Traditional American cooking seems to be a Protein + 2 sides. On the surface most vegetarian options become 1) replace meat with tofu or 2) a salad. Both of which get boring very quickly.

For vegetarian dishes it’s helpful to look at non European cuisines. Curries and soups both have a huge variety and don’t require a meat to be complete. Chickpeas also make a great protein substitute besides Tofu. Dumplings are other meat free food that are pretty good, but they tend to be carb and oil heavy so not necessarily healthy. Indian and Thai both have great vegetarian dishes that aren’t meat based dishes with the meat removed.

Finally, cooking with spices makes vegetables much more varied. Americans seem to think spices and rubs are only for meat and vegetables need to be plain. A well spiced vegetable dish is delicious.

The Instant Pot has been a godsend for me when it comes to making Indian dishes. Especially Chana Masala. Provided you have a pound of dried chickpeas (~$2-$3 a pound), some lemon, onion masala, and a few spices stashed away, it's really easy to make over and over. I can recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Instant-Pot%C2%AE-Cookbook-Tra...

Chickpeas are tasty but the protein quality as measured by DIAAS score is significantly worse than red meat. In particular they are deficient in tryptophan.

I don't think a majority of people are caring at all about the nutritional quality of their beef when they're eating a hamburger. I only see these arguments come into play as counters to vegan food. Everyone becomes a nutritional expert when vegan diets are mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan#Recommended_dietary...

  Soybeans: 0.59g/100g of food
  Beef: 0.23g/100g of food
  Chickpeas: 0.19g/100g of food

Doesn't look like a vegetarian or vegan diet would cause any sort of tryptophan deficiency.

According to your link, those are figures for raw (dried) beans. When water is added during cooking, concentrations will go down.

The ancient solution is to pair them with rice or wheat.

Isn’t tryptophan the thing that makes you sleepy.

>Finally, cooking with spices makes vegetables much more varied. Americans seem to think spices and rubs are only for meat and vegetables need to be plain. A well spiced vegetable dish is delicious.

No, you are wrong. And that a pitfall that for some reason a lot of people fall into.

ALL dishes need spices to make food taste better. All meat is seasoned when cooked. Why people cook vegies without seasoning and complain its bland is strange to me.

You say "No, you are wrong" and then repeat the exact message of their comment?

Also worth noting is that a lot of the vegetables you get in restaurant dishes have been buttered, salted, and/or sugared to hell to make them taste better in a short amount of time. This, of course, makes it even harder to actually get healthy food when eating out.

Boston Market is a classic example here. They make a big deal about offering vegetables, but all their vegetables taste to me like they've had corn syrup poured over them. Which they probably have.

Butter and salt are not bad for you.

Butter is calorie dense which may make it harder to lower intake.

No food is good or bad, it’s just food. Dose makes the poison, yada yada. Please stop moralizing food choices. Is butter a calorie heavy food that is being overused in restaurants, leading to overeating? I’d say yes. Does that make butter “bad?” I’d say no, still just a food item. It’s amoral. Sodium is an even trickier thing, as overeating isn’t really a calorie thing but can have other adverse impacts.

Putting a little butter on your veggies isn't going to harm anything. Putting butter on some bread and downing 1000 calories of bread or potatoes...that's a different story, but it's not the butter that's causing the overconsumption...it's the carbs.

Is the government lying when they say you should keep your sodium intake below 2300mg per day?

There is a major genetic component when it comes to handling sodium. Some people can eat a huge amount with no ill effects, others are much more sensitive. This is still an area of active research, so take any nutritional guidelines with a grain of salt.

That value could be too low, but keep mind that:

1. 30% of salt intake, according to WHO's reports, comes from bread

2. A lot of salt comes from junk food / ultra-processed food. This is because the brain is wired to seek salt and ultra-processed food is engineered for overconsumption.

Cut the bread and the junk food and you'll actually have a hard time eating enough salt ;-)

When I add salt on my plate, people give me funny looks as if I'm going to die tomorrow, but most of my food is cooked at home and by my own estimates in most days I don't go over 2 g of sodium.

---

Most people probably overconsume salt, but that's because of the junk food.

We also have clues that what might matter more for heart health is actually the potassium:sodium ratio.

Whole foods (meat, vegetables, fruits) are high in potassium and junk food is low in potassium. And eating more whole plants can probably balance a higher sodium intake.

But that's the second problem with the junk food that people are eating.

So the dietary guidelines aren't lying... that's basically their way of saying to cut the junk food.

Probably. You pretty much have to read the studies yourself, looking specifically for ways they are fucked up, to find out anything useful in the area of nutrition.

