Salads Are Nice, but Burgers Are What Really Sell

Americans talk skinny but eat fat.

No matter that First Lady Michelle Obama has been on a crusade for a year and a half to slim down the country. Never mind that some restaurants have started listing calories on their menus. Forget even that we keep saying we want to eat healthy. When Americans eat out, we order burgers and fries anyway.

"If I wanted something healthy, I would not even stop in at McDonald's," says Jonathan Ryfiak, 24, a New York trapeze instructor who watches his diet at home but orders comfort foods like chicken nuggets and fries when he hits a fast-food joint.

In a country where more than two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, food choices are often made on impulse, not intellect. So, while 47 percent of Americans say they'd like restaurants to offer healthier items like salads and baked potatoes, only 23 percent tend to order those foods, according to a survey last year by food research firm Technomic.

That explains the popularity of KFC's Double Down, a sandwich of bacon and cheese slapped between two slabs of fried chicken. It's the reason IHOP offers a Simple & Fit menu with yogurt and fruit bowls, but its top seller remains a 1,180-calorie breakfast sampler of eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, hash browns and pancakes. It's also why only 11 percent of parents ordered apple slices as an alternative to fries in McDonald's Happy Meals.

The mixed message hasn't stopped many restaurants from offering healthier fare. After all, the government has stepped up its oversight — and influence — over the industry that it blames for America's expanding waistline. National rules about putting calorie information on menus are expected to take effect next year and Mrs. Obama touts restaurants and companies that slash calories in foods.

But revamping a menu can be difficult and expensive, requiring months or even years. It took Dunkin' Donuts four years to figure out how to make its doughnuts without trans fat — which doctors say is one of the unhealthiest types of fat — without altering the taste. And efforts to curb unhealthy eating aren't always fruitful. In 2009, a year after New York made chains start listing calories on menus, only 15 percent of diners ordered lower-calorie foods, according to a study in the British Medical Journal.

Most restaurants won't share specifics about how their salads and veggie omelets compete when they're up against burgers and crepes. But the healthy stuff appears to be only a small proportion of revenue at most chains.

The IHOP pancake house, owned by DineEquity Inc., says that Simple & Fit sales have roughly doubled in the year since the menu was introduced. But it still makes up only a single-digit percentage of revenue.

The Cheesecake Factory, which introduced a "Skinnylicious" menu in August featuring entrees with 590 calories or less, says those foods have also performed well. But sales of its decadent cheesecakes are up too. "We recognize that 'cheesecake' is in our name," said Alethea Rowe, senior director of restaurant marketing.

There's a host of reasons for the disparity between word and deed. Sometimes people who eat healthy at home want to treat themselves when they go out. Others doubt that the so-called healthier items on fast-food menus are really healthy. Even peer pressure can play a role.

Jason Sierra, who was eating a Whopper hamburger and fries at a Burger King in New York recently, said he's cut back on unhealthy foods because his cholesterol and blood pressure were getting too high. But when his office buddies order lunch, he opts for "man food" like pizza to fit in.

"One day I did try to order a salad," said Sierra, 40, who works in tech support. "And I caught hell for that."

Healthier foods also are usually among the most expensive menu items, which can be tough for recession-weary customers to stomach. Efrain Vasquez and his wife, Evelyn, were recently eating fried chicken and gravy-drenched mashed potatoes at a KFC in New York. They say there's a big difference between a $2 burger and a $6 salad when you're on a tight budget.

"We've got bills to pay," said Efrain Vasquez, 51, a maintenance worker who's raising four kids with Evelyn, a 37-year-old receptionist. "We try to economize."

Like so many American dieters, fast-food restaurants have tried and failed to go healthy. The Wendy's Co. burger chain led the way in the mid-1980s with a short-lived effort to sell tomato halves filled with cottage cheese and pineapple chunks on lettuce leaves.

"Consumers weren't ready for it," said Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy's, where burgers and chicken are the biggest sellers. "Or at least they certainly didn't buy it."

In 2003, during the low-carb Atkins diet craze, Domino's Pizza Inc. couldn't get people to bite on a low-carb pizza it tested in Indianapolis. "While many people at the time made their voice heard that they wanted it, few people actually ordered it," said Chris Brandon, Domino's spokesman.

McDonald's, the world's largest burger chain, says the fruit smoothies and oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins it rolled out last year are selling well, although it declined to disclose their revenue. "We would not have them on the menu if we were not selling them at a rate that we could sustain them at," said Molly Starmann, director of McDonald's family business category.

But the chain didn't always have such luck. It spent three years developing the McLean Deluxe, a 91-percent fat-free hamburger it introduced in 1991 only to suffer disappointing sales.

