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Isn’t it strange how the only way to eat healthy food in America is to cook it yourself? Every fast food restaurant is unhealthy. Most sit down restaurants are

• atom-morgan 6y ago
  Lack of demand I'm guessing. Within cities it's much easier to find healthier food at restaurants.
  • itake 6y ago
    I am on a high protein diet. I can find "healthy" choices in local SF restaurant, but its rare to find food with enough protein to meet my needs. Even "healthy" restaurants sneak in sauces and sweet drinks or don't accurately measure their ingredients (and thus correctly report calories).
• sjg007 6y ago
  You can do healthy meal delivery plans or for the really rich, hire a chef. The healthy for life plans are quite good. I lost weight on them.
• vkou 6y ago
  > I can pay someone to change my oil, I can pay someone to cut my grass, but for some reason cooking healthy food, the most essential service, is difficult to find. > Why has our economy failed us in this sector specifically? Because it's incredibly inefficient for a chef to cook a meal for a family, because people want their food to arrive warm, thus preventing factory-food-production, because delivery is expensive, because everyone has a refrigerator, thus making cooked-to-order food have compete on price with long-shelf-life refrigerated staples, and because people vote with their wallets by buying food that tastes good, as opposed to food that's healthy. Do you know what makes food taste good? Sugar, fat, salt, and alcohol. Do you know what's not healthy for you? Sugar, fat, salt and alcohol. [1] The other problem is that a lot of Americans don't know how to eat well - because eating well is a skill that you inherit from your parents. If your parents were feeding you crap food as a kid, you'll turn into an adult that craves that same crap. There's a huge class divide, here. My parents were immigrants with lower-middle-class means, but upper-class habits. As a kid, soda was a treat for me. Soda was a staple for my lower-class friends - which was not by their choice, but rather by choice of their parents. They grew up into adults with bad diets, bad teeth, and bad overall health, and they find it really, really hard to change what they eat. This sort of thing repeats, generation after generation. [1] Yes, I'm aware that fat and salt aren't unhealthy in themselves - but are probably unhealthy in the amounts we consume.
  • zeroonetwothree 6y ago
    Fat and salt are both critical for your health.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      SOME fats are indeed essential for our health, but not every fat out there is. Highly processed shit like trans-fats seems to be pretty destructive.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  Most every fast food restaurant has reasonably healthy food that few people order. Mcdonalds has chicken burgers. Everywhere has salads (albeit fewer than in 2019 because of food handling concerns in 2020). Subway caters to this heavily in their marketing. You can easily put together a cheap sub with whatever macro/micronutrient combo you want. Also, most supermarkets have a hot prepared food section with very healthy cheap pre-prepared food. Again... few people take advantage of it. Outside of food deserts (which yes, do exist) it's really not hard to find healthy cheap prepared food if you want it. But nobody does.
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    Mcdonalds has chicken burgers. The cheapest chicken sandwich at McDonald's is slathered with mayonnaise. Of course one can specify that the mayonnaise be omitted, but then one is confronted with the fact that the factory-made chicken patty is fairly unpalatable by itself. The main question about Subway is which is more disgusting: the food or the way they treat (especially immigrant) franchisees? I can't think of a single item at Subway that qualifies as "cheap" either. Non-millionaires who seek tasty and healthy food must learn to cook.
    • bpodgursky 6y ago
      What are you on about? You can get a perfectly health meal at subway for $5. Just get a turkey club with vegetables or whatever. If you think Subway is garbage food, the problem is not Subway, the problem is that you're a rich food snob.
      • rsynnott 6y ago
        A couple of months ago, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that Subway's 'bread' wasn't bread (the reason this went to court was that it's important for setting a VAT rate), due to containing too much added sugar. In Ireland (and, as far as I know, most places in Europe) it would not be normal for bread to contain added sugar _at all_. So, yeah, a sandwich made with what is legally cake seems fairly garbage (though, I do see the problem in that it seems to be hard to get normal bread cheaply in the US). This does point to a potential solution, though. As I understand it, the determination was only directly relevant to taxation. However, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that a country could take the stance that advertising sandwiches made with non-bread as sandwiches wasn’t permissible. That might be enough of a marketing problem for Subway that they’d just drop the sugar.
• UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Chipotle?
• diarmuidc 6y ago
  Maybe eating out every day isn't the best idea.
