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 In a scene straight out of the old “Seinfeld” TV comedy, three consumers are suing Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., alleging the restaurant chain’s menu misrepresents the nutritional value of its food products and provides more calories than advertised. 
 
 The lawsuit cites the company’s chorizo burrito that is described as having 300 calories, but an “excessively full” plaintiff contends the burrito “couldn’t have been just 300 calories.” 
 
 One of the best-remembered episodes of “Seinfeld” centered around a yogurt shop that sidekick-neighbor Kramer invested in because the product tasted so good but was supposedly non-fat and unlikely to add weight. As Seinfeld and the other stars began eating copious amounts of the yogurt, they gained unexpected weight, despite the “non-fat” label in the 1993 episode. 
 
 The proposed class-action lawsuit against Chipotle was brought in Los Angeles Superior Court by David Desmond, Edward Gurevich and Young Hoon Kim and would cover all people who bought food at Chipotle for four years leading up to the filing of the complaint. All three plaintiffs bought chorizo burritos at three different Chipotle locations this month. 
 
 A Chipotle representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit filed Tuesday. The legal action alleges breach of warranty and violations of the state’s Business and Professions Code. 
 
 The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages and an injunction preventing Chipotle from putting allegedly misleading information about the nutritional value of its products on its menu boards, website and marketing campaigns. 
 
 The suit alleges Chipotle’s menu contains false nutritional information in which “consumers are lulled into a false belief that the items they are eating are healthier than they really are,” though the chain bills itself as a provider of “food with integrity,” organic fare and “responsibility raised” meat as part of its promotion of a “healthy eating mantra.” 
 
 Based on its menu board, Desmond bought a chorizo burrito at the Chipotle restaurant on San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles on Nov. 3 believing that it contained 300 calories, the suit states. But after consuming the product, Desmond “felt excessively full and realized that the burrito couldn’t have been just 300 calories,” according to the complaint. 
 
 Two days later, Gurevich bought a chorizo burrito at the Chipotle location on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake and similarly realized after eating it that had more than the 300 calories advertised, the suit says. 
 
 On Monday, Kim ate a chorizo burrito at the Chipotle restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles and came to the same conclusions as the other plaintiffs that the 300-calories that the menu board stated the item contained was untrue, the suit alleges. 
 
 The lawsuit further alleges that information on Chipotle’s website also contains misleading information about the calories in a chorizo burrito and other products. 
 
 –City News Service 
 
 ‘Seinfeld’ for real? Burrito calories – not yogurt – more than advertised in Chipotle lawsuit was last modified: by 
 
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 @ LidiyaKravchuk I'm sorry for the confusion, but we'll make things more clear next time. The 300 calories is for the chorizo. -Gabe 

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 When you step into a typical chain restaurant, you have a wide array of meal options, ranging from fairly healthful to downright gluttonous. This is particularly true at the rapidly growing type of restaurants known as fast casual, like Chipotle, where you can order a burrito many thousands of ways. 
 
 With the help of a large sample of online orders, we set out to answer a question that piques our interest every time we walk into a Chipotle (which is a lot): What do people actually order here? How healthy is a normal Chipotle meal? 
 
 Today, we have a ballpark estimate. The typical order at Chipotle has about 1,070 calories. That’s more than half of the calories that most adults are supposed to eat in an entire day. The recommended range for most adults is between 1,600 and 2,400. 
 
 The histogram above shows the distribution of calories for all orders. The spike around 1,000 calories represents “standard” burrito orders – a meat burrito with typical additions: cheese, salsa, lettuce, sour cream, rice and beans. If you order a meat burrito at Chipotle with these toppings, it’s very likely to reach 1,000 calories. 
 
 But there’s so much more to this data than the averages. Chipotle customers can and do order meals with fewer than 650 calories, such as a cheese-free burrito bowl. On the other end of the spectrum, about one in 10 meals had more than 1,600 calories. 
 
 The distributions of two other metrics of a meal’s health — salt and saturated fat, shown in the charts below — are just as revealing. Most orders at Chipotle give you close to a full day’s worth of salt (2,400 milligrams) and 75 percent of a full day’s worth of saturated fat. 
 
