Think twice before handing over your hard-earned cash for a quick meal at a fast food joint. A recent Emory study shows that menus are rarely designed with the consumer's health in mind.

Karen Glanz, professor of behavioral sciences and director of the Emory Prevention Research Center, studied how corporate executives in major restaurant chains incorporate health into menu planning.

The study found that 61 percent of respondents were most concerned with increasing profits, while 21 percent cited health and nutrition as influential factors in planning their menus.

"What we found was really not too surprising," Glanz said. "What motivates corporations is profit."

The report, "How Major Restaurant Chains Plan Their Menus: The Role of Profit, Demand, and Health" will be published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

To conduct the study, confidential, in-depth telephone interviews were held with 41 senior menu development and marketing executives at leading casual dining and fast food restaurant chains. The interviews covered topics ranging from menu trends to barriers for adding healthy foods.

Glanz's study relates to contemporary society because fast food and other restaurant chains are now more abundant and accessible.

"People are eating out so much more than ever before," Glanz said. "And increasingly, eating out is dominated by restaurant chains."

Dining patterns today stand in contrast to the eating habits of a few decades ago, she said, when eating out was a special occasion.

"It used to be a lot more kind of mom-and-pop or fine dining," Glanz said. "But these chains are just huge business now, so they really set the stage for what a lot of us are eating when we go out."

The choices provided by restaurant chains are seldom the healthiest available.

"It's affecting our waistlines more and more because most of the time when you eat out, it will be foods that are higher in fat, higher in calories and less healthy than what we eat at home," Glanz said. "We're getting fatter and fatter, and it's important to look into the causes behind that and is there anything that can be done about it."

Patty Erbach, director of food service administration and nutritionist at Emory, suggests that people return to the dining habits of the past to avoid succumbing to unhealthy food.

"I think as health educators and journalists, we need to stress the importance of the earlier decades. Eating at home is probably much healthier if prepared from scratch or home cooking," she said. "Eating out should be saved for special occasions."

Glanz would like to see governmental agencies take a proactive approach by requiring restaurants to provide nutritional information so customers can make informed choices.

- Contact Brett Israel at bisrael@emory.edu.