15 Unhealthy Chinese Restaurant Foods You Should Always Avoid

Chinese food is one of America's favorite types of cuisine. In 2020, Google data revealed which foods web users searched for most often (for both recipes and restaurant locations), and Chinese food came out on top (via Chef's Pencil). Nation's Restaurant News has reported similar findings, revealing that 36 percent of consumers report eating Chinese food "frequently," while an additional 42 percent say they eat it at least "occasionally."

In fact, Chinese food has been a favorite in America ever since the first large wave of Chinese immigrants arrived here in the mid-1800s, bringing their unique blend of various foods, spices, and cooking techniques to American consciousness (via Oxford Research).

But beware! As much as we love it, not all Chinese food is created equal. There are many healthy protein-packed Chinese food orders which are as nutritious as they are delicious. But there's also plenty of less than healthy Chinese food — high calorie, fatty, sodium-packed disasters that may taste good, but that are terrible for your health— especially if you're ordering them often. Here are some of the ones you'll want to avoid.

Based on the name, beef and broccoli must be a smart choice when ordering Chinese, right? Wrong! Prevention warned that the salty black bean sauce used in beef and broccoli may contain more than a day's worth of sodium — on it's own! In fact, an order of beef and broccoli at a restaurant like P.F. Chang's can pack 770 calories, 33 grams of fat, 33 grams of sugar, and 2,110 milligrams of sodium. To put that into context, the American Heart Association recommends capping your daily sodium intake at less than 1,500 milligrams — meaning you can't even chown down more than two-thirds of a single serving of beef and broccoli before accidentally soaring over that number.

While you can't order beef and broccoli at a Chinese restaurant without overdoing it on the sodium, there are some easy ways you can cut sodium levels and make this dish at home. Rather than using the standard mix of soy sauce, dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sesame oil to flavor your dish, try the American Heart Association's lighter variation made with low-sodium soy sauce, red wine, and honey to slash the recipe's sodium levels dramatically.

Vegetable lo mein is an example of a food that sounds fairly harmless but, in reality, is pretty unhealthy. It's "just noodles and vegetables," you could argue, but the portion size is huge so you're getting way more carbs than you need. Plus, the dish is made with massive quantities of oil, making the carbs you're eating that much more unhealthy.

The noodles in lo mein alone, without sauce, can clock in at 200 calories per cup, with a standard serving of the dish having upwards of 900 calories. "This dish offers plenty of sodium, oil, and refined carbohydrates, but very little in the way of fiber and protein," registered dietitian Andy Bellatti explained in an article for Berkeley Wellness.

If you can't live without lo mein, you should consider at least making it healthier. In an article for Livestrong, nutrition expert Jessica Bruno suggested asking your chef to use broth instead of oil when preparing the lo mein. "This is called a 'vegetable stock velveted' preparation and reduces the number of calories in the dish," she explained. If you're cooking lo mein at home, ramp up the amounts of vegetables you use, and dial the noodles way back for a better calorie balance.

The fried rice served in many Chinese restaurants is a food that starts out relatively healthy and is soured by massive portion sizes and loads of added fat. "Fried rice is undeniably bad for you, setting you back 450 calories and 14 grams of fat," warned Men's Journal. Nutritionist Jayne Hurley agrees. She told Newsweek that the average serving of fried rice is simply far too large for the average person, providing 4 or 5 cups of super oily rice, minimal vegetables, and "basically three quarters of a day's calories." Registered dietitian Andy Bellatti explained in an article for Berkeley Wellness that "rice, even when not fried, is best eaten as a side dish, as opposed to an entrée."

If all that weren't unhealthy enough, leftover fried rice can harbor bacteria and toxins and is so likely to make people sick that physicians have dubbed the phenomenon "fried rice syndrome" (via LiveScience). Apparently, dry foods like rice often contain Bacillus cereus, or B. cereus. When these foods are heated and left out, this bacteria can trigger production of a toxin which causes severe stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea, epidemiologist Sam Crowe cautioned in an interview with USA Today.

