Recently Friendly’s Restaurants started offering their biggest sandwich yet – the Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt. It’s a hamburger in between two grilled cheese sandwiches. At a whopping 1500 calories and 97 grams of fat (according to the Friendly’s website) this sandwich (or is it a burger?) has the amount of calories that an average sized woman would eat in an entire day.

Friendly’s is not the only restaurant to be serving up hugely high fat selections (KFC has the “DoubleDown” (pictured above), Wendy’s has the “Baconator Triple,” and McDonald’s has a whole host of sandwiches well over 500-600 calories each. The question is: Who is making the decision to sell this stuff?

“I’ve heard the whole ‘we only make it because people are buying it,’ or ‘we also have healthy items on our menus’ story,” says DASH for Health Director Tom Moore, MD. “But at the end of the day, over two-third of our country is overweight or obese and in order to get the obesity epidemic under control we all have to take some responsibility, from the company CEOs all the way down to the individual consumer.”

What is the individual consumer to do?
What can we as individuals do to influence the companies that are putting this stuff out there? DASH for Health has a few suggestions:

1. Don’t buy this stuff!
2. Don’t go to the places that sell this stuff!
3. Send the company an email, letting them know their menu items are excessive.