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Here at Good Elements we love to eat.   We recognize of course that it is healthier and more cost effective to eat at home.   After all, where do you think all of those great  Good Elements Monthly Recipes come from?  But eating out can be a great pleasure - but one that may come with hidden risks to the waistline.

A new study in Review of Agricultural Economics has compared fast food and table service meals at restaurants.  The results of the study show that both types of meals are larger and have more calories than meals prepared at home.  Now here’s the surprise - the typical fast food meal is smaller and has fewer calories than the average meal from a table service restaurant.  Seems intuitive yet counter-intuitive at the same time, right?

Fast food was found to be more energy dense than food from a table service restaurant, but fast food meals also tend to be smaller. As a result, the typical fast food meal had fewer calories than the average meal from a table service restaurant.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.  Table service diners were more likely to reduce their food consumption during the rest of the day, most likely because of the difference in energy density of the food they consumed.  As a result, fast food may ultimately result in more calories as fast food diners tend to eat more throughout the day.

Not all table service restaurants are created equal, and not all diners are either.  But the moral of this Good Elements blog is - be mindful of what you consume when eating out.  Eating incorrectly when eating out can be more damaging to the waistline than that fast food that you avoided.

Tags: craving control, diet, Natural Supplements, weight control, weight loss

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Cooking Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.