Healthy eating out

Although brown bagging (oh, all right, making your own sandwiches to carry to work in a brown paper bag — OK?) is probably the surest way to keep a check on your weight, if preparing food isn’t your idea of spending quality time at home, you can still eat out without gaining weight.

How — and where? We’ll come to that in a minute. We must eat to stay alive but if we put on weight by eating more than our bodies need we risk death by heart disease, the complications of diabetes and hypertension (pressure). In fact it’s what, rather than how much we eat when eating out — or in — that piles on the pounds.

If we’re short of cash (and who isn’t these days) we tend to eat what are known as “energy-dense” foods — foods that are fattening because they’re chock-full of energy, of nutrients.

Professor Forrester pointed out that energy-dense foods are: fats, oils, sugars; they’re cheap and they’re available in almost every fast food restaurant.

We don’t need to call the names of international fast food chains serving energy-dense food in TT.

However, I think it’s worth reminding Newsday readers of the book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser reviewed three years ago in Newsday (available in 2005 from Nigel Khan, Bookseller, still on sale today from Amazon.com).

Here is a thought-provoking extract from that horrifying (in more ways than one) book about fast food.

“Fast food is the one form of American culture that foreign consumers literally consume. By eating like Americans, people all over the world are beginning to look more like Americans... The US now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialised nation in the world. More than half of all American adults and a quarter of American children are obese or overweight... The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s.” And here’s an even more thought-provoking quote from my review of that book “If you want to know why fast food fries taste so good, take a look at pages 120-1 in this book to learn some unsettling facts about food additives and ‘natural’ food flavours” — it appears those added flavourings are designed to get you “hooked” on the chain’s particular brand of fast food.

Of course, you don’t have to eat out to gain weight. Home-cooked fried foods, sweet drinks, full cream milk, butter, cheese, mayonnaise, yam, sweet potato, ground provisions, paratha roti, curries swimming in oil, cakes, doughnuts, cookies, ice cream are all energy-dense food as deadly as fast food.

But back to the problem of eating out — as so many commuters must do these days — how and where can you eat out to stay slim or lose an excess pound or two? If you can find a fast food restaurant that doesn’t drown salad in dressing but lets you choose your own non-fat dressing — or none at all — as a side order with a healthy grilled burger or grilled, skinless chicken or fish, a glass of WASA’s best water, or mineral water and coffee or tea with no sugar, you’re well on the way to losing weight. So much for eating out on a tight budget.

Readers in Central and South have one of the nation’s healthiest take-away and fast food family restaurants in the Mongolian Grill where you choose the ingredients for the chef to cook by stir-frying without any oil at all. Would that there were a Mongolian grill in Port-of-Spain for those who can’t afford the comparatively very reasonable fixed price Eastern-Mongolian night on Wednesdays at the Hilton “Taste the World” menu in the hotel’s Pool Terrace Restaurant where every night you choose what you eat — and watch while it’s cooked — and very healthy it is, too, provided you choose wisely.

The low incidence of heart disease in Japan seems directly related to diet — and a much lower incidence of diabetes too.

Here again, you chose your own ingredients and watch while they’re being cooked in Benihana in Trincity (soon to open in Port-of-Spain, too), Laughing Budda on Frederick Street and Hanami in Movietowne.

In other restaurants you can try asking for grilled meat, chicken or fish — without the fattening sauce, steamed vegetables seasoned with herbs rather than butter or sauce and fresh fruit for dessert. Now you know how and where to eat out, start eating healthy!