Beyond the Headlines: Calorie Counts at Restaurants
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Part of President Obama's Affordable Health Care Plan requires chain restaurants to post the amount of calories on the menu, but just how accurate are those numbers? A.J. Hilton investigates. Video by fox47news.com
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Your restaurant meal may have a number other than the price next to it very soon. Part of President Obama's Affordable Health Care Plan requires chain restaurants to post the amount of calories on the menu.
We set out to find out if you're getting the bang for your buck calorie wise.
Here's what we did. We picked three restaurants: a burger from fast food restaurant McDonald's, a salad from Bob Evans, and some pasta from Applebee's.
Calories aren't on all the menus yet, but you can find the information online rather easily. McDonald's even had the calories posted on its drive-thru menu.
The Big Mac, according to the McDonald's website, has 550 calories for one serving. Bob Evans says its Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad lunch has 703 calories. And Applebee's Chicken Penne Pasta boasts 1150 calories.
"The FDA mandates a 15% margin of error," says Dr. Wayne Glieber, the lab director at Great Lakes Scientific.
How you to figure out the calories in each of our dishes, as we found out, is a very complicated process. It took about a week to get back the results, and we found out not everything was as it seemed.
Watch the video above for the full story from FOX 47's A.J. Hilton and the results of Dr. Glieber's research.
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