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Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

By and large restaurants are terrible at providing healthy, nutritious, sustaining food. If the pandemic helps promote more cooking at home and more nutritious eating, the failure of restaurants may have a silver lining.

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True, though this isn't the goal of a restaurant. A restaurant's goal is to make money by providing food, service, and an atmosphere that people enjoy. Minivans are terrible airplanes and even worse golf clubs. But they're great at being minivans.

I wouldn't bet on home cooks on average preparing healthier meals than restaurants.

I think you would be shocked at how much salt and fat go into dishes at fine restaurants.

The average home cook would likely recoil at putting those amounts into their own food

This may be a bit of a cherry-picked example but I had a tasty side dish at a nice restaurant so I thought I would try making it at home so I looked up the recipe

The first one that came up was this:

https://www.tastingtable.com/cook/recipes/Pommes-Aligot-Reci...

It contains 1.5 lbs of cheese, a cup of heavy cream, and makes... 4 servings

I didn’t make it.

2lb potatoes to 1.5lb of cheese? Not to even count butter or cream...

Sauces are fun too. Like Hollandaise and Bearnaise or mayo and such... Eggs and butter/oil...

Salt and fat aren't necessarily unhealthy. Some people are genetically sensitive to sodium for high blood pressure but for most of us it's fine. And people would generally be better off getting more of their calories from fat than simple carbohydrates.

The real issue with a lot of restaurant food is simply huge portion sizes that tempt diners to overeat.

This is a bit misleading, not all fat is created equal. Saturated fat in particular has been clearly shown to correlate with heart disease, and there’s a ton of saturated fat in butter, cream, red meat, cheese, etc. So much so that if you’re trying to lower your cholesterol it’s basically impossible to order something satisfactory at a typical restaurant.

The saturated fat - heart disease connection has been questioned quite a bit over the last decade or two. It’s unclear at this point whether it even exists.

Some observational studies have shown a slight correlation between subject reported saturated fat intake and heart disease. However those studies had multiple confounding factors (healthy subject bias), the effect size was small, and no one has ever shown clear causation. I'm not recommending consuming extra saturated fat but don't overstate the strength of the scientific evidence.

The real issue with heart disease is more about atherogenic lipoproteins than cholesterol, and genetics are a more important risk factor than diet.

https://peterattiamd.com/tomdayspring6/

A recent one for me was alfredo, I've always had either the dry stove top packets or bought it from a restaurant. I was simultaneously amazed at how easy it was to cook and how packed with different types of fat it is, and this is in addition to the carbs it's normally bundled with.

It makes perfect sense though, restaurants rarely provide nutrition information so their sole performance metric is taste.

But does the average home cook make pommes aligot from a recipe, or do they grab mashed potato flakes in a box at their local supermarket, and add a couple of hot dogs and call it a meal?

When we make mashed potatoes, we slice potatoes in chunks, add them to an instant pot with salt and water, cook it for 8 minutes, and after it's done we drain the water, add a little milk and butter (not a lot) and mash it all up. Tastes great, and doesn't take all that much effort, really.

Some of the relative healthiness of home cooking is just inexperience. As I've cooked more, I've also gotten a lot more shameless about throwing in a huge hunk of butter or salting liberally.

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