The menus offered to children by most U.S. restaurant chains have too many calories, too much salt or fat, and often not a hint of vegetables or fruit, according to a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The group, which has agitated for everything from healthier popcorn at the movies to calorie labeling in supermarkets, found that among almost 3,500 combinations surveyed, kids' meals failed to meet nutritional standards 97 percent of the time.

That was a marginal improvement over 2008 when such meals failed to meet standards 99 percent of the time.

Every children's meal offered at popular chains such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dairy Queen, Hardee's, McDonald's, Panda Express, Perkins Family Restaurants and Popeyes fell short of standards adopted by the center from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's nutritional recommendations.

The meals also fell short of standards set by the National Restaurant Association's Kids LiveWell Program, said the CSPI, which titled its study, "Kids' Meals: Obesity on the Menu."

"Most chains seem stuck in a time warp, serving up the same old meals based on chicken nuggets, burgers, macaroni and cheese, fries, and soda," said Margo Wootan, CSPI nutrition policy director. "It's like the restaurant industry didn't get the memo that there's a childhood obesity crisis."

Among the meals singled out was Applebees' grilled cheese sandwich on sourdough bread, fries and two percent chocolate milk, which has 1,210 calories, 62 grams of fat and 2,340 milligrams of sodium.

The combo meal had nearly three times as many calories as the CSPI's criteria for four- to- eight-year-olds suggest.

At Ruby Tuesday, the macaroni and cheese, white cheddar mashed potatoes and fruit punch combo has 870 calories, 46 grams of fat and 1700 milligrams of sodium, said Wootan.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that children eat no more than 2,300 milligrams of salt each day to avoid high blood pressure, which can lead to coronary disease, stroke and other ailments.

Being overweight as a child makes a person vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and a shortened life span. About one-third of American children are now considered overweight and 17 percent are considered obese, according to USDA's Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

The CSPI cited Subway restaurants' Fresh Fit For Kids meal combinations as exceptions to the salty, fatty norm.

Subway serves apple slices with its kid-sized sub sandwiches and offers low-fat milk or bottled water instead of soda. All eight of its children's meals met CSPI's nutrition criteria.

A few other establishments have begun to offer side dishes beyond French fries. In fact, every child's meal at Longhorn Steakhouse now comes with fruit or a vegetable.

"More chains are adding fruit, like apple slices, to their menus, but practically every chain could be adding more vegetable and whole grain options," said Ameena Batada, an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Wellness at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Labeling can be a potent tool. The report cited two studies that indicated customers who are provided with calorie counts on the menu sometimes gravitate toward healthier choices.

To produce its study, the CSPI looked at 50 top U.S. chain restaurants, finding 34 of them had meals designed for children and were willing to provide nutritional data. It analyzed those meals and meal combinations.

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Diners will have to wait a little longer to find calorie counts on most restaurant chain menus, in supermarkets and on vending machines.

Writing a new menu labeling law "has gotten extremely thorny," says the head of the Food and Drug Administration, as the agency tries to figure out who the law should cover.

The 2010 health care law charged the FDA with requiring restaurants and other establishments that serve food to put calorie counts on menus and in vending machines. The agency issued a proposed rule in 2011, but the final rules have since been delayed as some of those non-restaurant establishments have lobbied hard to be exempt.

While the restaurant industry has signed on to the idea and helped to write the new regulations, supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers that sell prepared food say they want to no part of it.

"There are very, very strong opinions and powerful voices both on the consumer and public health side and on the industry side, and we have worked very hard to sort of figure out what really makes sense and also what is implementable," FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Hamburg said menu labeling has turned out to be one of the FDA's most challenging issues, and while requiring calorie counts in some establishments might make sense on paper, "in practice it really would be very hard." She did not say what specific types of establishments she was referring to.

The challenges of putting such a law in place - and deciding whom it should cover  - were made clear Monday when a judge struck down New York City's ban on large sugary drinks. State Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling said in his ruling that the 16-ounce limit on sodas and other high-calorie drinks arbitrarily applied to only some sweet beverages and some places that sell them. The new limits, championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, were supposed to take effect Tuesday.

Hamburg said the FDA is in the final stages of writing the menu labeling regulations and the final rules should come out in the "relative near term." The FDA has tentatively said the rules are due this spring, but that deadline may be optimistic as the food industry and regulators continue to haggle over how they will be written.

The 2011 proposed rules would require chain restaurants with 20 or more locations, along with bakeries, grocery stores, convenience stores and coffee chains, to clearly post the calorie count for each item on their menus. Additional nutritional information would have to be available upon request. The rules would also apply to vending machines if calorie information isn't already visible on the package.

The proposed rules exempted movie theaters, airplanes, bowling alleys and other businesses whose primary business is not to sell food. Alcohol would also be exempted.

Supermarkets and convenience stores are looking for similar exemptions in the final rules. Representatives for the supermarket industry say it could cost them up to a billion dollars to put the rules in place - costs that would be passed on to consumers.

"It's a huge problem for us," says Erik Lieberman of the Food Marketing Institute, which represents retail grocery chains. He says fighting the menu labeling rules is one of his group's top priorities.

Lieberman says the rules could cover thousands of items in each store, going beyond just the prepared foods case and extending to cut fruit, bakery items like pies and loaves of bread and other store items that aren't already packaged and labeled. Lieberman says that means each store has to send all of those items out to labs to be tested, do paperwork to justify the ingredient and nutritional information for each item to the FDA and then create signage and train employees to use it.

Convenience stores say they will have similar problems.

