Sam Hodgson / New York Times News Service“Fast casual” restaurants like Chipotle, an increasingly popular sector in the restaurant business, often market their food as a healthier option, but the calorie counts don’t bear that out. ABOVE: A chicken bowl with fresh tomato salsa, rice, black beans, sour cream and guacamole is a meal in the range of 850 to 880 calories. BELOW: The chips and flour tortilla pile on the calories — A barbacoa burrito, with fresh tomato salsa, rice, black beans, cheese and sour cream, along with chips and guacamole, is a meal in the range of 1,770 to 1,795 calories — a full day’s worth for some adults.

Many restaurants in the fast-growing sector known as “fast casual” have built their success largely on a simple promise: Our food is fresher, more humanely raised and better for you. These chains also sell freedom of choice; at Chipotle Mexican Grill, for instance, you can have a burrito made many thousands of ways.

So we set out to answer questions that pique our interest each time we walk into a Chipotle: What do people actually order? How healthful is a Chipotle meal?

Today, thanks to a large sample of online orders, we have a ballpark estimate. The median order per person at Chipotle comes to about 1,070 calories. (Half the orders in our data set had more calories than that, and half had fewer.) Most adults should eat 1,600 to 2,400 calories a day.

That median order was also likely to have about 75 percent of the daily allowance of saturated fat and almost a full day’s serving of sodium, as recommended by the Food and Drug Administration. (The percentages listed here are based on a 2,000-calorie diet.) Chipotle said it does not track information on each customer order, so we obtained a data set of about 2,000 meal orders placed on GrubHub from July to December 2012, and looked up the nutritional information for each based on the numbers Chipotle publishes on its website. Almost all of the orders are from two restaurants, in Washington and in East Lansing, Michigan.

Admittedly, it’s a data set that comes with caveats. Some menu items, like sofritas and brown rice, have been introduced nationwide since then and are not in our sample data. It’s possible that ordering patterns have changed since then or that customers at these two locations behave differently from those elsewhere.

But the patterns we found broadly match those that Chipotle has publicly discussed. These online orders represent some of the most detailed information ever published into what people actually order. And they offer help for customers who want to tailor their intake of calories, salt and fat.

Here are examples from across the spectrum of light and heavy eaters:

• 545 calories: Light meals at Chipotle aren’t very common; about 95 percent of meals had more than this. But if eating light is your goal, order a burrito bowl, which does not feature the flour tortilla in regular burritos. That is a 300-calorie savings.

• 1,045 calories: One way to get a Chipotle meal near the median order is to order a steak burrito with white rice, tomatillo green chile salsa, sour cream, guacamole and lettuce.

• 1,795 calories: It may not be surprising to learn that people order truly huge meals at Chipotle, but it is rare; only 5 percent of meals reached this threshold. The easiest way to get there is quite simple: eat an order of chips and guacamole along with your meal. Together they add 770 calories.