Cheesecake Factory Bistro Shrimp Pasta Makes Annual ‘Food Porn’ List

The Cheesecake Factory Bistro Shrimp Pasta has landed on an annual list of restaurant dishes that are jokingly described as “food porn.”

Although the label might sound silly, the annual compilation of high-calorie foods is actually put together with your best interest at heart. According to Reuters, nonprofit group Center for Science in the Public Interest lumps all of the guilty pleasures into one location to help people make smarter choices when they’re looking at the menu.

Dubbed the Xtreme Eating list, the menu items have one thing in common: They’re going to contribute to the size of your waistline. One of the group’s goals is to get calorie numbers displayed on every restaurant menu in America.

The Cheesecake Factory Bistro Shrimp Pasta, a dish consisting of “butter and cream sauce and topped with battered, fried shrimp,” has around 3,120 calories. The dish also comes loaded with 89 grams of saturated fat and 1,090 milligrams of sodium.

CSPI senior nutritionist Jayne Hurley told CNN:

“We think this year that this is the worst of some of the worst. They top the list for being extremely high in calories, saturated fat and salt or sugar.”

The Cheesecake Factory pasta dish isn’t the only item that made this year’s list. Include in CSPI’s “food porn” collection is the Johnny Rockets bacon cheddar double burger, sweet potato fries, and Big Apple shake meal. All of that food adds up to around 3,500 calories and 88 grams of saturated fat.

Hurley said that Smoothie King’s peanut power plus grape smoothie was one of the biggest surprises on the list. The seemingly healthy concoction packs a whopping 1,460 calories and nearly two dozen teaspoons of sugar.

She said of the smoothie:

“I think smoothies get this pass that they are better for you than they really are. When you go to Smoothie King looking for a snack and walk out with a 1,500 calorie drink, which is close to a day’s worth of calories in a cup, that’s shocking. I think people need to be warned about that. Smoothies have the illusion of being good for you, which I think is why it’s important to warn people that the calories can skyrocket.”

Have you ordered the Cheesecake Factory Bistro Shrimp Pasta before? Would you have selected the dish had you known how many calories it contained?