Place: Taco Bell
Items: lower-calorie, low-fat Fresco option
Price: 25 cents per item

If you want to try losing 200 pounds eating nothing but burritos, Taco Bell is making it easier on you. Amid the trend focusing on calories and fat grams (remember the days when taste was the main selling point?) comes the “Fresco Style” alternative. You can get almost every item on the menu Fresco-ed, meaning the kitchen holds the cheese and sauce and instead dollops on some fresh “Fiesta Salsa.”

We made a run to the border to sample our favorites side-by-side both “Fresco Style” and, uh, “Fat Style,” or whatever the Bell is calling that now. And no, we haven't lost any weight yet.

Tom: Taco Bell never strikes me as decadent, when compared to, say, a Wendy's Triple and fries. So leaning up the menu wasn't really needed. But this Fresco is a huge win-win. Not only is everything Fresco style better than the normal style, it's better for you. Fresco ingeniously cuts the tasteless cheese and replaces it with a tasty, spicy pico de gallo. The real tomato chunks on the Frescos give the hard-shell tacos a made-at-home freshness I've never experienced at the Border. My Fresco Burrito Supreme eaten

bean burrito, too. I ate the regular one with my eyes closed and couldn't pick out the “Mr. Invisible” cheese. But with the Fresco, my tongue immediately got a load of the re-invigorating tomato chunks. Sorry, Tom, but I thought the taco was the only item that worked better old school. Spicy meat with spicy salsa is too much of a good thing, while the cheese serves to mild out the flavor.

Tom: I suppose if you need to “mild out the flavor,” then the bland, flavorless cheese is just the thing. But it's not worth it. You might as well layer a napkin on your taco—same flavor as the cheese, with a lot less fat. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against fat—but it should at least taste good.

Chris: Good point. I hope other restaurants jump on the Fresco thing. Truth be told, I want to have the regular style AND the Fresco style. With that salsa punching up the cheese, I'd be in Bell heaven.

Rating: 4 sporks (out of 5)

Food facts (for Burrito Supreme Fresco/Regular): 370/440 calories (29/37 percent from fat), 12/18 grams fat, (4/8 grams saturated), 51/52 grams carbohydrates, 15/18 grams protein, 1330/1330 milligrams sodium.  

E-mail The Lunch Guys:
tomandchris@thelunchguys.com

alongside the normal one wasn't asnoticeably better, but it certainly wasn't worse.

The only problems are that the whole Fresco movement is hardly mentioned on the menu. There was just a little sticker on the bottom corner of the drive-through speaker saying, “Try Fresco style for less fat.” The second problem is the robots -- I mean, people -- making the things. My Burrito Supreme had a handful of cheese on one end before the maker realized what he or she was doing.

Chris: I just want to say thank you, Taco Bell, for learning from McDonald's McLean debacle of years past, where the fat -- and flavor -- was sucked out to create the world's first rice-cake-flavored burger. Fresco keeps the core meat and beans intact while targeting the overlooked cellulite-makers: the condiments.

Not that the Grilled Stuft Burrito is now as good for you as spinach, but it tasted practically the same with the salsa instead of the cheese, mainly because there are so many ingredients in this big boy. In fact, I realized just how nondescript the Bell's cheese is. That holds true for the simple