20 Worst Foods in America

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Restaurant food is bad for us. You may assume that anything you order at a drive-thru is less than sterling in a nutritional sense, but, in fact, the majority of what we eat at restaurants — even ones with helpful waiters and real tablecloths — is worse for us than we might ever imagine.
A study from the University of Arkansas that found the average diner in this country underestimates his or her caloric intake by up to 93 percent when eating out. Translation: Every time you eat at a restaurant, you're probably eating twice as much as you think.

The scariest part is that it isn't our fault. By expanding portion sizes, spiking our foods evermore with added sugars and dangerous fats, and slapping misleading labels on menus, the restaurant industry has made it nearly impossible for consumers to accurately gauge the caloric heft of, say, a plate of spaghetti and meatballs or a tropical fruit smoothie.
Some studies even show that nutritionists — the PhD-packing "experts" — can't get their calorie counts right. So how can you be expected to?

In researching our book "Eat This, Not That," and to help combat the problem and give people a better idea of how perilous a simple dinner out can be, we spent months reading nutritional info, analyzing food, inspecting menu boards, and, yes, even eating some of these industrial-strength calorie bombs to come up with a list of the restaurant industry's worst individual offenders. Our primary criterion? Sheer caloric impact. After all, it's the top cause of weight gain and the health problems that accompany it. We also factored in other key nutritional data, such as excessive carbohydrates and fat, added sugars, trans fats, and sodium.

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