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Eat Out, Eat Right! A Guide to Healthier Restaurant Eating

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If you're like me, you're eating out more often and you find that you're running up quite a tab. (Your waistline is paying the price, that is!) For $12.95, you can have your own personal "nutrtionist" by your side at any restaurant, anytime--this book fits perfectly into your handbag.
From a creamy frappuccino at Starbucks to dinner at your favorite Italian restaurant, this book has you covered. 20 popular cuisines are featured as well as everything in-between (even airports and ball parks!). The author, Hope Warshaw, tells you exactly what's healthy and what's not, from soup to dessert. To simplfy menu choices, the book lists Green Flag (good) words and Red Flag (bad) words for every type of food. Each chapter includes sample meals with calorie counts and nutrtional data. Don't leave home without it!

Hope Warshaw's "Eat Out, Eat Right!" is a genuinely helpful guide aimed at allowing us to eat out without completely destroying our waistlines and health. First it provides us with some general guidelines on healthier eating at restaurants. This is followed by chapters on different restaurant and restaurant food styles: Mexican, Italian, Pizza, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Continental, Seafood, American, Fast-Food, Breakfast/Coffee Shops/Brunch, Salads, Soups/Sandwiches/Subs.

Each chapter includes some general words about healthful choices regarding that style of food, a "nutrition snapshot" for several typical menu items, "red flag" and "green flag" words that indicate unhealthy and healthy ingredients and cooking styles, special requests you can make at that type of restaurant, a typical menu listing, and a sample low-calorie (as well as moderate-calorie) meal.

There are some great suggestions in this book. Some of the nutrition information may surprise you and reveal hidden sources of fat. Ms. Warshaw also provides concrete psychological strategies to help you resist large portions of fatty food.

Unfortunately her presentation of information is somewhat inconsistent. For example, in the opening list of healthy foods to eat when out at the zoo or such, she lists pizza without any qualifiers, despite the fact that at many fast-food places pizza contains a wealth of grease and cheese. When she gets to the pizza chapter she includes the qualifiers that explain how you can choose pizza that will be healthy for you. She does this all over the place, though--including qualifiers in one place, then labeling the same thing as healthy or not elsewhere without mentioning those qualifiers. This is very confusing and leads to inconsistent indications about what it's okay to eat and what it isn't.

She also over-relies on artificial sweeteners as a cure-all for calorific beverages, completely neglecting the fact that some people can very distinctly taste a particularly unpleasant and even nauseating bitter/sickly-sweet aftertaste with these sweeteners, and that some people still have concerns over their potential health impacts. For some of us artificial sweeteners simply aren't an option, and a wider discussion of possibilities would have been nice.

There's a great deal of value in here for the restaurant-goer, but make sure to read entire chapters rather than simply referring to one chart or list at a time. Otherwise you're likely to miss important information.