Data study

We ranked 1,073 chain restaurant dishes by protein. Here's what surprised us.

My Fit Menu tracks 1,073 dishes across 66 US restaurant chains, each with a calorie and protein number labeled by exactly where it came from. We ran the numbers to find the best and worst orders in the database — and a few "healthy" menu items that aren't.

Start with the one that surprised us most: at Panera, the Greek Salad is 630 calories with 8 grams of protein — the lowest protein-per-calorie score of any salad we track, worse than most burgers. A McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese is 540 calories with 31 grams. The salad has more calories and about a quarter of the protein. It isn't an outlier: we track 159 salads across every chain in the database, and their calories alone range from 190 to 1,311 — "salad" on a menu describes almost nothing about what you're actually getting.

The honesty check, first

87% of the 1,073 numbers in this study are the restaurant's own published figures, not our estimate — the rest are either calculated from a restaurant's own published ingredient values, or, for a small remainder, a reasoned estimate shown as a range. Every dish below carries its label. We didn't average, round away, or clean up a restaurant's own numbers to make a better headline, including the Panera salad above.

The best protein per calorie

Across every meal-sized dish we track, the average is 39 grams of protein for 681 calories (the midpoint is lower, 640 calories — a handful of very large entrées pull the average up). These 10 lead the whole database on protein per calorie, plain grilled items mostly, none of them a salad:

The other end of that list is where the "healthy sounding" trap shows up again — not fried food, but oatmeal, waffles, and salads with a candied or breaded topping doing more caloric work than the protein on the plate:

The best protein per dollar

Restaurant prices vary by location, so treat these as typical, not exact — but the gap here is real. The single best value in the database is fried chicken, not a diet-branded item:

89 dishes break 500 calories and 35 grams of protein

If the goal is simply "filling, under 500 calories, real protein," the database isn't short on options — 89 dishes clear both bars at once, spread across steakhouses, Italian chains, and fast food alike:

Methodology

Every dish's calories, protein, carbs and fat come from one of three sources, shown on the dish itself: Published is the restaurant's own figure for that exact item. Calculated is added up from the restaurant's own published ingredient values for a stated standard build, shown as a likely range. Estimated means no published figure exists, and is always shown as a range, never as official. "Protein per calorie" is protein grams divided by calories, ×100. "Protein per dollar" uses each dish's typical U.S. price, which varies by location. Menus change; a dish's numbers here reflect when we last checked it — see each restaurant's page for that date. Full data notes and how to report a wrong number: Support.