CSPI reveals astonishing facts about restaurant meals

Widespread popularity of fast food in modern American culture has always remain of utmost concern to public health officials, government regulators and food safety agencies, now a new consumer study has revealed the facts about the potential danger of eating at a fast food restaurant.

Many US chain restaurants are promoting dangerous 'X-treme Eating', offering single food items packed with more than adequate calories one requires in a day, according to US watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Fast food is what one eats in the vast majority of America's restaurants. This inexpensive and convenient meal has become an inescapable part of the modern fast world. Large "super-size" or "biggie" portions of french fries, soft drinks, and milkshakes, aggressively offered by restaurants, cause an excessive and greatly increasing per-capita caloric intake among fast-food consumers, resulting in fast-growing rates of obesity in the United States, critics said.

In Washington, D.C., the group accused these "table-service" chain restaurants and others of promoting extreme eating. According to the group, some individual dishes can exceed 2,000 calories, more than the recommended daily intake for women.

In their examples of mega meal, the public interest group included Uno Chicago Grill's pizza skins, a Starbucks scone, and Ruby Tuesday's fresh chicken with pasta. The pizza skins appetizer racks up 2,050 calories, 48 grams of saturated fat and more than 3,000 milligrams of sodium. While, Ruby Tuesday's fresh chicken and broccoli pasta dish packs 2,060 calories and 128 grams of fat.

In desserts, the CSPI says Chris' Outrageous Chocolate Cake from the Cheesecake Factory contains over 1,300 calories, 32 teaspoons of sugar and 5 grams of trans fat.

Such dishes, increasingly stuffed with extra unhealthy ingredients, help fuel national epidemics of obesity and heart disease, the group said.

They are serving up 'ever-more harmful new creations' without giving consumers facts about their orders, says the CSPI. It urged restaurants not to keep diners in the dark about what's on their plate and should list nutritional information on their menus to make consumers more aware.

"What we're finding is that table-service restaurants have launched into a whole new era of extreme eating," Michael Jacobson, the CSPI's executive director, said. "If we're going to deal with the epidemic of obesity and the tremendous prevalence of heart attacks and strokes, we're going to have to do something about restaurant foods."

The watchdog indicted restaurants for not doing adequately to alleviate the surging problem of obesity. Instead of making their products healthier, the restaurant chains are locking their horns with each other to make their appetizers, main courses, and desserts bigger, badder, and cheesier than ever before, the group said.

Around 60 million adults (more than one in five) in the US are obese and 9 million severely obese, according to the American Obesity Association, which says that obesity is not a simple matter of overeating.

Last year in June, CSPI had filed a lawsuit against KFC, the second-largest fast-food chain in the world, after McDonald's, to get it to stop using partially hydrogenated oils that the chain uses as the foremost ingredient for its fried chicken.

In their lawsuit, the American non-profit organization accused KFC for serving foods that are high in trans fat and can cause heart disease.

In response to the CSPI's claims, the national restaurant association released a statement, saying, “Pointing to a select few menu items at a select few restaurants as being high in calories and generalizing that to all restaurant fare is misleading, inaccurate and does the public a grave disservice."