Pad Thai is not a health food, but it is also not the deep-fried disaster its reputation sometimes suggests — the honest answer sits in the middle and depends almost entirely on how the sauce is built and how much of it you eat. The dish is a stir-fried rice noodle plate originating in Thailand, usually containing rice noodles, eggs, tofu or meat, peanuts, and a tamarind-based sauce, and it gets evaluated for calorie and sodium levels precisely because those two levers move a lot depending on the kitchen. One cup of shrimp Pad Thai, at 200 g, carries 698 mg of sodium, which is 30% of the 2,300 mg Daily Value the FDA uses on U.S. labels. That single number tells you most of what you need to know: a normal restaurant portion, which is closer to two or three cups than one, can land you at or past a full day's sodium before you have ordered a drink.
Where the dish goes wrong is rarely the noodles themselves. Rice noodles are mostly starch and water, low in fat, naturally gluten-free, and fairly neutral. The damage comes from three places: the tamarind sauce, which is usually cut with fish sauce and sometimes soy sauce; the cooking oil, which a wok absorbs generously; and the