 Milligrams of sodium per order Grams of saturated fat per order 
 
 Salt and fat histograms 
 
 Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s communications director, said the company is aware of the nutrition of all its ingredients, but doesn’t track information about each order. “We don’t manage our menu around individual nutrients,” he said. 
 
 Below, a variety of actual meals across the calorie distribution, based on over 3,000 meals ordered on GrubHub. It’s some of the most detailed information yet published on what people actually order – not just what’s on the menu. 
 
 5th percentile 
 
 Chipotle declined to give us data, but Mr. Arnold did give us a few facts about what people order, which broadly matched our data. The most common protein is chicken, Mr. Arnold said; the most common “vessel” is a burrito bowl rather than a burrito tortilla or taco; and the most common salsa is fresh tomato, he said. Using those examples, he cited a potential meal: a burrito bowl with white rice, black beans, chicken, fresh tomato salsa, sour cream and lettuce, which comes to about 625 calories. About 90 percent of meals in our data set had more calories than that. 
 
 But if staying under 700 calories — about one third of the recommended daily amount for many adults — is your goal, a burrito bowl like the one Mr. Arnold described is your best bet. Only about 2 percent of the burritos in our data — just 25 out of 1,200 burritos in all — were in that calorie range. Why? The tortilla alone gets you to 300 calories. 
 
 25th percentile 
 
 Slightly higher up the calorie distribution — at about 900 calories, more than in one out of four orders — the options vary considerably, with burritos, bowls, tacos and salads all represented. Burrito bowls with 900 calories tend to have more toppings like cheese, sour cream or guacamole; if you want a burrito in this calorie range, you’ll probably have to go without two of those, perhaps getting extra salsa instead. But even at the 25th percentile, you’re still likely to have a meal with a lot of sodium. The fresh tomato salsa, for example, has just 20 calories, but it has 210 milligrams of sodium – more salt than a 1 oz. bag of Lay’s potato chips. 
 
 50th percentile 
 
 It’s quite easy to get to 1,070 calories — the median amount of calories per Chipotle order in our data — particularly if you order a meat burrito and don’t remove some of the standard toppings, like rice or beans. But all kinds of orders can get across the 1,000-calorie line. Even smaller orders, like bowls or tacos, easily reach the threshold with a side of chips, which deliver 570 calories. 
 
 75th percentile 
 
 When the dishes start approaching 1,400 calories – as about one in four did – it’s usually because an order contains a side item: chips and salsa, a sugary drink, extra guacamole. Around the 1,600-calorie mark in the histogram above, you can see a small bump: It’s a common order of a burrito with chips and guacamole. 
 
 Speaking of side items, calories from drinks add up. Twenty ounces of Coke has 240 calories. And, if anything, our estimates may be conservative. 
 
 Our data is made up of orders people ate in their homes, their offices or elsewhere outside the restaurant. That means it includes few fountain sodas, which are awkward to deliver. The drinks in our orders are mostly 12-oz. cans. And about 80 percent of meals had no drink at all. Some of them may have added one from their home or workplace, but we miss those calories. 
 
 95th percentile 
 
 When we published our photo essay about how to get to 2,000 calories at some of the biggest restaurant chains, Chipotle was represented by a carnitas burrito, chips and guacamole and a Coke. Orders of that size are not common at Chipotle — 98 percent of orders had fewer than 2,000 calories — but they are not unheard of. 
 
 The easiest way to get there is to order chips and guacamole: 770 calories. You’ll also need to say yes to the toppings – like both cheese and sour cream on a burrito. After a meal like that, you typically will have already reached your daily recommended amount of saturated fat and salt. In most cases, you’ll be well on your way to tomorrow’s recommended intake, too. 
 
 About the data 
 
 The data 
 
 The data is based on about 3,000 meals in about 1,800 Grubhub orders from July to December 2012, almost all from two Chipotle restaurants: one in Washington, D.C., and another in East Lansing, Mich. A few caveats are worth keeping in mind: Some menu items, like sofritas and brown rice, have been introduced nationwide more recently and are not in our data. (Mr. Arnold said that brown rice currently accounts for a third of the rice Chipotle sells and that sofritas accounts for about 3 percent of fillings.) 
 
