by Patricia Thorton

Created on: September 03, 2008   Last Updated: September 22, 2008

ABSOLUTELY! With the current trend of healthy living, restaurants are ready to sell you anything that looks healthy. These healthy meals also taste great. The problem is that they are not really healthy. Even the foods that are not advertised as healthy should have their calories and fat grams listed. This is because sometimes it is unimaginable how many calories one can actually take in just by eating one dish at a restaurant. Furthermore, with regards to foods that are advertised as healthy because of their appearance, there could be ingredients in the food that the consumer would not expect to find in that particular dish. This ingredient could make the dish much more fattening. Consider any meal advertised as "healthy" at fast food restaurants. When is the last time you heard someone losing weight from eating salads at McDonalds? This is a deceptive practice by these restaurants, the consumer should be able to easily find out how many calories and how many grams of fat they are consuming. I emphasize the word easily in this last sentence. I remember watching a documentary on a fast food restaurant that supposedly advertised the nutritional facts of their products inside their restaurant. When the narrator of the documentary requested to see the nutritional facts, it took the employees over one hour to finally locate the chart that had the nutritional facts. What is worse is that when the nutritional facts were finally found, the serving sizes that the nutritional facts were representing were more than half of the size of the portion that one would receive by ordering that meal.

I would expect people to say "no" to this question because the restaurant should not have to burden itself with this taste. It is the consumer's choice to eat there, no one is forcing them. Well if this were the case, no food product should have to provide nutritional facts. Restaurants are selling food just like Frito Lay is selling chips. If Frito Lay must provide nutritional facts when selling food, I do not see why restaurants should be an exception. As a matter of fact, restaurants should be regulated even more harshly because people consume greater quantities at restaurants, thus, their meal is more likely to affect their health than one bag of chips.
Some may even say that they do not want to know. When they go out to eat, they go out to cheat on their diets. That is fine for those who do not care about their health. But the fact is that there are many people out there who are unhealthy and need to know what they are consuming. Moreover, there are people who care very much about their health and deserve to know whether or not a product advertised as healthy really is in fact healthy.
Simply put, my point is that people should be able to know what they are putting into their bodies and restaurants should not be able to deceive consumers into thinking they are eating healthy, when in reality, they might as well be eating chocolate cake.

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