Frozen dinners seem to have come a long way, even in the past 10 years. My father is on a diet plan and the way he does it is to have basically nothing in his house except "healthy" frozen meals and healthy-ish snacks like nut mixes and apple chips. The word healthy is in scare quotes but actually they seem relatively okay: a good amount of grains, usually enough veggies to satisfy a serving or two, and enough protein to feel sated. Just don't reach into the freezer aisle blindly and you can come out with something decent.

If you can't muster the energy at the end of your day to cook a meal, these are a pretty decent substitute.

Almost all foods seem to get destroyed in the freezing process and lose their texture. I have found that at my supermarket they sell refrigerated meals that just need to be microwaved and they taste outstanding. As long as you make sure to stir them half way through so they don't dry out at the top you could literally serve it at a restaurant and I don't think people would notice.

I have a feeling there are more than a few restaurants which do basically exactly this.

There are plenty of places in the UK where this is done. I'm sorry when visitors eat in these places, and either don't realise £6.50 for a meal means it can only be microwaved from a box, or get ripped off and pay £12 for it.

This is a major supplier.

https://www.brake.co.uk/meal-solutions/multi-portion-prepare...

As someone who doesn't enjoy cooking all that much, I've noticed this too and been distressed by it.

Restaurants, almost uniformly, serve unhealthy food. There are exceptions to this, but they don't seem to be all that popular. When I go out to eat with friends I am often stuck eating something heavier and less healthy than I would like.

Is there some good reason for this?

99% of my dinners' vegetables are pre-heating the oven to 350-400, putting aluminum foil on a cookie sheet, and coating Vegetable X in salt, oil, and pepper, and cooking for 15-20 minutes. It's basically 0 cleanup and you're eating whole, unprocessed vegetables. Our bodies are built for that sort of diet.

Brussels sprouts and cauliflower, to name just two, are outstanding when cooked this way.

If you want to bring your brussels sprouts to the next level, add bacon and maple syrup.

I'm amused that we're talking about recipes on HN but then after all recipes are algorithms.

Or saute them with a bit of butter, garlic, and balsamic.

or a little maple syrup plus goat cheese bits!

Along this same line, something I've been extremely surprised by every time I visit someone in the hospital is how unhealthy hospital dining options are.

What's even more depressing is that hospital meals are designed for healthy people. Most people recovering from a gastrointestinal disease or chemotherapy find most food unpalatable, and hospital food seems like straight up garbage to them. For example, there are few to no "light" tasting options. Everything is seasoned restaurant-style (pedal to the metal in the flavor department). Hospital food ought to have a bland option.

Hospitals are such stressful places to be in that they seem mandated to provide "comfort food" all around.

In my observation, most people don't want healthy food. They want to think they are eating healthy but when it comes down to it, they want the fat, sugar and salt that goes into restaurant food. They want to think they're healthy drinking their fruit smoothie but god forbid you leave out some of the sugar. They want to think they're healthy eating a salad but make sure it's got some fried chicken and plenty of salad dressing on it. It's healthy because it's salad, right?

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule but restaurants typically have to cater to the lowest common denominator.

For about a year, Noodles & Company had an option to replace the noodles with spinach and double the veggies of any dish. It made a few of their menu items decently healthy. I was sad when it was discontinued shortly after I discovered it.

Yes; restaurants, especially nice restaurants, are in the business of selling food which people eat primarily for pleasure, not for nutrition. It's an indulgence, not sustenance.

Even those restaurants who want to appeal to a 'healthy eating' audience find that their less healthy items sell better; considering the difficulty of succeeding or even surviving in the restaurant business, they start to emphasize those items and eventually become a source of relatively unhealthy meals. It's the same phenomenon that caused all of the niche cable networks to fill their schedules with general-interest reality shows unrelated to their original programming over the last couple of decades.

tl;dr: Restaurants sell unhealthy food because people want to buy unhealthy food.

The misconception is tasty food and healthy food are orthogonal qualities; that's thankfully far from the case! For example, you could a make a restaurant quality chicken breast entree with a white wine reduction and heavy cream sauce, seasoned with Herbs de Provence. If you're a follower of Keto, you'd notice these ingredients are all low carbohydrate, and offer protein and fats. Pair with seasoned veggies and you've got yourself an entree, it's delicious, and it's far from consuming the "empty" calories of typical fast food.

Substitute thighs for the breast and you might have something. As has been noted, chicken breast is the skim milk of the meat world.

There's nothing wrong with chicken breast, especially if the skin is left on and crisped. It just lends itself to different applications than thigh.

Especially if you're using heavy cream, which is 36% fat. The sauce compensates for the breast's lack of fat (when compared to thighs). I like both, but as you say, they have different applications. For breast, just use extra olive oil/butter/heavy cream to balance the dish.

Thighs are less time and temperature sensitive. They're a bit more hardy if you're new to cooking. Chicken breast is easy to overcook because less fat makes it less forgiving.

