Here’s something that may surprise you: a Big Mac meal from McDonald’s might be better for your body than a nice meal at a fancy restaurant.

That’s the conclusion some scientists have come to in a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which indicates that the common perception that fast food is the worst of the worst when it comes to your health is not necessarily the case, according to a TIME report.

The study’s findings suggest that people may be focusing too heavily on fast food, and while it’s fine to be wary of getting a supersize meal at your local drive-thru, you may be underestimating just how bad for you the food is ata full-service restaurant. And it means that scientists may need to do more research, as the nutritional details on the menus of non-chain restaurants are often hard to come by, so there’s a lot researchers don’t know.

But they learned some interesting things with this study, which used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2003 and 2010, where 19,000 adults self-reported on what they ate for two days. The researchers found that, not surprisingly, in both cases of non-chain restaurants and fast food joints, people ate more calories, fat, and sodium than if they prepared food at home. And they were actually about the same when it came to calories per day, with an extra 190 calories per day for fast food compared to 187 for sit-in restaurants, and about 10 grams of fat extra for both.

But there was a huge difference between the two when it came to sodium and cholesterol. Full-service restaurants resulted in consumers getting an extra 58 mg of cholesterol per day — for fast food, it was just 10 mg. And for sodium fast food increased the intake by 297 mg, but restaurants were far worse at 412 mg.