Page 2 / News, Trends, Gossip and Stuff To Do : Web Watch : Weighing In on Fast Food

Say you blew it at breakfast with a bacon-and-cheese omelet, so you decide to go easy on the fat at lunch. Weighing your options at the local drive-thrus, you figure it’ll be slim pickings.

That’s when a Web site called Food Finder (https://www.olen.com/food/) can show you another way. The site gives the nutritional breakdown, including calories and fat grams, for menu items at 20 fast-food restaurants. You plug in what you’re looking for--a burger with fewer than 10 grams of fat, for instance. Five options turn up, including a plain burger at McDonald’s (9 grams) and a burger at White Castle (7 grams).

Food Finder also turns up the wolves in sheep’s clothing, such as the Caesar side salad at Boston Market, which has 17 grams of fat. According to the Web site, you can have a barbecue chicken sandwich at KFC, along with a scoop of rocky road ice cream from Baskin Robbins, and come out better off. The combination contains only 16 grams.

Food Finder gets about 10,000 hits a day, says Michael Olenick, owner of Olen Publishing, a Web site creation company in Mill Valley, Calif. He built the site in 1995 as a prototype for a potential client who was interested in finding ways to distribute consumer information online. But the site proved so popular that Olenick decided to keep it up and running.

“We recognize people aren’t going to give up eating fast food,” he says, “so they might as well eat more intelligently.”