Nutritional quality at fast-food restaurants still needs improvement

New 14-year study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reports

San Diego, CA, May 7, 2013 – More than 25 percent of American adults chow down on fast food two or more times each week. Known for menu items containing high amounts of fat, sugar, and salt, fast-food restaurants have contributed to America's poor diets and increased risk of diet-related chronic diseases, like heart disease and diabetes. A new study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Eating Research program and published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine presents results from a 14-year study indicating that fast food restaurant menus have only modestly increased nutritious offerings, and much improvement is still needed.

"Despite qualitative evidence that the fast-food industry is making improvements to the nutritional quality of at least some of their menu items, a quantitative evaluation of trends in the nutritional quality of fast food available in the marketplace was lacking," says lead investigator Mary Hearst, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor of Public Health at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. "This is the first study to quantitatively evaluate whether fast-food restaurant chains have improved the nutritional quality of their U.S. menu offerings over a period of time during which they have been encouraged to do so by governmental and nongovernmental agencies."

Hearst and the study team set out to examine trends at eight fast-food restaurants using data from 1997/1998 to 2009/2010 culled from the University of Minnesota Nutrition Coordinating Center Food and Nutrient Database, which houses menus from 22 fast-food restaurants. The investigators selected eight restaurants:

• McDonald's
• Burger King
• Wendy's
• Taco Bell
• Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC)
• Arby's
• Jack in the Box
• Dairy Queen

Eating more fat may increase daytime sleepiness in healthy, non-obese adults, while eating more carbohydrates may increase alertness

May 7, 2013 —DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that your level of sleepiness or alertness during the day may be related to the type of food that you eat.

Results show that higher fat consumption was associated with increased objective daytime sleepiness, while higher carbohydrate intake was associated with increased alertness. There was no relationship between protein consumption and sleepiness or alertness. These findings were independent of the subjects' gender, age, and body mass index as well as the total amount of sleep they were getting and their total caloric intake.

"Increased fat consumption has an acute adverse effect on alertness of otherwise healthy, non-obese adults," said principal investigator Alexandros Vgontzas, MD, professor of psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa.

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep, and Vgontzas will present the findings Tuesday, June 4, in Baltimore, Md., at SLEEP 2013, the 27th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

How Much Exercise to Burn Off a Burger?
By Chris Kaiser, Cardiology Editor, MedPage Today, Published: April 24, 2013

Menus displaying the amount of exercise required to burn off calories in a meal had some impact on food choice, researchers found.

Individuals given menus with the exercise information not only ordered food with fewer calories compared with those given menus without such information (763 versus 902 kcal, P=0.002), they also consumed fewer calories (673 versus 770, P=0.01), according to Ashlei James, a graduate student at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, and colleagues.

However, there was no difference in calories ordered (P=0.15) and consumed (P=0.19) between those whose menus had exercise information and those whose menus contained calorie counts, James reported at the Experimental Biology 2013 meeting in Boston.
Similarly, menus with and without calorie counts did not lead to differences in calories ordered or consumed (P=0.09 and P=0.21, respectively), the researchers found.

"This is the first study to look at the effects of displaying minutes of brisk walking needed to burn food calories on the calories ordered and consumed," said senior researcher Meena Shah, PhD, in a statement.

She noted that the volunteers were quite surprised at the amount of exercise required to burn calories. For example, a quarter-pound double cheeseburger requires 2 hours of brisk walking for a woman to burn the calories.

As more restaurants have begun to include calorie information on their menus, voluntarily or by law, consumers have become more calorie conscious about their choice of menu items. "The majority of studies, however, show that providing information on calorie content does not lead to fewer calories ordered or consumed," researchers noted.