Doing Away With Menu Mysteries

Losing weight and being on a diet means knowing exactly what you're eating at every meal

. This usually rules out going out to restaurants because it's always a mystery how your food is being prepared and with what ingredients. Portion sizes are also a challenge as they are usually way bigger than you're supposed to eat in one meal.

The good news is, due to the lobbying efforts of community activists, more and more states are now providing detailed nutritional information on their menus. In some cases, this is mandated by law and in others restaurants are providing the information voluntarily in an effort to give the consumers what they want.

Many restaurants are now offering nutritional guidelines on their menus right alongside the the sun dried tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. Some menus even have a special "weight watchers" or "heart healthy" section offering smaller portions of lower fat foods. Remember to read these carefully because you might be getting lower fat at the expense of higher sodium or some other undesirable ingredient.

Food makers have responded to the requests for more labeling information with some creative marketing campaigns that you should watch out for. Putting "low fat" or "low sodium" on packages of food that never contained fat or sodium is somewhat misleading to people who think they're now getting a superior product. Claims of the healthy benefits of package ingredients with only sketchy amounts of supporting evidence is also unfortunately becoming common.

The goal of all this increase in information is to make consumers more aware of what they're eating and how healthy their food choices are. This effort seems to be succeeding, too. The Food and Drug Administration did a survey of health and diet in 2008 that seems to indicate that people are becoming much more label savvy. Over half of the people surveyed answered that they read nutritional labels in the grocery store and almost 40% of respondents claimed that they weren't fooled by spurious claims of "low fat" or "high fiber".

Giving what the customer wants is good for business. More and more restaurants and grocery stores realize this and are voluntarily providing the information that consumers want. This works out well for the customer and the business owners bottom line as well.

by: John Fleming.

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