Olive Garden is a popular Italian restaurant that serves up delicious and rich meals like fettucine alfredo and cheese ravioli. Though Olive Garden offers salads, meat dishes and pizza, they are known for their pasta, and their fun, Italian atmosphere. It is difficult to maintain a low-calorie diet while at Olive Garden, since many of their meals are high in fat and calories. However, they do offer some healthy entrees. If you want to cut your calories further, you can always split a meal.
Appetizers
One of the most popular appetizers at Olive Garden is the breadsticks. They offer endless breadsticks when you order certain entrees. According to Olive Garden, each breadstick has approximately 150 calories, 2 g of fat and 28 g of carbohydrates. A light appetizer for people watching their weight is the garden fresh salad, which, without dressing, has 120 calories and only 3.5 g of fat for one serving.
Pasta
Pasta dishes at the Olive Garden restaurant are usually served in large portions. The Olive Garden states that a dinner serving of cheese ravioli with meat sauce has 790 calories, 28 g of total fat and 14 g of saturated fat. A fettuccine alfredo dinner at the Olive Garden has 1220 calories and 75 g of fat. According to the American Heart Association, saturated fat raises blood cholesterol levels which in turn can increase your risk of heart attacks. The American Heart Association recommends that no more than 7 percent of your daily calories come from saturated fat. For example, a person who eats 2000 calories should only eat 140 calories a day from saturated fats, or about 16 g of saturated fats for the day.
Chicken
Chicken entrees can be either very lean or very high fat at Olive Garden, depending on which entree you order. For example, Olive Garden states that the chicken scampi dinner has 1020 calories, 53 g of total fat, and 1880 mg of sodium. The Venetian apricot chicken, however, has only 380 calories and 4 g of fat, plus it has 8 g of fiber.
Desserts
Even though the appetizers and meals at Olive Garden are filling, the desserts are almost irresistible. The black tie mousse cake contains 760 calories, 48 g of fat and 27 g of saturated fat, according to the Olive Garden.
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