127: Why “Healthy” Restaurant Meals Quietly Backfire

Speaker: One of the hardest pills to swallow once you understand food quality is this. You can't really eat healthily while eating out, even if you choose the right food categories. You know, most people think they're doing great because they ordered eggs instead of pancakes, salmon instead of a burger or salad instead of fries.

But once food leaves your kitchen. Categories matter a lot less than sourcing fats and preparation. Welcome to the Prime Shift Podcast. Most restaurants are not designed for health. They're designed for speed, consistency, and profit. And that means a few things are almost guaranteed. They use seed oils for frying, sauteing, and grilling.

They use seed oils in sauces, marinates, and dressings. They rarely source organic produce. They almost always use low quality poultry, and most seafood is farm, not wild. Even if you choose unquote healthy foods, they're often cooked in oxidized fats and paired with ingredients that quietly drive inflammation.

A salad with industrial dressing can be worse than a plain burger. Grilled chicken is usually one of the worst choices on the menu, and farmed salmon is not the ancestral food people think it is. For us, eating out has become mostly frustrating, not because we are trying to be perfect, but because we know we are taking a hit every single time, and that's why we don't eat out often.

When we do, we stick to a small handful of restaurants that, for example, use butter for cooking instead of seed oils or olive oil at least. And we try to choose foods that are harder to mess up, like red meat and eggs. The problem is for people who eat out all the time, you know, daily work, lunches, travel meals, convenience based decisions.

Most of those people genuinely believe they eat healthy, actually. My brother-in-law told me about, uh, his cousin who eats out every day and who tries to stay healthy and be healthy, and he said, well, I'm eating healthy. I'm always, you know, picking the right, you know, meals for lunch, not realizing that even if you pick the right ke or the type of food.

The way it's made, the way it's sourced, makes it anything but healthy, you know, and most people have no idea how much low grade toxin exposure they're getting with every meal. You're not gonna feel it after one dinner. You feel it after years, you know, and so eating out occasionally isn't really the issue.

Eating out regularly is small exposures, compound, oxidized fats add up and endocrine disruptors, accumulate, gut irritation becomes normal, and that's when people start blaming carbs, protein, or entire food groups instead of the environment the food is coming from. So here is what actually works. We have to interrupt this episode for an important message from your feet.

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And now back to the episode, the most effective solution. Is also the least exciting.

Bring food from home. You know, a lunchbox beats a restaurant salad every time. If you're into salads, that is leftover meat. You know, eggs, fruit and simple foods travel much, much better than most people think. And if you do eat out. Reduce frequency first. That alone moves the needle more than obsessing over menu choices.

When you are at a restaurant, stick to foods that are difficult to ruin. Plain red meat. You know, no spices, just salt eggs. Ask if they can make it in butter or olive oil if they don't have anything else. Burger pad, patties without sauces, you know, and ask simple questions. Hey, can you cook this in butter please?

Could you skip the sauce? Can you keep it plain and avoid foods? With a health halo like salads, grain bowls, and plant heavy dishes loaded with dressings and oils. They might look clean, but perform terribly and. This isn't about fear or purity, it's about being realistic. You can't outsource health to systems that were never designed for it.

Restaurants aren't evil. They're just optimized for different outcomes. Health happens at home, and so I would encourage you to cook as much as possible at home using individual ingredients, you know, real food if you do that and bring your food. To where you're going, you're gonna significantly improve your health, or at least if nothing else, avoid negatively impacting your health with foods that you buy from someone else who does not care and who is not incentivized to care about your health.

Now, what we do for us, we have found a couple of places, mostly breakfast places, I should say, that, you know, use organic flour to make sourdough if you are into bread or you know, pastries or what have you. They source from local farmers, they use butter. There is even an app, um, seed oil scout, I think it's called.

That's the one my wife uses to look up restaurants that don't use seed oils for frying. So if you are into, I dunno, having fries or anything fried, really at the end of the day, and they use butter or telo. Or olive oil that's significantly better. Might not always be perfect. It's probably not gonna be the highest quality grass fed, you know, grass finished tallow you can find it's probably not gonna be the highest quality olive oil.

It might even be an olive oil mix, but anything that's better than plain old seed oils is a step in the right direction. And. In restaurants, any other restaurants we go, we ask. In fact, a couple of years ago we went to vacation in Mexico and we brought our own little pouches of olive oil. And you know, in the morning they had like this breakfast buffet where they, you know, fried eggs right there.

Um. We just gave them the olive oil and said, Hey, can you please cook it in that olive oil? Now obviously that surface where they cooked on the cook surface was not free of those seed oils they used for the previous uh, guest. But nonetheless, try to be a little bit better and try to avoid your exposure to meals that were made in an environment that doesn't care about health.

If you do that, you're gonna be. On the right track, you're gonna be significantly better off. And the more you can cook yourself, the more you can prepare the food yourself, the better it is. And bringing a lunchbox might sound nerd or might look nerdy or what have you, but it's significantly better than the alternatives and your health will thank you even if you don't change anything else.

With that, we're gonna wrap it up. I hope you enjoyed those last three episodes specifically on nutrition. We're gonna be switching gears next. Next week. But with that we're gonna wrap it up. Maybe share with someone who eats out a lot and who might not be aware that buying that salad or that salmon with asparagus that is full of glyphosate and some pesticides might not really be a healthy choice.

Until next time.