"In a small store like a convenience store that is really putting a lot of signage all over the place," says Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores, referring to the calorie labels. "You just hit a point where words become noise and that's not good."

Nutrition lobbyist Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says consumer advocates heard the same kind of complaining from the packaged foods industry before they were required to put nutrition information on the backs of food items. Supermarkets and convenience stores should be included because they are breaking more and more into the prepared foods business, she says.

"The supermarket industry is positioning itself as a place to buy prepared items so you don't have to go out to eat or cook," Wootan says, arguing that a rotisserie chicken that is labeled with a calorie count at a takeout restaurant should also be labeled at a grocery store.

The idea of menu labeling is to make sure that customers process the calorie information as they are figuring out what to eat. Many restaurants currently post nutritional information in a hallway, on a hamburger wrapper or on their websites. The new law will make calories immediately available for most items.

Menus and menu boards will also tell diners that a 2,000-calorie diet is used as the basis for general nutrition advice, noting that individual calorie needs may vary.

The labeling requirements were added to the health bill with the support of the restaurant industry, which has faced a patchwork of laws from cities and states. New York City was the first in the country to put a calorie posting law in place. Since then, other cities and states have followed.

Scott DeFife of the National Restaurant Association says the supermarkets are exaggerating how much it would cost them to implement the rules. The restaurant industry has lobbied for the prepared foods in supermarkets and convenience stores to be included, saying they are selling essentially the same things.

DeFife says some convenience stores have even joined the National Restaurant Association as many gas stations now include full restaurants in their stores.

"It's about the food, not the format," he says.

Not all restaurants have been fully supportive, though. A coalition of pizza chains - including Domino's, Papa John's and Pizza Hut franchise holders - have pushed for changes to the proposed rules that would allow more flexibility in how calories are posted because of endless combinations of pizza toppings. The coalition claims there are 34 million ways to order a pizza.

"When you're a small pizza operator trying to get by on tight margins, regulations like this really affect your bottom line, hurting your ability to grow and hire," Domino's Pizza franchisee Jonathan Sharp of Abilene, Texas, said last summer.

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Igor Dutina / Featurepics.com

So beautiful, so bad for the waistline. A cocktail of cranberry juice plus vodka can easily total 300 calories.

You’ve switched to diet soda and scrupulously have been counting calories at every meal, but you’re still not losing weight. What’s up? You might be missing a big diet buster: that glass of wine you like to have with dinner.

As it turns out, on average Americans are consuming 100 calories a day in alcoholic beverages, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. Broken down, that’s 50 calories a day for women and 150 for men -  which, by the way, is the equivalent of a 12 ounce can of sugary soda, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

And while 50 calories a day may not seem like much, over the course of a year, that adds up to 18,250 extra calories. At 3,500 calories per pound, this could potentially translate into a weight gain of about 5.2 pounds in a year. And that might explain why you can’t drop that pesky last five pounds, no matter how well you stick to your diet.

“I just don’t think this is on people’s radar screen,” says the study’s lead author Samara Joy Neilsen, a nutritional epidemiologist at center. “It’s not even highlighted in the scientific literature. Researchers usually focus on sugary drinks or sodas or fruit juices or energy drinks.”

Neilsen and her colleagues surveyed 11,000 Americans in a nationally representative sample.  Each was asked to detail what they’d eaten over the last 24 hours. To make sure the findings weren’t biased, some people were surveyed during the week and others on weekends.

While the average may be 100 calories per day, a full 19 percent of men and 6 percent of women are consuming more than 300 calories per day through drinking, the researchers found.  You can see where that ends up in terms of weight gain.

The new findings are “not surprising, but they are concerning,” says David Sarwer, a professor of psychology and director of clinical services at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.  “For every extra 100 calories per day you’re taking in over and above what you are burning there’s a potential for gaining one pound per month.”

Sarwer suspects that the numbers in the new study may actually underestimate just how many calories people are taking in from alcohol.  “We know from other areas of alcohol research that most people tend to underestimate how much they are consuming,” he says.

Weight loss experts like Sarwer say that their patients often forget about alcohol when they’re totaling their calories for the day. And that’s especially true for those consuming wine or mixed drinks, says Susan Bowerman, assistant director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I think people are aware of beer,” Bowerman says. “Everyone talks about beer bellies. But when it comes to wine, I don’t think people account for the calories. And I don’t think people are aware of how many calories they can get in a mixed drink.”

For example, Bowerman says, if you add the 100 to 120 calories for a shot of any alcohol to the 160 calories in a glass of cranberry juice, you’re getting mighty close to 300 calories from just one drink.

And then there are those extra-large glasses that some restaurants like to use for wine. A 5 ounce glass contains about 120 calories. “One of those huge balloon wine glasses can contain 8 to 10 ounces,” Bowerman says. “That’s a lot of calories.”

The average person in the study isn’t a problem drinker in the traditional sense, Sarwer says. But the calories they are taking in with that glass or two of wine over dinner, or the beers on the weekend, may be wreaking havoc with waistlines.

Neither Sarwer nor Bowerman suggest people go on the wagon. But cutting back by half could make a big difference, they said.

“We don’t want to send the message that you can’t have any fun with food at all,” Sarwer says. “We tell our patients in response to a study like this that it’s a reminder that they might want to stop at one glass of wine, instead of two, or maybe drink every other day. It’s a good investment in their weight and in their health.”

Spirits manufacturers said most Americans aren't problem drinkers.

"This research shows that the overwhelming majority of adults drink moderately as defined by the federal Dietary Guidelines," Lisa Hawkins, Vice President of the Distilled Spirits Council said in a statement.

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