Healthy Dining Finder

People are trying to eat healthier foods these days, and one of the biggest obstacles to doing this is finding healthy foods when dining out. With so many meals being outside the home, a Web site called the Healthy Dining Finder seeks to make it easier to find dining options that offer healthier choices.

Go to the Healthy Dining Finder "Find Restaurants" page to locate restaurants near you serving healthier food. The page lets you search for dining options by price range, and even looks for healthy foods for takeout, catering, and delivery.

I've tried it a couple of times, and was surprised that it came up with many chain restaurants, and even fast-food places like Burger King. The Healthy Dining Finder FAQ offers some explanation: "... Restaurants that choose to participate in Healthy Dining Finder pay a fee, which covers the costs related to operating and publicizing this website and program. Many of the restaurants that have enrolled in the program early on are the larger chains, and that sometimes means fast food restaurants."

The good thing about Healthy Dining Finder is that clicking on a restaurant's logo in the results will pull up nutritional information for some of the location's menu items, enabling you to size up the offerings of a number of different restaurants from one Web site.

Healthy Dining Finder has a good idea, but to be really valuable it will need to include many more local restaurants, and restaurants that specialize in truly healthy foods.