Healthy Dining Lends a Hand

Asian Restaurant News is pleased to announce a new collaboration with California-based Healthy Dining. The partnership reflects ARN’s interest in leading the way to increased awareness and implementation of healthier preparation methods by operators of Asian restaurants. Components of the collaboration include a series of articles, provided by Healthy Dining’s culinary nutrition professionals, with tips about enhancing the healthfulness of your menu items.

Healthy Menu Items – Where and How to Begin

Recognizing increased consumer interest in health and nutrition, many restaurant operators want to do something to improve the nutrition content of their menu items. The problem: They don’t know how to go about it. Healthy Dining’s team of nutrition experts can help! 

First, however, ARN would like to tell you why we are partnering with Healthy Dining: 

• Healthy Dining is a leader in restaurant nutrition. For 17 years, Healthy Dining has worked with hundreds of restaurants in Southern California, providing nutrition analysis of their dishes and publicizing the restaurants through a series of books. The California Dietetic Association awarded Healthy Dining its “Meritorious Service Award.” Both the California Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awarded grants to Healthy Dining to conduct research and education related to restaurant nutrition.  The National Restaurant Association (NRA) has also teamed up with Healthy Dining through a groundbreaking initiative that promotes restaurants that offer healthier selections.

• Healthy Dining is staffed by a group of health professionals, including master’s level health educators and registered dietitians with experience in restaurant nutrition. 

• Healthy Dining’s approach is practical and makes sense—it’s balanced, and it works for the vast majority of restaurants. It’s also limited in scope, meaning Healthy Dining doesn’t require ALL dishes on a restaurant menu be “healthy.” Instead, Healthy Dining helps your restaurant to develop, modify or create a selection of menu items—as few as four—that meet recommended nutrition guidelines.

• The fees for Healthy Dining’s programs and services are very reasonable.

• As a participating restaurant, you gain credibility (third-party validation) about the healthfulness of your dishes.

• Healthy Dining’s approach is comprehensive. It includes a variety of components that work together to promote your restaurant—and your healthier dishes—in various ways to many segments of the community.

• Healthy Dining’s program provides visibility and numerous marketing and public relations benefits for participating restaurants.

We believe that the partnership with Healthy Dining will be good for Asian restaurants and for the Asian restaurant industry overall. That’s because many Asian dishes are healthful; other dishes may need simple modifications to meet the nutrition criteria established by Healthy Dining. And in today’s nutrition-conscious climate, it’s important and advantageous to get the word out about the healthfulness of Asian cuisine.

Healthy Dining can help you by:

• Identifying and—if necessary—modifying some of the dishes from your menu to meet the recommendations of leading health organizations and health professionals.

• Conducting nutrition analysis on some of the dishes served at your restaurant, enabling you to offer health-, weight- and nutrition-conscious diners the information they want about calories, fat, sodium, fiber, etc.

• Providing materials—logos, window stickers, press releases, and more—that enable you to gain valuable publicity and public relations benefits, as well as new business, in connection with offering healthier choices.

• Promoting your restaurant to the increasing numbers of consumers who are health-, weight- and nutrition-conscious. As a participating restaurant, you will be featured on HealthyDiningFinder.com, the recently launched Web site featuring healthier menu items served at restaurants nationwide.

How did Healthy Dining begin?

Public health nutritionist Anita Jones and researcher Esther Hill began the Healthy Dining program in San Diego in 1991. Jones was counseling patients for a group of physicians, and restaurant dining always presented a challenge. Hill’s diabetic son was having difficulty controlling his blood sugar level due to frequent dining out. The two women teamed up to approach restaurants in the area, offering to conduct nutrition analysis on their dishes and publicize the results through a book entitled Healthy Dining in San Diego. The book was so well-received that the project expanded throughout Southern California.

After 15 years and 15 Healthy Dining books, the staff—which had by that point expanded substantially—realized that the benefits of Healthy Dining could be expanded to restaurants and consumers nationwide by making the centerpiece of the program a Web site rather than a book. The plan resonated with many within the restaurant industry and beyond, attracting such partners, supporters and collaborators as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Restaurant Association, American Express and scores of health organizations, health professionals, employers, community organizations, etc.

The Healthy Dining Program and HealthyDiningFinder.com are widely seen as a win-win for all sides. Chinese Restaurant News is excited about bringing the resources of this organization to our restaurant community.  

For more information about how Healthy Dining can help your restaurant, please contact Erica Bohm at 800-953-3463, ext. 7112 or Erica@HealthyDiningFinder.com.