Your Weight for Low-Fat Fast Foods Has Ended

Most of us don’t necessarily plan to dine on fast food. It just sort of happens.

Take a long day at the office, top it off with an hour or more of crawling on the freeway, toss in the knowledge that the refrigerator needs restocking, and before you know it, you’re queued up at the drive-through wondering whether you should treat yourself to a shake with that double cheeseburger combo.

All those good intentions you had about eating right will just have to wait until tomorrow.

But there are healthy, easy alternatives, even for those of us who aren’t organized enough to plan menus even a day ahead.

Hidden behind a Wendy’s drive-through in a Laguna Niguel shopping center, for example, is Encore Cuisine to Go, which bills itself as offering “healthy, exciting fast food for people on the go.”

Proprietors Pam Murphy and Francois Coinon, who operated a catering business together for several years before expanding into the carry-out business last May, didn’t exactly envision their business as being focused on either fast food or health-conscious menus.

“We had the catering business, and we kept getting requests for smaller orders, which at the time we didn’t do,” Murphy says. “So we decided to open a place where people could come in and on the spur of the moment get something just for themselves or for six to 10 people or whatever.”

Encore’s original menu featured a couple of low-fat, low-cholesterol items, but they were the exception, Murphy says. But when those offerings quickly became the most popular, “We asked ourselves, why not do everything that way? That’s what our customers wanted, and it was very easy to change the preparation to make it healthier.”

Out went the ground beef in the meat loaf, and in went the turkey sausage. They switched from Roquefort to feta cheese for stuffing chicken breasts, and virtually eliminated salt. Instead of cream or butter or even oil, Coinon put the emphasis on nonfat vegetable sauces thickened only with a little flour. Even the croutons in the Caesar salad are oven-roasted instead of fried to cut down on fat. In fact, nothing at Encore is fried, Murphy says.

Everything on the menu at Encore Cuisine is available as of 7:30 a.m. each day. The salads, soups, sandwiches and entrees are prepared in advance, then refrigerated. Some customers prefer to come in the morning and pick up something for lunch, then take it to the office to be microwaved later.

For those who prefer, Murphy and Coinon will heat food in the shop’s microwave oven.

During the dinner rush, Murphy says, “It just kills us in the evening to look out the window and see people going through the drive-through at Wendy’s. We believe we have a healthier alternative.”

Coinon, who has been cooking professionally for 20 years and represents the seventh generation of his family in the food business, says he began cooking low-fat meals in Nice, on the French Riviera, where he grew up.

“My mother was really conscious of health way before her time, and she taught me to prepare foods without all the heavy sauces. Then when I came to California, I realized I could do even better. I do a lobster sauce, for example, and if I’d made it 15 years ago, I would have made it a white sauce (with butter and flour as a base). Now I use vegetable flavorings instead.

“We don’t like to call it ‘health food.’ A lot of people get a bad idea from that. It’s just nice and healthy without having wheat germ or tofu or that kind of thing.”

There is no drive-through, but Murphy says that she and Coinon do have dreams of opening other locations someday and perhaps offer that service as well. Delivery is available for an extra $1.50 within a 3-mile radius.

The two cooks also have dreams of franchising their operation someday, “only if we can maintain good quality control,” Murphy says.

Meanwhile, it is possible to find a healthy meal at a traditional fast-food place, with a little creativity.

First, skip the sauce. Arby’s sauce, for example, gets 90% of its calories from fat, as does the blue cheese and thousand-island dressing at Carl’s Jr., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, the fast-food chains themselves and other sources.

The sauce on a Burger King BK Broiler adds 10 grams of fat (for a total of 18, including the meat), and the tartar sauce on a McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish sandwich contributes 16 of the sandwich’s 26 grams of fat.

Most fast-food menu items get 50% to 90% of their calories from fat, far above the 30% recommended by dietary experts these days.

A Burger King Whopper with cheese, for example, gets 53% of its calories from fat, a Carl’s Jr. Super Star is 58% fat, a Jack in the Box Jumbo Jack is 50% fat, and both the Big Mac and the Filet-O-Fish get 53% of their calories from fat. A Wendy’s quarter-pound double gets 55% of its calories from fat, compared to 45% for a single on a multigrain bun.

A plain McDonald’s hamburger, however, gets only 35% of its calories from fat. Taco Bell’s lowest-fat offering is the bean burrito, at 31% fat, by calories.

Many fast-food chains are now offering alternatives, such as low-fat burgers or broiled chicken sandwiches, which can be good without sauces and cheese.

And one chain, El Pollo Loco, makes a point of offering low-fat food: The combo meal is only 28% fat, and El Pollo Loco’s chicken only gets 18% of its calories from fat.

Skip the fries, and the onion rings, both of which range from 45% to 55% calories-from-fat, depending on the chain. Even fried foods advertised as “no cholesterol” still contain fat and can contribute to high cholesterol and other health problems.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is 47% to 66% fat, measuring by calories, and extra crispy has more fat than original recipe. But the Colonel’s baked beans are only 9% fat, and those gravy-drenched mashed potatoes are only 15% fat.

To cut the fat even more, try removing the fatty breaded skin from the chicken. That cuts the calories in half and the fat by two-thirds, according to Bonnie Liebman of the Nutrition Action Healthletter.

Liebman also recommends removing the cheese from pizza and throwing it away, tossing out 40% of the calories and 85% of the fat, which is largely highly saturated butterfat.