Q&A: Nutritionist Says Restaurant Legislation Wrong Way to Promote Health

Healthy Dining works with restaurants to identify and promote their healthiest menu items. A group of nutritionists started the group in San Diego in 1990, but in 2005 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) gave them a grant to expand and create a nationwide service online. More than 60,000 restaurants are involved with the program, ranging from local gourmet establishments to national chains like Subway, Burger King, and even Hooters.

I spoke yesterday with Anita Jones-Mueller, Healthy Dining’s president and founder, about nutrition legislation and the challenges of nutrition analysis.

Philadelphia just joined New York City, the state of California and several counties in passing a law requiring restaurants to disclose nutritional information. What do you think of this trend?

AJM: I don’t know that this legislation is going to inspire people to eat healthier or help them to choose healthier items; it’s just giving them a chart of numbers.

The most stringent legislation requires more data points on the menu, and it’s just hard for restaurants to find the space. A lot of times people have a choice — do you want this sauce or that sauce or this side or this side or this side — so that grand total is difficult to put on the menu. You really need to get a chart.

And this legislation is hitting restaurants at a bad time, economically. I really hate to see this be such a negative to the industry. It’s always been my passion to get chefs behind this and excited about creating healthy items. As people become more health conscious — either because they want to be or they have to be because of health problems — we really want to make this a positive for the restaurant industry, so we can look to them to lead this initiative.

How difficult is it for a restaurant to figure out the nutritional content of all of its menu items?

AJM: It’s complicated; we really don’t recommend that the restaurants do it themselves. Basically they’re putting recipes into a database, but some databases don’t have accurate numbers, or they have missing numbers. If the nutritionist isn’t trained to find those, there will be accuracy problems.

Also, we always make sure we’re using the brand of the restaurant. If the restaurant says an item includes hamburger bun, you have to get the same hamburger bun, because those can vary quite a lot.

Then you have to look at all of the marinades, the sauces, everything they make in house. There’s different data for how much marinade is absorbed, the cooking process… it’s really a pretty complex job.

And then for the larger chains that have locations in different counties that are requiring different things, just keeping on top of it all is a lot of work. There’s a national plan that the National Restaurant Association is supporting to sort of alleviate that; basically it would be a standard plan for the whole United States.

Have you been helping a lot of companies comply with new restaurant legislation?

AJM: We’re working with a lot of companies now to do their full menu analysis, but what this legislation is asking for is a chart of numbers. We help restaurants take the next step of identifying healthier choices, rather than assuming that their customers are going to look through this chart of numbers and find the best choices. That’s really important, I think the numbers are just a lot for people to wade through.