Appetite grows for ordering meals in

Hungry Americans are not going near the stove or off the couch.

The number of phone and internet orders for restaurants surged 18 percent last year, to 1.9 billion, according to new data released by research firm NPD Group.

Dinner is the meal most often ordered online, and families are the heaviest users of digital ordering, the report finds. Half of the digital orders come at dinnertime, while 35 percent includes parties with kids.

People under 35 and those with higher household incomes are among above-average users of digital ordering through apps like Seamless and Grubhub.

Experts say ordering in can be bad for your diet as well as your pocketbook.

Restaurant food is the No. 1 thing that Americans spend their money on, according to the Principal Financial Group’s annual Financial Well Being Index, which was released in December.

The study found Americans spent 24 percent of their budgets on restaurant food, up 22 percent from two years earlier, versus 20 percent on groceries and 18 percent on entertainment.

All this eating out adds up. For lunch alone, Americans spend an average of $53 a week, or $2,746 a year.

Another reason driving the surge in takeout meals: People are eating alone and it’s not always economical or easy to cook for one person. Single-person households jumped to 34.2 million in 2014 from 26.6 million in 1999, according to the US Census Bureau.

The majority of meals (57 percent) are eaten by solo diners, according to previous research by NPD. Snacks have the highest percentage of lone diners (72 percent) followed by breakfast (61 percent) and lunch (55 percent).

Although one-third of Americans spent dinnertime alone, half of families still choose to eat dinner with each other five times a week.