopping 1022 calories and their Club House Salad has 896 calories, and that’s without any dressing. Throw some ranch one on of those and you’re easily adding 100 additional calories. Chili’s “Crispy Chicken Salad” comes in at a 810 calories and their “Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad with dressing” comes in at 1,010 calories!

Eating out at these major chain restaurants is just not healthy any way you put it. Fortunately there are a few things you can do to make it a bit healthier. Consider only eating half of your meal and taking the rest home with you for lunch the next day. This will spread out the calories over two meals rather than gorging yourself at one sitting. You could also split a meal with the person you’re going to eat with. It will cut your bill in half and get rid of a lot of the calories. You can skip on the Soda or any other beverage besides water, that’ll save you $1.50 off your bill and save you a few hundred calories.