I'm not a big fan of the book Eat This, Not That. It purports to tell you which foods you should be eating in restaurants instead of other foods. Sometimes the comparison is good, but other times it just seems to save a person 100 calories here or a few grams of fat there and doesn't seem worth the bother (and sometimes the "eat this" choice has more carbs or salt). But I guess it's good to have the info.

Now Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko exposes some restaurant secrets. Why don't some chains want us to know the nutritional numbers of their foods? What foods are often cooked with other foods in the kitchen? Do some fast food chains actually have healthier options than sit down restaurants?

I'm a big fan of the new law requiring some NY restaurants to post calorie counts. However, posting calorie counts is only helpful if they are clear and accurate.

Midtown Lunch points out that Chipotle's implementation of the law is neither.

Chipotle uses calorie ranges so the consumer is left to guess what add-ons make the meal more or less caloric. Midtown Lunch does some math using calorie counts buried in Chipotle's website and determines that, "If you want a burrito on the low range of the calorie scale (420), you will be ordering a flour tortilla, filled with vegetarian black beans. No salsa. No sour cream. No rice. No cheese." That's one boring burrito. Midtown Lunch questions whether you could even call it a burrito.

What do you think? Are these calorie counts better than nothing or are they too confusing to be useful?

NYC's Board of Health attempted last year to pass a measure that forced fast food joints to post calorie counts on their menu boards, right where people could see them (and, I guess, be horrified by them and run screaming from the restaurant. Or...something. Not quite sure what the city's goal was).

At any rate, a judge struck down the measure, so now they're back to where they started. But they're not giving up on trying to hoard their mighty caloric knowledge on the citizens of New York! By golly, they will succeed in getting people to acknowledge the 600 calories in that Premium Crispy Chicken Ranch BLT Sandwich they're eating! And then the Board of Health officials will sleep soundly at night, feeling virtuous that they have single-handedly handled the "obesity epidemic." Right?

For the record, Burger King and McDonald's already make this information available (it took me half a minute to find how many calories were in that Chicken McWhatever listed above), they just don't advertise it like the marquee outside of Radio City. Currently, if the city's restaurants want to display their food's nutritional info, they are more than welcome to.

And I mean, really, how many people nowadays don't know that fast food is bad for them? I highly doubt that prominently displaying caloric information will make people who have already walked through a eatery's doors gawk at the fat content and walk out of the store in a huff. I mean, if I want a cookie, I'm eating the cookie knowing that it's bad for me (and even secretly reveling in that fact).

If enacted, the regulation will go into effect March 31. So, until then, we can remain uneducated, bumbling masses. Sound good?

I recently posted a list of the 88 worst fast food items. That list was based on the amount of trans fats in various fast foods. Now Men's Health has weighed in and picked the 20 Worst Foods in America, and this list is based not only on fats but also calories, sodium, and carbs.

Obviously, when you're talking fast food, a lot of it is going to be bad for you, but I guess it's good to have a list of specific foods and categories. For example, they name the McDonald's Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips (5 pieces) witih Ranch Dressing as the Worst Fast Food Chicken Meal. The Jamba Juice Chocolate Moo'd Power Smoothie gets the Worst Drink nod. It's 900 calories, with 10 grams of fat and 166 grams of sugar.

What foods on the list do you regularly eat?

I hate to be the one to do it to you, especially after trying to pawn off organic gummy bears and Fruit Roll-ups on you as "candy," but someone has to do it. Someone is going to remind you how many calories are in that Snickers bar you just swiped from your kid for yourself, and it may as well be me.

Website A Calorie Counter has a fairly decent table of calorie counts for some of the more popular chocolate and candy bars. It's a side-by-side comparison to see how they all stack up against each other in terms of their nutritional content and ingredients like saturated fat , sugar, and trans fat. The funny thing is, most of the bars within a certain category flutter about the same calorie count. For example, most chocolate bars are about 200 calories, so you really aren't saving much by choosing a Nestle 100 Grand Bar at 180 calories over a Heath Bar, which is 210. You're better off going to a completely different category like hard and powder candies, but to really save calories, you know that the best thing to do is not eat it.

