By Jennie Tanner

Let’s face it. We all love to go out to eat once in a while so we don’t have to worry about cooking ourselves. Many restaurants boast about their healthy options; but exactly how healthy are they?

Countless fine dining establishments are loaded with sodium and saturated with fat, such as Applebee’s and Uno Chicago Grill. Uno’s even goes so far as to have a kiosk inside each of their restaurants for public consumer use so customers can be aware of what they’re eating.

Uno’s shouldn’t be boasting their so-called nutrition values, considering one of their individual cheese and tomato deep dish pizzas—which is meant for one person—contains 1750 calories, almost a whole day’s worth.

Nikole Lambert, a current student at Fitchburg State University, says, “I tried Uno’s pizza as a child and I hated it; I’ve avoided it ever since.” She made a good choice, considering that the amount of sodium in it trumps a day’s worth of sodium also, ringing in at a total of 2750 mg.

Their healthier nine grain crust option isn’t much better, with calories ringing in at 1570 and sodium of 2200 mg, when a day’s worth should be no more than 2000 mg.

Some restaurants are making an effort to reach out to the health conscious people, luring them in with promises of low-calorie dishes. Applebee’s, for example, has an under 550 calorie portion on their menu. On this menu there are a total of four items, plus three more that belong to a weight watchers portion of the menu.

Kudos goes to Applebee’s for trying to make their consumers feel better about eating out and eating right, even though the options off their healthier menus may be somewhat limited. Hopefully they will expand upon their beginnings of a healthier menu more in the near future.

All facts about nutrition can be found on www.applebees.com or www.unos.com