Here’s good news: You can get a healthful meal in almost any Mexican restaurant, whether it’s a fast-food joint or an upscale room with white tablecloths and salsa served in antique china bowls.
Though the information doesn’t grab headlines, traditional Mexican foods such as soft corn tortillas wrapped around a piece of grilled chicken breast; fresh seviche; or salsa, plain beans and rice won’t swell your waistline or cake up your arteries.
Real Mexican food can be low in fat, high in fiber and full of nutrients-especially the hot peppers, some of which have more vitamin C than an orange.
But perhaps you find bad news more interesting: There’s some of that this week about Mexican-style food too. Most of the popular dinner platters from a selection of Mexican restaurants across the country contain as much fat, saturated fat and sodium as a person should consume in a day, according to the report issued Monday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Washington-based consumer advocacy group.
A beef chimichanga dinner-a large fried tortilla filled with ground beef, cheese, lettuce, sour cream and other goodies-had a day and a half’s worth of fat and sodium. Chiles rellenos are the Mexican equivalent of the Italian dish fettuccine Alfredo, which CSPI called “a heart attack on a plate.”
“Chiles rellenos is like eating a whole stick of butter,” says Jayne Hurley, a CSPI dietitian who conducted the survey.
CSPI is the group that earlier branded kung pao chicken and several other Chinese and Italian restaurant dishes as dietary disasters full of fat, cholesterol and sodium. And, yes, CSPI staff members also were the nutrition police who not long ago raided theaters selling popcorn rich in saturated coconut oil.
But you may be wondering, is this really important? Are people really so ignorant that they don’t know that a plate of fried enchiladas doused with cheese, guacamole and sour cream is fat and calorie overload?
“Most people go out to restaurants to reward themselves. They go to relax or do business, but they don’t go to count calories or eat heart-healthy food,” says Stephen Elmont, owner of Boston’s Mirabelle Restaurant and past president of the National Restaurant Association. “Consumers are smart people: They know what’s going on.
“You don’t see Chinese or Mexican restaurants advertising: `Welcome to the home of the low-cholesterol egg roll or taco.’ They are not trying to promote those kinds of foods as healthful.”
“Some food you get in some Mexican restaurants is fatty, that’s true, but a lot of the food that passes for Mexican is really Tex-Mex (which often relies on deep-fat frying),” says Dudley Nieto, chef at Lindas Margaritas in Chicago. “Real Mexican food doesn’t rely on fat for flavor. It uses spices, beans, chilies and grains. . . . A lot relies on fresh vegetables, fresh meats,” Nieto says.
Chicago chef Rick Bayless, owner of Frontera Grill, also has concerns about CSPI reports on ethnic cuisines. “First, CSPI trashes Chinese food, then Italian and now Mexican,” he says, “but nowhere has it distinguished the real cooking of those countries from the Americanized versions,” which is what is sold in the restaurants CSPI visited.
CSPI, which has been taking on the fast-food restaurant industry for more than a decade, did suggest eating Chinese food “as the Chinese do” with large amounts of rice and small amounts of meat, and recommended simple Italian pasta dishes.
But while Italian and Chinese restaurants offer some fat leeway in selecting among popular dishes, the only common items Hurley could suggest ordering at Mexican restaurants were the chicken fajitas, chicken tacos and a chicken burritos-and those without beans, guacamole, sour cream and tortilla chips. It is a minefield in which the health conscious diner must be wary, she says. )
At Chi-Chi’s, one of the chains cited in the CSPI report, customers can ask for items to be made low in fat and cholesterol, a representative says.
“We always have been willing to assist people who have any dietary restrictions or allergies,” says Lynn Miller, vice president of human resources for the Louisville-based chain. “We can tailor our items. Since we make everything in each restaurant, we can leave the cheese out of a burrito or delete sour cream and guacamole and things with higher fat. If you want a low-cal salad dressing, we have that too.”
The owners of ZuZu, a 5-year-old, 31-restaurant chain in the Southwest not mentioned in the CSPI report, pride themselves on offering “authentic, handmade” Mexican food. Lard has been replaced with olive and peanut oils, and each item is made to order, said David Bennett, president. A 3-ounce order of refried black beans, for instance, has only about 2 grams of fat-about 0.3 gram of which is saturated-and 290 milligrams of sodium.
In the 15 restaurants-many of them midpriced chains-visited by CSPI in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, D.C., most of the refried bean dishes and rice mixtures had added fat, Hurley says. In fact, the side dishes of rice, beans, sour cream and guacamole that come with the regular platters supply about two-thirds of your daily recommended allowance for fat, saturated fat and sodium.
However, in a departure from its regular procedure, CSPI recognized a Portland, Ore., Mexican-style restaurant chain for its “healthier direction with Mexican food.” Macheezmo Mouse, a 15-unit chain, grills and steams rather than fries, uses fat-reduced cheese, cuts sour cream with non-fat yogurt, adds no fat to its beans and offers several vegetables as side dishes, says CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson.
Citing recent news of increasing obesity rates in Americans, Jacobson has written to 13 Mexican-restaurant chains, asking them to consider not adding oil to their rice and refried beans, not dipping enchiladas in fat, switching to leaner beef, making tortillas with whole wheat, and baking tortilla chips instead of frying them.
Nieto and Bayless, of course, suggest just avoiding chain-restaurant Mexican food in favor of more authentic fare, though that may be much less available.
“Those (chain) restaurants have gotten away from corn tortillas,” says Bayless. “Instead they use mostly flour. Corn tortillas have no fat, no salt: Flour tortillas have salt and fat. And if you fry flour tortillas, they have phenomenally high caloric content.”
Mirabelle’s Elmont thinks Jacobson and CSPI are shooting themselves in the foot by being “alarmist. They are not being helpful. Maybe if somebody found that frozen yogurt caused cancer, it might cause a reaction, but this kind of thing has been going on since the cranberry scare in 1959.
“People don’t care, and restaurateurs know it,” Elmont says. “They don’t believe they have the responsibility to make customers eat healthfully. The customers aren’t coming to us to be educated.”
Jacobson and CSPI may get the last word, however. Despite the protests after the group’s pronouncements on the coconut oil in theater popcorn, several large theater chains announced they would start using less saturated fat.
