This Is How Many Calories Youd Eat With Olive Gardens Pasta Pass
It sounds like a good deal for 100 you can eat all the pasta, salad and bread you want at Olive Garden for 49 straight days. But taking advantage of the offer has its downsidesperhaps up to 113,190 of them. That's the number of calories you would likely consume if you were to have a standard dinner nightly at the restaurant for the 7-week period of the offer. That works out to eating about 2,100 calories for dinner alone. Americans' average total daily caloric intake is between 1,800 for women and 2,600 for men, according to recent government data. TIME's estimate assumes you're eating a fairly standard Olive Garden dinner a chicken Caesar salad, one order of bread sticks, a spaghetti and sausage entree and a Coke to wash it all down. All of those items are included in the offer, and this estimate assumes you don't continue to scarf down food after the first serving of each item the offer is technically "all you can eat". "No matter how much we talk about epidemic obesity and diabetes, we have not yet caught up with the times," says Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University's Prevention Research Center and editor of a journal on childhood obesity. "The last thing we need is more refined pasta at no extra charge. It seems like a great deal until the money you saved goes to the endocrinologist.", Of course, there are less caloric dinner options at Olive Garden. For instance, you would consume 1,670 calories per meal if you subbed in seafood alfredo instead of the sausage pastaand you could shave off even more if you skipped the Coke. But, says Katz, that's beside the point. "Everybody overeats at an all you can eat buffet. You're missing out the bargain if you don't eat all you can eat," Katz says. Recent research has suggested that the caloric content of many sit-down restaurant chains makes them just as unhealthy as their fast food counterparts. The average size of a meal at these restaurants, according to the study, is 1,400 calories.