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13-Year Study: Your Chances of Eating a Healthy Meal at a Restaurant Are Effectively Zero
I generally write about work not food, but there’s a good reason a writer focused on psychology and careers might occasionally cover healthy eating too. What you eat affects your stress levels, your energy, and your productivity. Studies show healthy food helps you get more done, and anyone who has suffered through a post-donut sugar crash probably doesn’t research to convince them of this truth.
Which is why a massive recent study that examined the eating habits of more than 35,000 Americans over a 13-year period is worth pointing out to busy professionals. The research, which was published in The Journal of Nutrition, came to a startling conclusion: your chances of eating a healthy meal at a restaurant are just about zero.
How many times a week do you eat out?
When you’re busy, ordering a burrito or slice of pizza can be a tempting way to jam a little more productivity into your day. But when Tufts University researchers sifted through mountains of data on from the 2003–2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which asks a representative sample of Americans to recall what they ate in the last 24 hours, they found eating out almost never means eating healthy.
