Calories on menus: suggestion or gospel?

More restaurant chains are under fire for misrepresenting the calorie counts on their menus.  This time it’s Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts who are in hot water after a news station in New York found “caloric inaccuracies.” New York City was the first city to require calorie information on the chain menus, and similar bills have been proposed all over the country, including Missouri.

Local chain Applebee’s faced similar criticism over items on its special Weight Watcher’s menu that had three times as much fat as advertised. This lead to a class-action lawsuit against Applebee’s last month alleging that the company purposely misled diners on calorie information.

Neither Starbucks nor Dunkin’ Donuts has been sued (yet). Some of the revelations are shocking — a Starbucks’ peach apple tart was listed at 120 calories but actually contained 280. Blueberry muffins were also higher in calories than advertised.

What’s lost in all this outrage is how much consumers should depend on calorie information in the first place. It’s important to let customers know that something they think only contains 500 calories actually contains 1,500 but for items like a blueberry muffin, when people are buying it even when it’s labeled as 400-plus calories, an extra hundred calories is not that big of a difference.

The issue is different for a sit-down restaurant like Applebee’s. No two chicken breasts are going to have the exact same number of calories, just as a line server may put an extra ounce of mashed potatoes on a plate. In a controlled laboratory it may be easy to duplicate a dish’s calories but in an actual kitchen, variables are going to happen.

Calories on menus should be taken with a grain of salt. They’re a guide to making healthy choices but not a way to count individual calories.