The United States covers more than 3 million square miles.

It turns out we have a wide range of tastes in food.

We collaborated with Lifesum, a Swedish digital health company with 30 million users, to find out what each state preferred for dinner.

Not every state agreed on the same plan for dinner.

Vermont consistently remained an outlier. Six familiar favorites kept rising to the top for each group.

The way you cook chicken and potatoes could affect your health in a different way than you might think.

It’s better to focus on the positives instead of the negatives.

steamed, baked, or both. We came back to the basics.

We focused on the most popular dinners and broke them down into three distinct combinations.

We highlight the benefits of each ingredient, as well as how to make your go-to dinners the healthiest they can be, in the future.

To get a few tips on these popular meals, we spoke to the RDN and the CPT.

1. Rice + chicken + salad

Juicy fried chicken in the South tends to look different in different states.

The basics are usually rice, chicken, and salad.

Chicken, in its leanest form, is a good source of nutrition.

Salad (sans dressing) is great for the gut as well.

If you stick with non-white rice, it is not bad to include it in your weight loss program.

2. Potato + cheese + beans

You have the ingredients for a casserole when you combine them.

An amazing breakfast burrito might be what some in the Southwest think.

There are more vitamins in cooked taters than there are in bananas, but they mainly consist of calories.

There are a lot of cheese choices, but the ones with the lowest amount of fat are mozzarella and feta.

For beans, freshness is important.

It’s a good idea to keep canned stuff out of your house.

If you haven’t been eating salads for lunch, you might want to try cauliflower to get your vegetable serving in instead of beans, it’s paleo-friendly.

Cook the florets in the same way you would green beans, boiling them in a cup of water, and then lightly toasting them in the pan.

3. Bread + egg + bell peppers

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and this combo certainly delivers from a balanced diet perspective if you keep bread to whole wheat and sprouted grains.

Ezekiel bread has no added sugar. Just avoid it if you can.

Eggs can be boiled, scrambled, or do them sunny-side up.

On the East Coast, fluffy egg sandwiches are popular.

4. Fries + beef + tomato

This is where the meat and potatoes come in.

The cut of beef is the most important factor in the quality of this meal.

Porterhouse is considered the best because it has both a New York strip on one side and a filet mignon on the other.

Regular ground beef, also known as burger night, is popular all over the world.

In the south, sweet potato fries are just as popular as regular fries.

Is that tomato the same one? You will want to get the whole fruit for its vitamins C and K benefits, even if it is just a small amount.

5. Quinoa + turkey + broccoli

Diners looking for a healthy variety are turning to quinoa as their grain of choice.

Turkey is a better choice for lean meat than chicken because it is lower in calories and has more calories in it than chicken.

The little green tree by any health-conscious eater’s side has always been broccoli.

The three ingredients make for a delicious high-fiber meal and will look amazing in a bowl presentation.

6. Couscous + pork + spinach

There are many ways to prepare pork, from roasting to barbecuing.

The main question remains: Do you want to sauce or not to sauce?

In the South, you will find slabs that are completely covered in barbecue sauce.

Pork on the coast is prepared more minimally, letting the meat speak for itself.

It is the best time of the year to serve it with accompaniments such as couscous and spinach.