Health Group Reviews Popular Restaurant Food

"Order a sirloin steak or a filet mignon, each with a house salad, fat-free dressing, and baked potato with tablespoon of sour cream, and you're talking just 800-or-so calories and half a day's worth of artery-clogging fat," said CSPI senior nutritionist Jayne Hurley, who conducted the study. "By restaurant standards, that's darn good."

"But go for a 16-oz. prime rib," Hurley warned, "and, even if you trim it, you've eaten two days' worth of artery-clogging fat. Add a Caesar salad and a baked potato with butter and you'll be leaving the restaurant 1,700 calories and 104 grams of fat heavier."

CSPI's latest study analyzed nine samples each of 15 popular dishes sold at some of the largest steak-house chains -- Damon's, Lone Star, LongHorn, Outback, Steak and Ale, Stuart Anderson's, and Tony Roma's -- as well as smaller chains and independent steak houses. The steaks that were analyzed were trimmed carefully.

One of the study's most surprising findings, which appear in the January/February issue of CSPI's Nutrition Action Healthletter: The worst food you can buy at a steak house isn't steak.

"A cheese fries appetizer is worse than any of the steak platters we analyzed," said Hurley. "In fact, it's worse than anything we've ever analyzed, including a plate of fettuccine Alfredo, a dish we called a 'heart attack on a plate.'"

An entire cheese fries appetizer with ranch dressing packs 3,000 calories and three days' worth of fat (217 grams), Hurley revealed. "What do you expect from more than a pound of fries smothered in a third pound of a cheese, sprinkled with crumbled bacon, and served with ranch dressing? Split it with a few friends and you've still got a coronary time bomb."

Other CSPI findings include:

Eat just half a deep-fried onion appetizer (at Outback they call it a Bloomin' Onion) -- and no dipping sauce -- and you'll use up roughly a day's worth of fat (58 grams) and artery-clogging fat (22 grams), more than half a day's sodium (1,520 mg), plus more than 800 calories. "To get that much fat you'd have to eat three McDonald's Quarter Pounders," said Hurley. "Make it four Quarter Pounders if you use just half the dipping sauce."

The healthiest dish you can order at a steak house is not steak, but barbecue chicken breast or grilled fish (tested in a previous CSPI study). But you can build a decent meal around a sirloin steak or a filet mignon. That's not true of any of the other steaks that CSPI tested. "A rib eye or New York strip has the fat of two sirloins, a T-bone has the fat of three, and a porterhouse or prime rib has the fat of four," said Hurley. "Fortunately, sirloin is the most popular steak served at restaurants."

Side dishes can make or break your meal. A Caesar salad and a baked potato with butter packs three times more fat as you'd get from a house salad with "lite" dressing and a baked potato with a tablespoon of sour cream.

CSPI is a non-profit, health-advocacy group specializing in food and nutrition issues. The Center accepts no government or corporate funding. Find CSPI on the Internet at http://www.cspinet.org/.