More recently, McDonald's got a lukewarm response when in 2004 it began offering parents the option of choosing apple slices instead of fries for Happy Meals. So, in July, McDonald's said it would stop offering a choice and instead serve a half portion of both. It had considered taking fries out Happy Meals completely, but nixed the idea when parents in tests said "No."

Restaurants continue to straddle the line.

Burger King Corp. this summer pledged to promote healthier foods for kids, but announced last week that it would sell ice cream desserts nationwide, including an Oreo brownie sundae with 530 calories and 17 grams of fat. KFC introduced grilled chicken in 2009, then launched the Double Down sandwich the following year. The 540-calorie, 32-grams-of-fat breadless sandwich started as a limited-time offering, but proved so popular that the chain ended up keeping it.

Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants Inc., which runs the Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast-food chains, said even though his restaurants offer salads and turkey burgers, he figures his best seller at Hardee's is probably the Thickburger. The most decadent version of it comes with two types of cheese, fried onions, mayonnaise and nearly half a pound of beef and weighs in at 1,170 calories and 83 grams of fat. (The government recommends that most people consume 2,000 calories and no more than about 70 grams of fat each day.)

"We have wonderful, healthy foods if people want to buy them," Puzder said. "But they don't sell particularly well."

Source http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/salads-nice-burgers-sell-14653483

Romney, Obama show rare interest in California

California, usually forlornly on the sidelines during presidential contests, saw a brief glimpse of a potential general-election kerfuffle Wednesday. Mitt Romney came to Los Angeles and slammed President Obama's handling of the economy; not coincidentally, Obama made his case in an interview with a Los Angeles television station, a rare shift from his focus on the states likely to matter most next year.

Romney, a Republican candidate and former Massachusetts governor, took a break from fundraising to appear before empty storefronts at a desiccated North Hollywood mall where he argued that Obama had failed to fully focus on the economy, instead pushing a liberal agenda that made the recession worse.

"Sadly, as we look around us at this development, we see a development that is no longer going to be developed," Romney said. "There was a plan to put a $600-million shopping mall here, but the Valley Plaza development plan has been scrapped in part because of the challenges in the economy."

Yet as Democrats were happy to point out, the mall was in decline well before Obama took office. One of the first outdoor shopping malls in the nation — then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy delivered a speech in its parking lot in 1960 — it suffered structural damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Many of the businesses closed their doors during the George W. Bush administration.

Romney acknowledged that the shopping center's decline could not be fully blamed on Obama, but he argued that a massive revitalization plan was shelved because of the president's handling of the economy.

"Obviously, the challenges here are not all the result of the current administration. A lot of economic woes you are seeing around you and around the country are the result of errors made over a long period of time, but what's happened in the last couple years has not helped," Romney said. "The president is fond of saying he didn't cause the recession, he inherited the recession — and that's true. But he made it worse."

City Councilman Paul Krekorian said Romney was misleading voters. The company that owns much of the property — led by a Romney donor — is working with Krekorian and city officials to create a new development proposal for the mall. A preliminary proposal is expected soon. The company, iStar, was not contacted by the campaign about the event.

"In the San Fernando Valley, we make a lot of movies and we make a lot of television shows," Krekorian said. But "we know the difference between a movie set and real life. Today, Gov. Romney used my neighborhood as a movie set, and I'm a little resentful of that."

When pressed by reporters, Romney said, "I'm sure there's going to be something done here, and if I'm president there will be something done in places across the country to put people back to work."

Obama, meanwhile, argued in an interview on KABC-TV that he was actively engaged in creating more jobs.

"We've got more to do. First thing we have to do is get our fiscal house in order, and we should be able to do that in the next several weeks," Obama said, referring to negotiations over raising the nation's debt ceiling.

"The next step is to start looking at bolder plans, like infrastructure, for example — putting people to work rebuilding not just our roads and bridges but also broadband lines, high-speed rail, putting all those construction workers that used to be in housing to work rebuilding California and rebuilding America," he said. "That can have huge ripple effects.

"And then the last thing we have to do is we have to make sure that we're investing in research and development and training our workers for the jobs of the future, thinking about clean-energy jobs, making sure the solar panels and the wind turbines and electric cars are built here in the United States, built in California. All that can help in terms of moving us forward."

Obama's remarks represented a departure from his routine of conducting interviews with television reporters from swing states. In recent months, his targets have included Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Presidential candidates of both parties typically ignore California during general elections, and pay attention at this time of the electoral cycle for one reason — the vast trove of wealthy donors who live here.

Focused on fundraising here Wednesday were Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is expected to announce within weeks whether he's running for president, was also conducting private meetings in the state.

In the interview, Obama took up a state issue: budgetary whacks at education.

