Restaurants, Risky?

Here we are discussing some of the risk factors inherent in restaurant eating and in the consumption of food delivered to your home as part of weight loss programs. Some of those foods are the most unhealthy foods that we can eat.

So, in our culture we are eating out at restaurants more than ever before in the history of the country. And, we have more chronic disease than ever. Additional fast food restaurants are continuing to pop up everywhere. The context of this brief paper has to do with the disease burden in our country; so, we have more chronic disease than ever and, the major contributory factor has to do with our unhealthy food consumption.

 

Buffet restaurants as well as restaurants in general pose risks because of portion size, temptation and because in an interesting way we are affiliating with many other people whose example is to over-eat and to make poor food selections.

We need to remind ourselves that when we eat in restaurants we lose control over cleanliness, bacteria levels, and we lose control over the quality of food. For example, many servers are using their bare hands to take lemon slices out of the container and put them on your glass. Does your restaurant ever serve contaminated food? Does your restaurant ever lie about what foods are in a particular dish? I can recall a situation in which a quaint local restaurant advertised a lunch item as grouper with an elegant sauce, when in fact it was an entirely different, lower priced fish; the problem was publicizing in our local newspaper.

Recommendations

·       Eat until satisfied, not full; this is what the longest-lived people groups do.

·       Know the menu of the restaurants you frequent

·       Having a plan for negotiating the restaurant experience is very important.

·       Have a plan about what you will eat and how much you will eat before you go to the restaurant. Preplan your food choices.

·       Make every effort to do the majority of your eating at home; use your own kitchen. Shop for your own food and prepare your own food whenever possible. This is an inherent part of being your own best health care advocate.

·       Adopt an understanding that the restaurant marketing, including menus on the table are not your friend as they contribute in a huge way to over eating and eating unhealthy food.

·       Be particularly cautious if you are eating at a buffet style restaurant. Buffet restaurants tend to compete with each other for how many total dishes they offer; if one restaurant offers 110 dishes, other buffet restaurants aggressively market 195 dishes. So, why is this important? Well, it leaves the impression that we must have a huge range the food selection in order to consume a meal. It takes the simplicity out of eating. We strongly recommended variety in the consumption of plant-based foods, but that can be achieved with five or so dishes. In addition, eating at buffet style restaurants tends to encourage gluttony, over eating, resulting in a very toxic food experience.

·       Assess how hungry you are on a 1 to 10 scale so that you can be extra cautious about the amount of food and the type of food you choose in the restaurant. High levels of hunger are a pronounced risk factor for over-eating and eating unhealthy foods.

·       Beware of the peer pressure issue if you are eating with friends who urge you to eat more unhealthy foods.

·       Specifically, beware of hyperpalatability, that is, foods that are high in salt, sugar, and fat that tend to be addictive and very unhealthy.

·       Be assertive and don’t hesitate to ask the server for exceptions to a particular dish; do not select menu items that contain cheese because it is full of unhealthy fat, too many calories, and it is addictive.

·       Also, pay attention to what you drink; we advise not drinking liquids during the meal. Clean water and green tea tend to be very healthy choices for drinking

·       If you were eating with someone, invite them to join you in your selection of healthy foods

·       We define healthy foods as whole food plant-based (WFPB).These foods contain no cholesterol and are loaded with hugely healthy dietary fiber and other healing compounds. These are the best foods for maintaining a healthy weight and for avoiding illness.

·       Salad bars can be an excellent way to eat healthily. Select green leafy vegetables, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, onions, olives, fresh fruit, nuts and seeds, and beans of any sort; avoid all creamy salad dressings and instead ask for some oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. All oils are high in calories and saturated fat so use as little as possible.

·       You may even want to bring your own salad dressing in a tiny jar; you can make this with apple cider vinegar, puréed garlic, yellow mustard, freshly squeezed lemon juice, S&P and turmeric.

·       Avoid fast food restaurants because the majority of the food is quite unhealthy; however, in some you can order a white baked potato and put on it some chili that has barely any meat in it. Also, these new so-called veggie burgers may or may not be healthy depending on the specific ingredients.

·       Learn all you can about reading food labels; most often, highly processed foods contain numerous ingredients and most of them are unhealthy.

·       Try to avoid all products containing white flour; instead, opt for 100% whole- grain products.

·       Whenever possible mimic the Blue Zone people groups who lived an extraordinarily long life without disease. For the most part they consumed locally grown, sometimes homegrown produce and herbs. Some of them would not even consume leftover foods. For the most part they took great pride in using their kitchens, preparing delicious meals.

References

Frates, Beth; Bonnet, Jonathan; Joseph, Richard; Peterson, James: ‘lifestyle medicine handbook: An introduction to the power of healthy habits,’ Healthy learning, 2019.

          Fuhrman, Joel: ‘Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is Killing Us and           What We Can Do About It’  Paperback – October 2, 2018

Jeff Novick: ‘Distracted: Looking for health in all the wrong places,’ published online, February, 2020.

Ornish, Dean and Ornish, Anne: ‘UnDo It,’ Ballantine books, 2019.

 

Zahler, William A.: ‘Health, inertia, and information: why are we sick?’

Printed by Create Space, Copyright 2018 by William A. Zahler.

Zahler, William A.: ‘Synergy and the dynamics of lifestyle change,’ Printed by Create Space, Copyright 2019 by William A. Zahler.

 

March 2020

William Zahler, MSW, DipACLM