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Restaurant visits are slipping and guess who they're blaming?  Millenials. It's turning out that 18-to-30-year-olds just aren't going to restaurants much.  Fifty to 60 million of these young people are going out to restaurants far less than baby boomers did at that age, according to Stephanie Strom. And restaurants are hurting. Strom reports that research has shown that "restaurant visits among millennials have fallen 16 percent over the last four years, failing to pick up even as the economy has improved. The outlook for the restaurant industry over the next 10 years is dismal,” Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at a consumer marketing firm, told Strom.       Sales are expected to grow less than 4% in the next 10 years for places like McDonald's and even fast-casual outlets like Chipotle, a very bad thing for restaurants. In fact, McDonald's sales in stores open a year fell 1.2%, after rising every quarter for almost the last decade...

Oh no, say it isn't so!  But a new survey has found that Subway is every bit as unhealthy as McDonald's. In a study of young people from 12 to 21, a little over 1,000 calories were consumed by each participant at the golden arches, while at Subway, it was 955,  according to a story at takepart.com.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) advises that students eat no more than 850 calories at lunch (and for people like me, on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet, even that sounds decadent!). Now, I was also under the impression that Subway was healthier.  There you could get a turkey sandwich (okay, rolled turkey), tomato and lettuce on a bun, hold the mayo, maybe a slice of swiss cheese, and that just had to be healthier than a Big Mac, no? But the sodium content is higher at Subway (that's probably how they get away with making the food taste good), and the Subway sandwiches, one of the chain's most popular offerings, still had 200 more calories than a similar McDonald's mea...

Big surprise!  Children's meals at restaurants are still unhealthy! And we're not just talking about McD's and Burger King. According to a new study of the "nutritional quality of meals for children on the menus of the nation’s largest chain restaurants ... 91 percent do not even meet the standards set by the National Restaurant Association’s Kids LiveWell program," as reported by the NYT's Stephanie Strom. Just five years ago, Strom writes, a similar study found that 99 percent of kids' restaurant meals were unhealthy so I guess we've made some progress.  But not nearly enough. Strom notes that even though restaurants are now bragging about their "healthier" options for kids, truly healthy meals have gone from one percent to only three percent of what's offered.  Not nearly enough, experts agree. Strom singled out in her story Subway, which does not offer sugared sodas with its kids meals, but offers water or nonfat milk ins...