When I go into a fast food place such as McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's (which I think I've done maybe 3 times in the past 3 years), I know beforehand that I have made a decision to eat badly that day. I don't care if these places have "salads" or "low-fat foods," it's still fast food to me, and I don't need anyone to tell me what I'm about to eat probably has a lot of fat and calories.

Having said that, I see no real problem with New York City restaurants having to show calorie info where customers can see it. The law took effect earlier this week. Some of the fast food companies argued that it "violated their First Amendment rights," which I still don't understand. Some places are putting the info in areas where they're not immediately accessible to customers, while other places, like Subway, have the info upfront.

Fines will start being issued October 1 for restaurants that violate the law.

Coffee is hip (actually, it's been that way for several years now), and everyone is drinking it, including kids and teens. When I was a kid, we never drank coffee. It was seen as a "grown-up" thing to do, right up there with having sex, smoking cigarettes, and mortgages. But now you see kids and teens with a Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts cup in their hands, and coffee shoppes are the new malt shoppes.

The Boston Globe's Beth Teitell has an interesting piece on the trend, noting how we try to cut high sugar sodas and fat-filled candy from schools but we're not really thinking about high calorie/high fat/high sugar coffee drinks. Funny how coffee was always seen as an adult thing when soda has caffeine and sugar in it too.

Well, maybe once in a great while, but don't make it a daily thing, OK?

HungryGirl.com has the list of the five summer drinks that will destroy your diet. Sometimes we don't think of the massive amount of calories and/or sugar and/or fat that are in those seductive cold drinks. For example, Krispy Kreme's Mocha Dream Chiller has 670 calories, 28 grams of fat, and 58 grams of sugar (that's for the 12 oz). Dunkin Donuts' Vanilla Bean Coolatta has 440 calories, 17 grams of fat, and 69 grams of sugar.

The other drinks on the list are from Starbucks, Fatburger, and Dairy Queen.

Here's an idea that is either brilliant or will make you feel really, really guilty about eating snacks.

AndrewAndrew has come up with these cookies that have the nutritonal label printed right on the icing! So now with every bite you can see what you're putting into your body. Or, if you don't want to know, you can just shove the whole thing into your mouth and not think about the numbers.

I wonder if this would work with other foods? Maybe print nutritional labels right into a piece of Wonder bread or onto a piece of Kraft American cheese? It probably wouldn't work with Pepsi or creamed corn.

[via Boing Boing]

I've done an extensive survey of all of the information about weight loss that you can find on the shelves of Border's and Barnes & Noble, and here are the results.

It seems as if the best way to lose weight and get in shape is a combo of the following: eating a lot of carbs, eating a lot of fat, cutting carbs out completely, drinking a lot of water, not eating any "white" foods at night like bread, rice, and pasta, eating just grapefruit, eating your meals in a mixed-up fashion (lunch for dinner, breakfast for lunch, etc), not eating after 8pm, eating a lot of soups, cutting out all candy, cakes, and processed foods, avoiding diet drinks, eating a Subway sub a couple of times a week, eating foods according to your blood type, eating foods according to color, eating a lot of fiber, training your brain to think like a thin person, eating like they do in France, eating like they do in China, not counting calories, making sure you count calories, taking vitamins and supplements, become a vegan, eating more meat, eat a lot of apples, eating only raw foods, and joining one of the weight loss organizations such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

If you follow the above rules, you should get in shape very quickly. You're welcome.

The Cheesecake Factory is known for their enormous portion sizes and high-calorie cheesecakes. The large sizes seem to add value to the meals for diners, while the cheesecakes, depending on who you ask, are a big slice of heaven on a plate. Both of these things, however, are a source of irritation to nutritionists and consumer watchdog groups.