 It’s also likely that the ordering behavior varies somewhat around the country and that some items have become more or less popular in the last two years or so. But many of the ordering patterns that the company has publicly described — such as chicken being the most popular protein and burrito bowls being more popular than burritos or tacos — matched the patterns in the GrubHub data, and Mr. Arnold said there has not been much significant variation in ordering habits regionally or year-to-year. 
 
 We were also forced to make some assumptions with some orders. 
 
 We assume people eat only one salad, burrito bowl, burrito or set of tacos at a time. When there’s more than one of those items in an order, we assume it’s for more than one person. And we assume that groups of people who order together split side items, like chips. That’s probably untrue — there’s always one guy who eats more — but assumptions about chip division don’t have a huge impact on the overall shape of our histogram. 

 Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Three Chipotle customers in Los Angeles are filing a class-action lawsuit against the Mexican fast-casual chain for misrepresenting the amount of calories in its new chorizo burrito. An in-store sign advertising the new spicy sausage filling showed a picture of a chorizo burrito and a calorie count of 300. In fact, the chorizo alone contains 300 calories. Once you add a tortilla, white rice, black beans, tomato salsa, and cheese, as the sign suggests, you get a meal that clocks in at around 1,050 calories, according to Chipotle’s online nutrition calculator. 
 
 Three separate California customers felt not just misled by the sign but also wronged by it. One of them bought a chorizo burrito because of the sign, but afterward “felt excessively full and realized that the burrito couldn’t have been just 300 calories,” according to the complaint reviewed by My News L.A. Even though the chorizo filling has been available only since October, the class-action lawsuit would cover “all people who bought food at Chipotle for four years leading up to the filing of the complaint,” because the plaintiffs claim the chorizo signs fall into a pattern of misleading nutritional information promulgated by Chipotle. 
 
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 I hope the plaintiffs have more evidence behind that claim, because it’s easy to see how Chipotle’s misleading chorizo signs might have resulted from human error rather than malice. Perhaps more relevant to the damages sought by the plaintiffs, it is hard to see how eating 1,050 calories when you believe you’re eating 300 calories does any lasting harm to a person, absent some medical condition that requires strict control of one’s caloric intake. You know what you can do when you’ve accidentally eaten too much? Not eat for a while. Maybe take a walk or do some gentle stretching to promote digestion. Believe it or not, within a few hours you won’t feel “excessively full” anymore, and a few hours after that you’ll even be ready to eat some more. The miracle of the human metabolism! 
 
 Better yet, stop paying attention to calorie counts at all and just pay attention to your body’s hunger and satiety signals. It can feel really hard to listen to your body when you are used to mistrusting it—take it from someone who used to count calories obsessively and binge eat—but with practice and self-forgiveness, it becomes easy and enjoyable. When you obey internal rather than external cues, you begin to notice how different foods affect you, and as a result you make better choices according to what your body needs at a given moment. If you’re extremely hungry, you might eat a whole chorizo burrito; if you’re less hungry, you might eat half a burrito, or opt for a bowl instead, or go to Hale and Hearty Soups instead of Chipotle. When you’re used to eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full, the prospect of getting a calorie count wrong feels almost unbearably trivial.
– Chipotle's chorizo burrito as diet food? If you read the description of the menu item, available since October, you certainly wouldn't think so: It packs chicken, pork sausage, rice, beans, and cheese into a tortilla. Except that same sign also said "300 calories." And so three customers who bought the burrito in Los Angeles this month are suing. As City News Service reports, one of the men behind the proposed class-action lawsuit brought in Los Angeles Superior Court ordered the menu item on Nov. 3 thinking it was a 300-calorie dish. David Desmond "felt excessively full and realized that the burrito couldn’t have been just 300 calories" after eating it, per the complaint. LV Anderson does the math at Slate, and reports the true total is closer to 1,050 calories. (That's par for the course at Chipotle, according to this 2015 New York Times article.) The suit would cover "all people who bought food at Chipotle for four years leading up to the filing of the complaint," even though the chorizo filling is a new menu offering. That's because the plaintiffs are alleging the signage is part of a pattern by the chain of presenting misleading nutritional information. CNBC reports Chipotle didn't respond to its request for comment, but Chipotle did reply to some customers who tweeted their disbelief about the calorie count: "I'm sorry for the confusion, but we'll make things more clear next time. The 300 calories is for the chorizo [alone]." (Here are the six meals with the most calories at McDonald's.)