7 ms·

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepa

by polar8 2y ago

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.

standardUser 2y ago
Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.
- positr0n 2y ago
  How old are you? 5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc. As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.
m463 2y ago
...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :) I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food. In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish. But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those. (also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)
  - m463 2y ago
    add chocolate and get the perfect click ^H^H^H^H cookbait.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      no, I meant an actual famous cookbook. I read about it on hn, actually. it's called something like fat, acid, salt and heat. you can Google it.
      - fuzztester 2y ago
        >I read about it on hn, actually. you know, like here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    [flagged]
- glinkot 2y ago
  Your side comment about saunas got me searching. It's quite amazing (though based on small populations) - I'll be giving this a try, thanks for pointing it out! https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)30275-1/fulltext https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)...
dredmorbius 2y ago
Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)? Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004). I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors. I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.
- dustincoates 2y ago
  > Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004). There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I don't unless I'm traveling but eating a couple modestly portioned meals a week which, yes, you can do in the US, is healthy enough as part of a basket of options. And often better than whipping up a lot of things you can make with 15 minutes of effort from the grocery store.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
Larrikin 2y ago
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home. Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc. Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.
- bsder 2y ago
  > You won't achieve wok hei on your stove Not true. Pull out that blowtorch. > your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine. > restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores. And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way. > You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home. It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment. However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.
decafninja 2y ago
I lost a ton of weight during the initial Covid lockdowns of 2020 without even trying. The only difference? I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight. Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time. I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.
throwaway2037 2y ago
I hear this "cheap oil" thing a lot in food pseudo-science Internet writing. What exactly is "cheap oil"? And, is there any peer reviewed evidence for your claims about how you feel after eating "cheap oil"? If this effect is so drastic, then, surely, it must affect others, and would be an interesting and worthy research topic.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I guess it's generic vegetable oil as opposed to Canola oil or Peanut oil? I'd actually suspect that a mindset of buy whatever oil is cheapest from Sysco would pursue cheapness in other areas as well including kitchen supervision/skills.
  - lobsterthief 2y ago
    I wouldn’t suspect that at all—some recipes (like certain kinds of “street food” from different countries actually call for the use of cheaper oils :)
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I doubt it makes any appreciable difference anyway most of the time although Canola oil and Peanut oil do have a slightly higher smoke point than vegetable oil.

by polar8 2y ago

standardUser 2y ago

Where are you people eating that you feel gross? And what are you ordering? I promise you, eating out does not and should not need to be anything like you are describing.

positr0n 2y ago
How old are you? 5-10 years ago I would have agreed with your comment, but once I hit my 30s I started to feel gross if I ate a bunch of donuts, super duper greasy food, etc. As the years progress more and more food makes me feel a little yucky afterwards, not just the blatantly obvious incredibly unhealthy ones.

m463 2y ago

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :) I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food. In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish. But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are paid to make things tasty - with salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. And then with more of those. (also, I wonder how restaurant review eating compares to supersize me)

fuzztester 2y ago
>salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)
- m463 2y ago
  add chocolate and get the perfect click ^H^H^H^H cookbait.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    no, I meant an actual famous cookbook. I read about it on hn, actually. it's called something like fat, acid, salt and heat. you can Google it.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      >I read about it on hn, actually. you know, like here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat
- fuzztester 2y ago
  [flagged]
glinkot 2y ago
Your side comment about saunas got me searching. It's quite amazing (though based on small populations) - I'll be giving this a try, thanks for pointing it out! https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)30275-1/fulltext https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(18)...

dredmorbius 2y ago

Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)? Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004). I find some restaurant meals strike me as far better than others. Taquerias, Thai and Vietnamese food, better vegetarian restaurants (say, Greens in SF), for example. Specific choices such as sides, beverages, alcohol, and whether or not the restaurant permits smoking (some parts of the US still allow this barbaric practice) would likely be huge confounding factors. I'm not discounting home-cooked meals, and generally far prefer them myself. But overly-broad, undifferentiated analysis is ... not especially illuminating.

dustincoates 2y ago
> Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004). There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't unless I'm traveling but eating a couple modestly portioned meals a week which, yes, you can do in the US, is healthy enough as part of a basket of options. And often better than whipping up a lot of things you can make with 15 minutes of effort from the grocery store.
- dredmorbius 2y ago

Larrikin 2y ago

There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and that's just talking about average restaurants. You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home. Sure eating a fast food burger and fries everyday will be heavy, but even something that simple can be difficult to match compared to the restaurant. Grinding your own meat, double frying the fries, finding/making decent buns, etc. Food is one of the few activities that can be very enjoyable daily. It's usually cost saving to cook yourself and there's a lot of good stuff you can make at home. But you're missing out on some enjoyable experiences by completely avoiding professionals using professional equipment with access to better ingredients.

bsder 2y ago
> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove Not true. Pull out that blowtorch. > your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine. > restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores. And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way. > You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home. It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment. However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.

decafninja 2y ago

I lost a ton of weight during the initial Covid lockdowns of 2020 without even trying. The only difference? I ate home cooked meals while WFH. They weren’t even made to be specifically healthy or with the objective of losing weight. Then I jumped ship for a company that was 100% in office. I started eating the supposedly healthy meals catered by the company for lunch. Dinner also came later because commute time. I gained back all the weight I lost WFH and then some. The significant amount of walking and/or biking from the commute did nothing to help.

throwaway2037 2y ago

I hear this "cheap oil" thing a lot in food pseudo-science Internet writing. What exactly is "cheap oil"? And, is there any peer reviewed evidence for your claims about how you feel after eating "cheap oil"? If this effect is so drastic, then, surely, it must affect others, and would be an interesting and worthy research topic.

ghaff 2y ago
I guess it's generic vegetable oil as opposed to Canola oil or Peanut oil? I'd actually suspect that a mindset of buy whatever oil is cheapest from Sysco would pursue cheapness in other areas as well including kitchen supervision/skills.
- lobsterthief 2y ago
  I wouldn’t suspect that at all—some recipes (like certain kinds of “street food” from different countries actually call for the use of cheaper oils :)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I doubt it makes any appreciable difference anyway most of the time although Canola oil and Peanut oil do have a slightly higher smoke point than vegetable oil.