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Researchers say eating at restaurants is generally bad for our overall health.

They note that 50 percent of full-service restaurant meals and 70 percent of fast-food meals are of poor dietary quality.

Experts say you can avoid unhealthy eating habits at restaurants by checking the menu beforehand and saving a portion of your meal for lunch the next day.

There was a time not so long ago when dining out was a rare treat and most of our meals were prepared at home.

Today, restaurants are lined up along main roads, and fast-food joints are tucked into every corner of our world. We even have the ability to summon just about any kind of food to our couch with the tap of an app.

The result: A solid 20 percent of the calories we consume as a nation comes from some type of restaurant.

Those factors are bad news for the health of people in the United States, according to a study published today in The Journal of Nutrition by the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

The study analyzed the dietary selections of more than 35,000 U.S. adults from 2003 to 2016 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to determine how often they dined at full-service or fast-food restaurants.

The researchers assessed nutritional quality by evaluating specific foods and nutrients in the meals, based on the American Heart Association 2020 Diet Score.

The researchers found that at fast-food restaurants, about 70 percent of the meals Americans consumed were of poor dietary quality.

At full-service restaurants, about 50 percent were of poor nutritional quality.

The researchers also report that less than 0.1 percent of all the restaurant meals consumed over the study period were of ideal quality.

The study authors point out that consumer choice comes into play here, but they add that restaurant choices don’t make healthy ordering easy.

“Our findings indicate that major efforts are needed to improve the nutritional quality of meals consumed at U.S restaurants — both what’s available on the menu and marketed, and what Americans actually choose,” Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, BS, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and a co-author of the study, told Healthline.

“Looking at how close or far each meal was from ideal, the biggest problem is actually too few healthy components,” he said.

The lowest scores — and the greatest room for improvement — were seen for whole grains, fish and other seafood, and legumes, nuts, and seeds, Mozaffarian says.

“Adding more healthy foods to restaurant meals, while reducing salt, is the biggest opportunity for improving their healthfulness,” he said.