Greek Food - souvlaka is healthiest choice - Statistical Data Included

Nutrition Action Healthletter, Nov, 2000 by Jayne Hurley, Bonnie Liebman

Restaurant meals with red meat just don't get any leaner. Only a handful of the meat dishes we've tested from other types of restaurants even come close: spaghetti with meat sauce (but not meatballs), a trimmed sirloin steak plus salad and baked potato, and pot roast with vegetables, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

To make it better: Sodium aside, there's no need to.

Spanakopita

The spanakopita capital of Greece is the northwestern city of Epirus, where greens were often all people had to eat, according to The Food and Wine of Greece (St. Martin's Press, 1990). That's not the case in America.

Spanakopita (spinach pie)--layers of paper-thin phyllo dough that have been slathered with butter and filled with a good dose of feta cheese, oil, and egg--isn't exactly what American blood vessels and backsides need. A modest, entree-sized serving of spanakopita is as bad as a Burger King Bacon Cheeseburger.

The pastry may be light and flaky, but after 410 calories and 24 grams of fat (12 of them saturated plus trans), you may feel dull and leaden. And that's without the potatoes, rice, or vegetables that most restaurants offer on the side.

Spinach is loaded with vitamins and phytochemicals, but don't use it as an excuse to order this splurge.

To make it better: Split it with someone who's ordering souvlaki, and ask for extra vegetables on the side.

Greek Salad

It hurts to criticize a salad. They're largely vegetables, after all--those low-calorie, low-fat, diverse and appealing packages of phytochemicals, fiber, and vitamins that people should eat more often.

(We only ordered Greek salads that included lettuce. Many restaurants offer "taverna" or "village" salads, which are made without lettuce.

Their numbers may differ from those in our chart.)

Naturally, you'd expect a Greek salad to be heavy on the olive oil, but that's unsaturated fat--not low in calories, but not an invitation to the coronary care unit, either.

The bad news: Of the 30 grams of fat in a typical entree-sized Greek salad, 12 are saturated plus trans, more than half a day's worth ... about the same as a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. The good news: You can cut the damaging fat by removing some of the feta cheese.

Unlike Quarter Pounders, Greek salads ads are as variable as the chefs who grab a handful of cheese, crumble it over the plate, and move on to the next dish. On average, the salads we bought had 4 1/2 tablespoons (1 1/2 ounces) of feta, but some had just 1 1/2 tablespoons, while others had eight.

Cutting the feta would also cut the sodium down from the 1,060 mg we found. But olives, dressing, and pepperoncini (pickled hot peppers) also add salt.

To make it better: Ask for the cheese and the dressing on the side and use just a tablespoon or two of each.

Dolmades

Dolmades are the Greek equivalent of stuffed cabbage. The grape leaves are filled with either rice (more typical when it's served cold as an appetizer, or meze) or meat and rice (more typical when it's served as an entree). They're often drizzled with an avgolemono (egg-and-lemon) sauce. (We analyzed only entree-sized portions of meat-and-rice dolmades.)