Updated Fast-Food Guide Finds Some Healthful Improvements Among Chains

NEW YORK — With 160,000 fast-food restaurants across the land gobbling up half the dollars we spend to eat out, no wonder there’s constant debate about whether the food is a good value--nutritionally or economically.

Some people who wouldn’t mind if you stopped patronizing fast-food spots altogether have answered just about every question you could imagine asking. And, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not all bad news.

“The Completely Revised and Updated Fast-Food Guide” (Workman, $7.95), by Michael F. Jacobson and Sarah Fritschner, revisits the chains and burgers surveyed five years earlier and found some promising changes as well as a few clunkers.

“Companies have been both improving existing foods and introducing healthier new ones,” the authors say.

First time around they had trouble finding “any healthy foods at many of the restaurants.” These days, while high-fat, high-salt meals still abound, it’s also possible to choose a meal--salad, whole-grain bread and yogurt, for example--that fits just about anyone’s idea of healthful eating.

The authors also cite as improvements: low-fat hamburgers, food fried in vegetable fat instead of beef fat, plain baked potatoes, broiled chicken, fat-free muffins, low-fat milk and the elimination of some food dyes.

On the other hand, fatty biscuits and croissants are commonplace today. The authors list specific “moves in the wrong direction,” chain by chain.

But it looks like fast-food restaurants are here to stay.

They allow people “to eat quickly without planning, without dressing up, without having to make many decisions, and without getting out of the car,” the authors note. “For the hurried, harried and overworked, it’s eat and run at reasonable prices.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that half of restaurant dollars go to fast-food restaurants. One in five Americans eats in a fast-food restaurant on a typical day, according to Consumer Reports.

The authors are especially critical of fast food’s appeal to children with ads, promotions, playgrounds and parties.

The “Fast-Food Guide” contains lists galore: foods highest in saturated fats (Carl’s Jr.’s double Western bacon cheeseburger heads the list with seven teaspoons) and lowest in fats (green salads, McDonald’s apple bran muffin, Long John Silver’s green beans, and Wendy’s three-bean salad all weigh in at zero).

There are lists according to amounts of various vitamins and minerals, sugar, salt, ingredients and nutritional breakdowns.

There’s also a “gloom” scale, based on an overall nutritional evaluation. The Carl’s Jr. double Western bacon cheeseburger scored highest with 91, while a Burger King double Whopper with cheese earned 83 points, and McDonald’s biscuit with sausage and egg earned 63. In contrast, a plain baked potato gets a gloom rating of two.

Jacobson is executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. Fritschner is a nutritionist and journalist.