Chipotle is delicious but you definitely don’t want to eat there more than once per day. In fact, if you do eat there once per day, you may not need to eat anything else for another 24 hours.
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The New York Times has done some detective work and has discovered that a typical order at Chipotle contains about 1,070 calories, which is more than half of your daily recommended caloric intake. And that estimate doesn’t even account for all the salt and saturated fat in a Chipotle meal.
The barbacoa burrito, for instance, weighs in at 1,085 calories and contains 78% of your daily allowance of saturated fat and 109% of your daily salt intake. The chicken burrito, meanwhile, is 1,095 calories and accounts for 98% of your daily salt intake, although it also accounts for a comparatively paltry 39% of your daily saturated fat intake.
Things get much worse if you decide to add chips and guac to your meal — those will bump your barbacoa burrito and chicken burrito meals up to over 1,750 calories and put their daily saturated fat and sodium counts at well over 100% of your daily allowance. And for good measure, the Times also found meals that packed over 2,000 calories as well.
So what’s the bottom line here? It’s not that you should stop eating at Chipotle it’s that you should know what you’re getting into when you do decide to dine there. And really, though Chipotle may be high-calorie food, it’s still quality stuff — we can’t say the same, for instance, about KFC’s truly monstrous Double Down Dog.
