Whether you want a specific dish or don’t feel like cooking, eating out can be as convenient as it is satisfying. Unfortunately, overdoing it in restaurants can have a major negative impact on your health. According to a new study, you’re probably cutting years off your life if you eat out twice a day or more. Read on to see why cooking at home can be worth the effort and for more information on maintaining other healthy habits, check if you drink so much coffee a day, your heart is in danger, study findings.
The study, which was recently published in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, assessed the eating habits of 35,084 adults aged 20 years and over with personal interviews from 1999 to 2014. When the interviews were completed in 2015, the results showed that 2,781 participants died of heart disease and 638 died of cancer.
After adjusting for factors such as age, sex and body mass index, data analysis revealed that, compared to study participants who ate meals prepared outside the home less than once a week, those who ate out or ordered food for travel on average twice a week a day or more were 95% more likely to die prematurely.
“Frequent consumption of meals prepared outside the home is significantly associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality,” concluded the study authors. “The association of eating meals prepared outside the home with cardiovascular mortality and cancer mortality warrants further investigation.” And for more information about the signs that your health may be at risk, check if you can’t do this in 90 seconds, your heart is in danger, the study says.
But other recent studies have found that even eating out every now and then can make it difficult to keep health in mind. According to a study published in The Journal of Nutrition in January 2020, researchers found that meals in restaurants ranging from full-service establishments to fast food to go were more often harmful to health, finding that less than 0.1 percent of the food served was of optimal nutritional quality.
“Our findings show that dining out is a recipe for eating unhealthy most of the time,” Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, PhD, senior author of the study and dean of the Friedman School at Tufts University, said in a statement. “It must be a priority to improve the nutritional quality of full-service and fast-food meals, while reducing disparities so that all Americans can enjoy the pleasure and convenience of an outside meal that is also good for them.”
However, the Tufts University study also found that both sides of the order desk need more attention to make the current situation better. “In restaurants, two forces are at play: what is available on the menu and what Americans are actually selecting,” said Mozaffarian. “The efforts of the restaurant industry, consumers, advocacy groups and governments must focus on these two areas.”
But what exactly can be changed? “We found that the biggest opportunities to improve nutritional quality would be to add more whole grains, nuts and legumes, fish, fruits and vegetables to meals, reducing salt”, Junxiu Liu, PhD, first author and a postdoctoral scholar at the Friedman School, said in the statement. And for more information about the warning signs that your body may be giving off, check If you have this problem with your eyes, your risk of heart disease is high.