Many of the Chinese dishes Americans love were actually dreamed up in the U.S. and specifically crafted to appeal to American palettes, and nowhere is this more evident than in the story of the sweet and sour sauce used to coat pork, chicken, and shrimp. According to Chowhound, sweet and sour sauce originated in the early 1900s. Chinese food was gaining popularity in the United States, but spices were scarce and few restaurants had the time to cook their foods in the traditional ways they were used to. To combat this, chefs created an efficient and crowd-pleasing sauce to coat deep-fried chunks of meat — a sauce which included canned pineapple and ketchup. And that's how foods like sweet and sour pork became Chinese restaurant staples.

From the time it was created, sweet and sour pork has been a poor performer nutritionally. The dish "typically serves up 16 teaspoons of sugar, about the same amount in 3 chocolate bars," according to WebMD. Sweet and sour pork is so calorie dense in fact, the site warned, that "even if you split this entree with someone, you're still likely to get more than 800 calories and 48 grams of fat."

Spare ribs — translated from a German word meaning "spear ribs," which referred to the way they were roasted on a spear – come from the bottom section of the ribs and breastbone of a pig, just above where bacon originates (via Spruce Eats).

Coated in five-spice powder and soy sauce, Chinese spare ribs are also usually a brilliant red color. Ideally, this coloring comes from red wine yeast and nanru, which is made from fermented bean curd, according to Bon Appétit. However, "lesser places will go the easy route and rely on food coloring or jarred sauces that are basically thickened mixtures of sugar, salt, and Red No. 2," to get the right coloring on the ribs.

Whichever option you end up with, pork spare ribs are obviously full of fat. "One order can pack in 1.5 times the sodium you should get in a day, along with 64 grams of fat," warned WebMD. "They also can have more sugar than a can of soda." Nutritionist Jayne Hurley agreed, telling Newsweek that the fat and calories you get in a serving of barbecue spare ribs are is equivalent to two full pork chops!

Named for the bubbly foam found on top of the drink—  and not those round, bubble-like pearls of tapioca at the bottom of the cup — bubble tea originated in Taiwan and generally consists of tea mixed with milk, fruit, flavored syrups, and, these days, gummy pearls that make the drink so iconic (via Eat This, Not That).

Because it's generally based around tea and fruit juice, most people wouldn't consider their favorite bubble tea to be on par with the most sugar-packed coffee drinks or milkshakes available, but the drinks are actually very similar nutritionally. According to The Daily Meal, one bubble tea can contain an alarmingly high 50 grams of sugar and nearly 500 calories. "Tapioca pearls — loved for their chewy, candy-like texture — are as bad for your health as actual candy," the site warned.

Researchers at Pepperdine University were so worried about the abundant sugar found in the increasingly popular drink that they conducted one of the first studies ever on bubble tea. Their conclusion: The drink is so overflowing with sugar, we need to develop lower-sugar options ASAP as a measure of protecting public health.

Given that sweet and sour pork would appear to be a less-than-healthy choice (per WebMD), perhaps swapping in chicken for pork might make it a better bet? The answer depends on whether you're talking white versus dark meat chicken, per SFGate. White meat is lower in fat, cholesterol, and calories than dark meat chicken, according to a side-by-side comparison by Foodstruct using data supplied by the USDA (via FoodData Central). On the other hand, white meat chicken has less to offer than dark meat chicken in terms of minerals essential to human health. In any case, however, the sweet and sour chicken on your plate may be made from dark or light meat — or both (just as sweet and sour pork may be made from various pork cuts).

Accordingly, it seems a fair comparison of chicken versus pork (for purposes of ordering sweet and sour) would be one that doesn't take into account the cut in either case. Using Foodstruct's side by side comparison, it turns out you're getting roughly the same amount of protein and fat in both. However, chicken has more cholesterol, and is significantly less rich in several important minerals, including calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, copper, and zinc. At the same time, pork meat is lower in sodium than chicken. Overall, although chicken has more iron than pork, it appears that, unless iron is your first and only priority, sweet and sour chicken is even more unhealthy than sweet and sour pork.