Restaurant menus may lie

Nothing like a little investigative reporting to open our eyes to restaurant lies. In eight cities across the nation, Scripps television stations recently ordered meals off the low fat/low calorie menus at Macaroni Grill, Chilis, Applebee's, Cheesecake Factory and Taco Bell. Then they put each meal in a separate Ziploc bag, packed them on ice and shipped 'em overnight to an EPA-certified testing lab for nutritional analysis.

What they found was shocking. Total fat and calories of many allegedly 'healthier' meals did not even come close to matching the published totals on the menu. Here are a few of the worst offenders from the complete list of meals tested:

• Macaroni Grill's Pollo Magro "Skinny Chicken": "Skinny's" really fat. Published as a 6 grams of fat and 500-calorie dish, "Skinny" actually had 49 grams of fat and 1,022 calories. That is unforgivable.
• Chili's Guiltless Chicken Platter: Oh no, one of my favorite dishes -- published as a 9 grams of fat and 580-calorie dish, Guiltless Chicken weighed in guilty with 32.5 grams of fat and 627 calories.
• Taco Bell's Fresco Bean Burrito: Published as a 7 grams of fat, 330-calorie choice, the Fresco actually had 19.1 grams of fat and 441 calories.

Hello culinary chefs and corporate, where is the quality control here? Be wary of nutritional info on restaurant menus -- you might be ordering more fat and calories than you think.