Noting that school funding had been "drained away," he said: "What I encourage states and local officials to think about is what are the things you can't do without, but make sure you're still investing in those things that are going to help us win the future."

Source http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0721-romney-obama-20110721,0,3345747.story

Poll: Four in 5 approve of Obama's plan for Afghanistan drawdown

About four in 5 Americans approve of President Obama's plan to bring troops home from Afghanistan and more than half would approve an even bigger withdrawal, a new CBS News/New York Times Poll finds.

In the survey, conducted between June 24-28, Americans overwhelmingly expressed their approval of Mr. Obama's announcement last week that he intends to withdraw about a third of the 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan by the fall of 2012. According to the poll, 79 percent of Americans - including a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents - approved, while just 17 percent disapproved.

In fact, most Americans do not think Mr. Obama's proposed troop withdrawal goes far enough. Fifty-nine percent of Americans think even more than the proposed one-third of U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be withdrawn.

Still, for the first time since Mr. Obama took office, a majority (53 percent) of Americans say the Afghanistan conflict is going well. In March, only 44 percent of Americans said the same - a figure which was at the time outweighed by the 49 percent of those who said they thought things were going badly.

But while most Americans expressed confidence that the war in Afghanistan is now going well, they appear ambivalent about America's mission there. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say the U.S. should not be involved in Afghanistan, the highest percentage recorded since the question was first asked in September 2009. Only thirty-five percent of Americans said they thought the U.S. was doing the "right thing" there.

Furthermore, most Americans don't think the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan will have a significant impact on the threat of terrorism against the U.S. Twenty-six percent said they thought the threat would increase, but 65 percent said the threat would likely remain the same. Six percent said they thought the threat will decrease.

Despite Americans' general support Mr. Obama's proposed withdrawal, however, the survey suggests that they don't necessarily think that the U.S. has achieved most of its goals there. Only 36 percent think the killing of bin Laden means the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and the surrounding areas has been completed; 58 percent disagree.

On the question of U.S. military operations in Libya, public opinion remains relatively unchanged in recent weeks: 59 percent of Americans say the U.S. should not be involved there, while 29 percent say America is doing the right thing.

Moreover, most Americans think the Obama administration should have to get congressional authorization in order to continue U.S. military action in Libya - despite the president's recent statements to the contrary. Six in 10 Americans think the President should have to get Congressional authorization.

There are partisan differences, however: 81 percent of Republicans think the president needs Congress to approve military actions in Libya, compared to half of Democrats.

Source http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20075503-503544.html

Nearly 80% of Obama’s Top Bundlers Given “Key Administration Posts”

President Obama launched his campaign in 2007 promising a change in the way business is done in Washington, DC, but today a report from the Center for Public Integrity says that when it comes to major campaign donors scoring plum administration positions, it’s business as usual.

The report says that 184 out of 556, or about one third of 2008 Obama campaign “bundlers” -- donors who agree to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for a campaign – “or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took ‘key administration posts,’ as defined by the White House.

The Center points out that candidate Obama suggested that big moneyed interests would not have as prominent a role in DC during his administration.

"The cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play,” said then-Sen Obama in his February 2007 announcement speech. “They get the access while you get to write a letter…The time for that kind of politics is over."

The White House today pushed back on the Center report, saying it’s “hardly a story” and insisting that donations play no role in these plum jobs.

"The people who got those positions got them because of their credentials," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. "They also happen to be donors in some cases. ... Being a supporter does not qualify you for a job or guarantee you a job, but it does not disqualify you."

It's essentially the same explanation the Bush administration gave.

"We make no distinctions about people on the basis of whether they've given or not," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in January 2001.

Tom Perrelli raised $500,000 for Obama in 2008 and is now associate attorney general. Charles Rivkin did the same and is now ambassador to France, so did Donald H. Gips, ambassador to South Africa, and John Roos, ambassador to Japan.

Carney insisted that all bundlers given these positions were qualified, but earlier this year, the Ambassador to Luxembourg, Cynthia Stroum -- who also was a half-million dollar Obama bundler -- resigned right before a State Department report was issued calling her "aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating."

Schulte, Senior Reporter with the Center, says that there is a difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration.

“We did look at the administration of George Bush which was widely criticized for appointing donors to these kinds of posts, and they had about the same number in four years that the Obama administration has had in two years,” Schulte said.

And according to the American Foreign Service Association, President Obama has nominated more “political” appointees for ambassadorships versus foreign service candidates than any president in at least the past 20 years. A full 36.2% of Obama’s ambassadors are political, while just over 30% of Bush’s were political. Former President Clinton, 27.82% were political, for President George H.W. Bush, 30.3% were political.