• jariel 6y ago
  The food is not so much unhealthy as portion sizes are just too big. I eat literally the kids meal sizes at many places. McDonalds burger is not very unhealthy for example. And even the food you buy is loaded with sugar and other hidden carbs. Yogurt - for example - is kind of positioned as 'healthy' when for the most part it's total junk food due to the addes sugar. Most cereal, crackers are effectively junk food. Pragmatically speaking even bread is junk food. Salad dressing is usually junk food. BarbQ sauce is junk food. Eat less, avoid carbs and sugar ... we'd probably do just fine.
• ojhughes 6y ago
  When I used to travel to the US with work, I would start to get split cuticles after a few days due to nutrition deficiencies eating out every day
• meowzero 6y ago
  Usually, healthier cooking doesn't taste as good. Most of the food industry is focused on providing the best tasting food so people will buy them. How do you make food taste good? Add a lot of fat and/or carbs, which are the macro nutrients that are calorie dense. There doesn't seem to be much demand in healthy food services.
  • symlinkk 6y ago
    I disagree that there isn’t much demand for healthy food services. I think the real problem is that healthy food just doesn’t have as high of profit margins as unhealthy food. A satisfying healthy meal will be primarily meat based, which is expensive. A satisfying unhealthy meal will contain lots of carbs and fat, which is cheap.
    • t-writescode 6y ago
      > A satisfying healthy meal will be primarily meat based, which is expensive. Indian, vegan and vegetarian food would like a word. I've had some stellar salads.
  • linspace 6y ago
    For the same amount of taste healthy food is incredibly more expensive. I have eaten vegetables as good as any meat.
  • worik 6y ago
    No! Healthy food tastes great!
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      But not as great as unhealthy food. So if you're trying to sell food next door to someone selling tastier food, you're probably not going to succeed unless you have a weird number of health conscious folks. And health conscious folks tend to cook at home anyway and not eat out anyway.
  • hristov 6y ago
• kube-system 6y ago
  My reality is the opposite. I ate healthier food when I worked in an urban office every day. There was basically a salad place on every corner -- enough variety that I basically never got tired of them. And when I did, I would usually get some ethnic vegetarian food that I have no idea how to cook anyway. At home, I have fewer options in my fridge, it's easier for me to make a lazy choice for lunch, and there's nobody around to lean on for social support.
• didibus 6y ago
  Not just that, but even if you cook it yourself, it can be hard to find certain things that are healthy, almost everything has added sugar, or sugar concentrates for example, and a lot of produce are adulterated and so arn't even the real thing, like some Olive Oils.
• shinycode 6y ago
  Because processed food yields the most profit. It’s cheap and quick to cook. It’s the economy of profit, with 8h of work and the same food budget you cook more and make more profit ...
  • symlinkk 6y ago
    Maybe there is space in the economy for a fast food restaurant that is slightly more expensive but also slightly healthier. Food for thought.
    • shinycode 6y ago
      In Europe, at least in France there is lots and lots of restaurants with healthy cooked food and not expensive. Maybe it’s cultural ?
• konjin 6y ago
  Because healthy food is not subsidized. A raw Big Mac costs on the order of a dollar. If you tried to just match that with raw healthy ingredients you'd be looking at five to ten times that. And that's before we get into the labor costs of cooking.
• mcavoybn 6y ago
  I don't think that this issue is specific to the food service sector. I think the reason healthy food is hard to find in America is the same reason that the only way to have a healthy social ecosystem online is to painstakingly develop it at a grassroots level: corporate interests have taken over. The second that a corporate entity takes hold, growth is made the only priority and the system will naturally develop insidious patterns which abuse our most pathological tendencies. Let's refactor your comment using social media: > Isn’t it strange how the only way to have a meaningful discussion on the internet is to spend hours researching and filtering through a sea of clickbait/porn/fakenews/gossip? > Every social media website is unhealthy. Most well-known forums are unhealthy. I think the unfortunate reality is that we will continue to slip into these patterns until we stop responding to them. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. We all need to strive to find out what healthy means and crawl towards that. Unfortunately things will continue to spiral out of control to the degree they need to for us to change, and sadly some people will be lost along the way. Other possibilities: * Food is now abundant. The whole idea of healthy food is relatively new. Only the very rich used to be overweight, but now even the poorest can afford enough food to become obese * American food is heavy and fatty as a matter of tradition. Burgers, fries, fast food are all cultural artifacts most commonly associated with the US. * Multiple generations of Americans have been raised in front of the television and have deep seeded emotional imprinting from fast food marketing (happy meals!)