My sense is that the restaurants that serve, you know, FOOD -- as opposed to the middlebrow chains with their processed crap -- are a lot better, and at least make it obvious if a dish is heavy with carbs, sugar, and fat. And even with the middlebrow chains, you'd have to be kind of stupid, to fail to understand that their food is bad for you.

I mean, come on: If you order herbed-cheese ravioli in almond cream sauce at Cafe Pro Bono, you must know you're clogging your arteries. I still occasionally split the small size one with somebody, as an appetizer. It's yummy. I just don't do stuff like that every day.

One would think. However, some of these meals are subtle -- for instance, the mentioned 2,000 calorie Ruby Tuesday's thing is actually a grilled chicken & broccoli pasta, which some people might order thinking "hey, that'll be healthy!" and the 700-calorie KFC Famous Bowl is in fact pretty small -- about the size of the bowls that other chains sell that have about 500 calories.

The bills introduced only deal with restaurants with more than 5 or 10 branches, which basically means the chains that are catering to the least-educated customers, with the unhealthiest stuff, and can also afford to figure out what average nutritional values are. So that's fine.

But you're right -- once you go to a nice restaurant, well, any self-respecting chef knows that cheese fried in butter tastes great, but the challenge is to make a dish that tastes just as good without being quite so artery-clogging. So you don't see so many unhealthy dishes, and you also see customers who are inclined to a wider variety of flavors and so wouldn't eat the cheesy items every day.

Well, chicken-and-broccoli pasta would probably be fine if they a) didn't serve such huge-ass portions (which is a problem at virtually all US chain restaurants, and a lot of non-chain ones), and b) didn't apply a creamy sauce (which I'll bet they do -- I haven't read the article all the way through, but, come on, it's a middlebrow chain, they're incapable of serving pasta without drowning it in cheap white wine, butter, and cream).

Not only does it have a cream sauce, they also cover it with melted cheese. Egads! The article had a description of the dish and a photo and I have to admit, I'd never have expected something so heart-stopping from the menu description.

I mean, if you're going to put cream sauce and melted cheese on top, why go for chicken and broccoli at all? The increase in unhealthiness from using a nice, marbled steak has got to be marginal at worst.