Chicken breast is garbage. The magic is in the leg meat.

Healthy meals do not have to be flavorless. Of course if they are trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator then the menu will maybe start to look like McDonald’s, but even somewhere like chipotle you can buy a salad without the extra cheese and chips.

I never understood why vegetables are difficult to get as a "fast food" format. With salt pepper oil and heat, they can be very tasty. There has to be a huge market for Jack in the box equivalent for healthy eating. Most of the existing fast casual chains miss the mark. Chipotle comes to mind, but it's still mostly grains and protein and still lacking in vegetables, beyond the optional pico de gallo for your burrito.

You don't have to get a burrito at Chipotle. Try my salad recipe:

Salad with no dressing (you don't need their sugary dressing when you have salsa).

Black or pinto beans.

Optionally, a bit of brown rice, but they will give you too much unless you ask for only a sprinkle of it.

Onions and peppers.

Chicken or whatever meat you like.

Corn, pico de gallo, and medium salsa.

Guacamole. "I know it's extra."

And some of the chopped lettuce at the end of the line, especially if you're getting it to go. "So the guac doesn't stick to the lid."

Now you have mostly vegetables, some meat, some beans, and not much in the way of grains. And it makes two full meals!

The single most popular fast food in Berlin is Döner Kebab, which is about 40% fresh vegetables, 25% bread, 30% grilled meat and some sauce/spices.

It's not super unhealthy as fast foods go.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Doener_K...

Fast food is engineered to hit all the sweet spots that our primate brains desire. No matter how delicious my asparagus or salad can be it's difficult to compete with a Quarter Pounder.

My thought experiment of a chain wouldn't directly compete with people choose McDonald's every single time. It'd be for people who've seen the light, and know you can't eat McDonald's, sustainably, indefinitely. That population isn't everyone, but there's a sizable number of consumers who are diet conscious. That's the target market. While McDonald's food is designed to have a certain effect on your palette, you haven't appreciated a skilled cook's entrees if you think there's no realistic competition. Deep, rich, meaningful flavor could absolutely compete against the engineered taste of McDonalds.

There's an Australian chain that does vegetables in the "fast food" format (they have a presence at highway service centres, that sort of thing). So I think you might be right about there being an unserved market for this. ( https://www.oliversrealfood.com.au/pages/our-menu )

I find Cava's green and grains bowl to be pretty good for getting a decent serving of veggies. I usually skip the spreads and dressings and it basically turns into a tasty salad with rice.

They aren't impossible to find, there are loads takeaway sandwich stores as well as buritos. You just have to look a little further than takeaway that has a drive through.

Greens keep pretty well and have decent, smoothish availability year-round. I'd guess that's why they favor them at restaurants.

Sure, but they're perhaps the most unsatisfying foods of them all. They also have almost zero nutritional value and calories. A vegetarian Indian friend of mine lamented, "Americans think that a vegetarian meal means lettuce."

Nutritional value's decent, in terms of vitamins & minerals and such. Calories being near-zero is a huge bonus, for those on an American diet—lots of people would pay extra to eliminate the calories from some of their food, keeping all else the same.

But yes, I agree, I don't really want a greens-heavy salad as my main dish for my biggest meal of the day.

For a while I was really good about taking 40-50% of restaurant meals home as leftovers. Then something changed and now I haven't done that in a while and have since gained 10lbs. Restaurant meals are "okay" portion if that's all you eat for half a day, but many of us can't help but snack, and the combination is no bueno.

Want a better ratio? Eat at asian places. Its incredibly hard to get well cooked vegetables at anything other than a fine dining restaurant (or hot food bar at a whole foods), but every asian place is gonna have some really good ratios.

> emphasis has been on a healthy plate, which is a plate that is half vegetables, a quarter protein, a quarter starch or grains.

a little off topic but emphasis should be on reducing the calories. eating healthily helps feeling full and thus can help achieve this but it's not the actual lever

A quarter protein? That's insane. You only need about 60 grammes of protein a day. Why are you eating a quarter of your food in protein?

That's like the bare minimum to avoid obvious nutritional deficiency. For optimal health and athletic performance most people can benefit from significantly more.

It's not the minimum it's the recommended.

The recommendation is the minimum. Most people can benefit from more.

Nah. Insane is a really heavy word to use here. Everyone is different. And 60 is really low, insane even, for the average sized human regardless.

US RDA is 0.8 grams/day per kg of bodyweight. For a 150 pound / 68 kg person that’s around 55 grams.

Remember when the government told us that low-fat was the way to go?

I'm assuming they mean "a quarter protein heavy dish like a meat, etc"

weightlifting folklore says you should eat at least 1g of protein per kg of body weight to gain muscle efficiently

Depending on the research it is around 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kg body weight. [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29497353 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22150425 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19927027/