Since fans of the Factory wouldn't tolerate a decrease in the portion size, but the company wanted to offer something a little lighter for those who are watching what they eat (and possibly to placate the groups watching them), they introduced several "weight management" salads. The lower calorie offerings have less than 590 calories each. The Weight Management choices include: Asian Chicken Salad, Spicy Chicken Salad, Pear and Endive Salad (pictured), California Salad and Seafood Salad. Each is slimmed by using low-calorie dressings and cutting back on the amount of cheese, nuts, hard0boiled eggs, avocado and other high-calorie components, although it doesn't seem like they're entirely eliminated in any of the dishes, which is probably why they're just called "weight management" and not "light" or "diet,"

Professional football players have heavily regulated diets, but regardless of what they're eating when they're off the field, they're clearly working off those pounds when they play. The same cannot be said for the rest of us. During the Super Bowl, it is estimated that 30 million pounds of food, of which 4 million is fat, will be consumed across the country. Chips are the most popular snack, with 11.2 million pounds of potato chips sold for the game. Other snacks put up impressive numbers, as well: 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips, 4.3 million pounds of pretzels, 3.8 million pounds of popcorn and 2.5 million pounds of nuts. And it doesn't look as though they counted calories from beer, sodas and other drinks in these numbers.

To avoid packing on the pounds during the game, there are a few simple things you can do:

• Eat breakfast or lunch before the party, so you won't be as hungry and as likely to binge.
• Try and go for a walk/run in the morning before the game and burn off a few extra calories.
• Try drinking diet soda or water to avoid the hundreds of calories that come from drinks alone.
• When it comes to snacks, make a low fat/low calorie dip to bring to the party, such as salsa, a bean-based dip or a yogurt dip made with nonfat yogurt.
• Limit your chip consumption by sticking to veggies or lower fat crackers for dipping - especially if you're planning on chowing down on pizza or buffalo wings.

One last suggestion? Stand up and cheer for your team when they get a first down and do your own little touchdown dance when they score. Taking the opportunity to burn off a couple of extra calories never hurt.

So how much energy is in a kiss? I guess it depends upon the kiss. Is it a kiss by Helen of Troy? Or a Hershey's kiss? Well Helen's days of kissing are long gone, but scientists have calculated the energy in a Hershey's kiss (and any other food) and you would be amazed. They use something called a bomb calorimeter which is designed to hold small food explosions and then measure the heat produced by the explosion.

A Hershey's kiss has 26 calories. Now that's not much, but if you look at calories from a scientific viewpoint, and the energy they measure, then that tiny little kiss can provide enough energy to lift a 8,600 lb. SUV over six feet into the air. There's a heck of a lot more energy in our food than you think. If you want to learn more about this check out the article at www.NPR.org.

Food Network fans probably remember Juan-Carlos Cruz from his relatively unpromoted show Calorie Commando, which ran for about three seasons and was unfortunately forced into a TV no-man's land by the fact that the network kept switching around its time slot, making it difficult for viewers to find. The show itself was entertaining, with an underlying philosophy that said healthy foods could still be delicious and comforting. Some of Cruz's recipes could be a bit extreme (I seem to recall a generous use of watercress), but the premise was sound and is something that can translate easily to most home kitchens when cooks are looking to cut back a little bit - especially after the holidays.

The Juan-Carlos Cruz Calorie Countdown Cookbook: A 5-Week Eating Strategy for Sustainable Weight Loss offers a pretty reasonable weight-loss guide that doesn't go over-the-top and end up in the realm of "gimicky" diets. There are 150 sensible recipes, lots of menus that will eliminate guesswork as you get your new routine started, general health tips and even JCC's own personal weight-loss story (he lost 280 pounds!) for a bit of inspiration. The best part is that once the five weeks are over, assuming you stick to the plan, you'll have a nice collection of health-conscious recipes to fall back on. And who wouldn't mind reliable, but lightened, versions of chicken Parmesan, macaroni and cheese, chocolate cake and even cheese fries?

It's hard to tell how many calories something has just by looking at it. We already know what an ounce of nuts looks like - but what do servings of other common foods look like? Wisegeek took pictures of 200 calories portions of 71 common food items, including everything from staples like flour, cornmeal, oil and butter to muffins, ketchup, bacon, Powerbars and Tootsie Pops. They every carefully cut down the items that were more than 200 calories per piece to provide the most accurate visual example possible. Measurements are given in grams or milliliters, as well as calories. And as an additional bonus, every item was shot on the same plate, bowl or glass, so the size of each item can easily be compared to its neighboring items.

Now, calories aren't the only thing to take into consideration when planning your diet, but it is still nice to see that one glazed donut doesn't have quite as many calories as a bakery muffin or a bagel because it makes it that much easier to enjoy every once in a while.