Looking For an Apple in the Barbeque Joint

Eating at a restaurant can be a great way to enjoy some good food and even spend quality time with friends or family. Unfortunately, eating out can also pose a significant threat to your regular healthy eating habits. You don’t have to stop eating out or avoid certain restaurants to stick to your healthy eating habits!  This is the second in a series of articles discussing the pitfalls of eating out. The first article discussed ways to avoid eating too much.

Even if you’re disciplined about making healthy food choices on a regular basis, it can still be challenging to maintain this habit when you go out to eat. One healthy strategy that can be particularly difficult to stick to when you’re at a restaurant is eating a balanced variety of food groups and nutrients.

Balanced Food Choices

A healthy, well-balanced diet provides your body with appropriate amounts of the nutrients your body needs without inundating it with too many Calories or too much fat or sugar. To empower the general public to make healthier meal choices, The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics created MyPlate, a visual guide to building a healthier plate at meal times by emphasizing fruit, vegetable, grains, proteins, and dairy food groups. These food groups are the building blocks for a healthy diet. MyPlate also provides guidance on the proportions of these food groups for your daily intake. To truly take control of your dietary habits, make it a regular habit to consider the types of food available to you before you decide what – and how much – to include in your meals or snacks. Reading nutrition labels can inform these decisions, as well.

The Challenges of Eating Out

When you’re eating out, a wide range of issues that can interfere with maintaining healthy eating habits, including:

• the restaurant doesn’t offer quality fruit/vegetable side dishes
• you don’t know how the food is prepared or what additional ingredients are used (other than the ones listed in the menu)
• you don’t know how much of each main ingredient is included in pasta medley or casserole-type dishes (i.e. you don’t know how much chicken will be in your chicken alfredo until it arrives at your table)
• you don’t know the quality of the food (you don’t know if the grain products are made with bleached flour)
• cost (unfortunately, fresh items like fruit and vegetables may cost more or the restaurant may charge you to substitute certain side dishes for the less-healthy ones that are packaged with the entrée)

Further complicating the choices you have to make while out are the unhealthy dishes masquerading as healthy choices and foods that are placed into a counterintuitive category. Specifically:

• Some fruit and vegetable sides are covered in a glaze or syrup, making them incredibly high in sugars. Remember, fruit is naturally higher in sugar. You don’t need to add any more sugar to it.
• Some fruit and vegetable sides are fried and/or combined with a cream-based food of some kind. Both of these food preparations significantly increase the fat content of the dish compared to the fruit or vegetable alone.
• From a nutritional standpoint, potatoes and corn do not count as vegetables. Instead, they should be considered a grain.

Conquering the Challenges

Presumably, you’re already preparing well-balanced, nutritious meals and snacks at home. Your goal when you go out to eat should be to continue these habits at the restaurant. The best way to do this is to have a plan before you go. Know about how much of each food group you want to consume while out (use MyPlate as a reference) and let this information guide all of your food-related decisions. If the entrée you’d like to order “comes with” sides that do not match your planned food group distribution, switch out these sides with sides that will help you stick to your plan.

If you know that you will not be able to order a given food group at the restaurant you’re going to (either it’s not on the menu, is prepared in ways that are not as healthy for you, is cost-prohibitive, or the restaurant doesn’t offer things you like), eat something from that food group before you go. Just remember to include this food when you’re considering the One Plate Rule.

Lastly, if the restaurant offers nutritional information, look at it! This information is often available in the restaurant upon request or on the restaurant’s website. The information presented on the nutrition label is an excellent way to understand exactly what you’re eating. It can help you decide not only what to eat but how much, as well. Restaurant nutritional information can also help you shed some light on the foods that will sneakily destroy your best healthy eating efforts (look for more information about these foods in an upcoming article). For help reading a Nutrition Facts panel, read this article!


Remember, eating well-balanced meals is only part of a healthy eating plan. Make certain you don’t eat too much in your effort to eat a variety of nutrients and food groups.