Turns Out Fast Food May Be Healthier Than Chain Restaurant Meals
Two studies from the U.K. analyzed calories in fast food and chain restaurants and compared the calories across several countries.
Main meals at full service restaurants had an average of 268 more calories than fast food restaurants.
Compared to the U.S., average calories of restaurant meals was lower only in China.
Two studies recently published by the BMJ medical journal report some tough statistics about calories in both fast food and chain restaurant meals. While it's no surprise that meals from both categories-McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Wagamama, for example-tended to be high in calories, fast food actually came out on top.
In the first study, researchers looked at six fast food and 21 full service restaurants and found that "full service restaurants offered significantly more excessively calorific main meals, fewer main meals meeting public health recommendations, and on average 268 (103 to 433) kcal more in main meals." Yikes.
That's not to say that the fast food meals studied were particularly healthy-KFC's sandwich and fries meal options had an average of 1220 calories each, while McDonald's burger and fries meal options averaged around 907 calories.
Worse still, the study noted that one of the limitations involved getting provided nutritional information from the restaurants themselves. That led the researches to conclude this: "Our findings are therefore more likely to underestimate than overestimate energy content of main meals, which means that the energy content of UK restaurant food may be more problematic than our data suggest."
A key takeaway? "A sizeable proportion of main meals from fast food and full service restaurants were excessive in energy content." Rule of thumb: If it looks like it has a ton of calories (burgers, fries, pasta, etc.), it probably has a ton of calories.
The second study compared calorie counts across several countries, including the U.S., China, Finland, Brazil, Ghana, and India. Surprisingly, only China had significantly less calories in fast food meals when compared against the United States. Of the 223 meals looked at, 94 percent of full service meals and 72 percent of fast food meals contained at least 600 calories.
These results showed an average calorie count across all six countries of 1317 calories for full service meals and 809 calories for fast food meals, meaning a single meal contains roughly half the calories most people aim to eat in a day. Both studies are fascinating and slightly depressing to read in full...but they may make you feel slightly better the next time you swing through the drive-thru.
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