Restaurants That Do Their Best With Food Calculators
All major restaurants are required to provide nutritional information for their menus, which you can find on their websites. But some go above and beyond by providing calculators so you can know exactly what you’re eating, right down to the sides and toppings.
The Chipotle Calculator is the perfect translation of its simple yet customizable menu: just check the boxes of what you put on your burrito. The result: not only the total number of calories and nutrients for the entire enchilada (so to speak), but a detailed list of numbers for each component. Subway takes a similar approach, but without breaking down the items: select a sandwich, click the Customize Yours button, and the nutrition information updates with your choices.
McDonald’s Meal Builder has a more clunky interface, but it can summarize nutritional information for an entire dish: say, a hamburger, fries, and apple pie. You can remove the toppings (which is how I know I’ll save 90 calories by holding the Big Mac, not that anyone would ever do that), but there’s no way to add more. Not every fast food restaurant has a detailed nutrition calculator, but if you just want to add up the ingredients of your meal, try the Fast Food Nutrition website, which has calculators for most of the main hamburger snacks.
In the pizza world, the Cal-O-Meter does a great job of counting calories, but doesn’t provide other information like carbs, protein, and so on (correction: it does! ). It can take into account several dishes, but its main drawback is the calorie content of each slice. My double cheese pineapple pizza looks like it has 435 calories, but if I eat three slices, I actually break 1,300 calories.
Missing your favorite restaurant calculator? Let us know in the comments!