Source http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/06/report-nearly-80-of-obamas-top-bundlers-given-key-administration-posts.html

Obama to meet with his Republican opponents

Look for pointed disagreements over raising the $14.3 trillion federal debt limit when President Obama meets Wednesday with the 240-member House Republican Conference.

Led by Speaker John Boehner, most of the House Republicans will troop down to the White House for a tete-a-tete, to be followed Thursday by House Democrats -- the day their caucus grows to 193 following last week's special election in New York.

The sessions follow similar meetings with Republican and Democratic senators two weeks ago and illustrate Obama in full bipartisan mode. The main goal: a meeting of the minds on what it will take to let the government continue to borrow money hand over fist.

Americans "expect their elected leaders here in Washington to come together and work out solutions to these challenges that we face, rather than talk past each other," White House press secretary Jay Carney said. "It's useful to come together in the same room, talk and listen. So that's what he looks forward to doing."

House Republicans met with the president in January 2009, shortly after he was elected, and again in January 2010. At the first, Obama sought support -- unsuccessfully -- for his economic stimulus plan. At the second, he sought support -- unsuccessfully -- for his health care overhaul. Both measures passed with Democratic votes.

Those meetings came before Republicans flexed their muscles and won a House majority last November. Now, they have virtual veto power over Obama initiatives.

"Members always appreciate an opportunity to propose and debate solutions with the president," said Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck. "But this shouldn't be viewed as a budget negotiation. No deal will be struck tomorrow. It's an opportunity to discuss priorities."

Source http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/05/obama-to-meet-with-his-republican-opponents/1

Oprah didn't scrap dated Obama scoop

After a morning of agonizing, Oprah yesterday aired her interview with President Obama -- taped nearly a week ago -- without mentioning the stunning news that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a daring raid ordered by the president.

"Trying to decide what to do about tomorrow's show with prez that was taped last week. Show will feel dated because we taped last week. Not even a hint of Osama's demise," Winfrey tweeted Sunday night.

It was a sticky spot for the queen of daytime, a former TV news anchor who does not like to be shown up by events.

OOPS: Oprah's interview with the Obamas was taped last week so there was no mention of Osama Bin Laden's death.

But the show aired, uncut and without an Oprah intro explaining what had happened since it was taped.

The only indication was a line on the screen, "Previously recorded," that appeared several times during the show.

"The decision was made late [Sunday] night to air the original show as taped . . . with the inclusion of a notification to our viewers that the program was previously recorded," said a Harpo spokesperson.

Was there any discussion of yanking yesterday's show altogether?

"There was discussion about how to remind our viewers that today's show was pre-taped," the Harpo spokesperson said.

The interview was taped last Wednesday in Chicago.

Subjects ranged from Obama's release that morning of a copy of his long-form birth certificate to the secrets of a healthy marriage to his re-election campaign. But no mention was made during the hour of the war on terrorism.

Source http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/ld_news_Wx2dLehHKa9k2Pe32NtGlN

President Obama and Sarah Palin extend their Passover wishes in similar ways

President Barack Obama called Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday to wish him a happy Passover. On Saturday, Obama delivered a message to all Jews in an attempt to send warm wishes "to all those celebrating the sacred festival of Passover."

"The story of Passover — which recalls the passage of the children of Israel from bondage and repression to freedom and liberty — inspires hope that those oppressed and enslaved can become free," Obama said in a statement. "This year, that ancient instruction is reflected in the daily headlines as we see modem stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa. Against the backdrop of change, we continue to pray for peace between Israel and her neighbors, while reaffirming our enduring commitment to Israel’s security."

PalinFormer Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin posted a Passover message to her Facebook account on Monday that mirrored Obama's in structure and substance.

"Tonight is Passover, the Jewish people’s celebration of their deliverance from bondage and their Exodus to the Land of Israel," Palin wrote. "Passover contains poignant spiritual and historical meaning for Jews, but it also reminds all of us of mankind’s universal aspiration to be free from bondage and oppression.

"Today, in the same region where the story of Exodus took place, Arabs suffering under despotic regimes are seeking their own freedom and self-determination. As Jews in Israel, the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, gather for Passover, we hope for the spread of freedom and peace throughout the region. On this Passover holiday, our family sends our best wishes to the Jewish community. Chag kasher V'Sameach. Happy Passover. And next year in Jerusalem," Palin posted.

The woman who famously described herself as a hockey mom spent two days in Israel last month, where she expressed her support for the the nation, met with Netanyahu and sported a Star of David necklace. During a tour around the sacred Western Wall, she asked her guides, "Why are you apologizing all the time?" after being told that Jews were not allowed to pray openly on the Temple Mount.

Source  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/04/barack-obama-sarah-palin-passover-wishes.html