What's wrong with these meals?
Posted by kathryn in A Balanced Diet
I’m starting today with a question for you. Below is a fairly standard selection of the ready meals available in your local supermarket. Despite being labelled Healthy Choice and Lean Cuisine, what’s wrong with all these meals?
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave them in the comments below.
:Update: I’ve posted my follow up article: why I hate ready meals.
Reminder
Tommorrow is Q & A Thursday – a weekly burst of blogging, where you get to dictate the subject matter. Q & A Thursday is all about simple, practical and sensible answers to food, diet and health dilemmas sent in by readers.
If you have a question you’d like answered, then either leave a comment or send me an email. For more information you can take a look at the Q & A Thursday archives.
03 October, 2007
Comments
Here goes (feel like I am trying for a quiz show, or exam):
There is no regulation of what can be described as ‘Healthy’ or ‘Lean’ for a start. From personal experience (sometimes I can be hungry and lazy!) they do not contain very many vegetables but do contain very long ingredients lists with a lot of additives keeping the sauces emulsified and shiny. They also taste very sweet, so I guess they probably contain a large amout of sugar.
They are all using white grains instead of wholegrains?
They’re all too damned small for a proper meal! (grin)
More seriously, even without actually researching, I’m going to guess that all of them play silly buggers with their labelling to hide their faults and play up their advantages. Processed to within an inch of their lives, most of the “general goodness” like fibre and a lot of nutrients will have been leached out, and then (if you’re lucky) stuffed back in so you’re less likely to suffer from scurvy.
Oh, and they cost a fricking fortune, and taste about as good as the packaging slathered in tomato sauce.
Am I close?
my main issue with these kinds of meals is that they detach you so much from the process of choosing and preparing food for yourself. having something completely ‘ready made’ and packaged seems a bit wrong to me. while i am by no means a saint and i eat packaged and processed foods almost every day, i really do enjoy making real food and meals whenever i can. not knowing exactly what’s going into them means there’s more likely to be added preservatives, salt, fat, etc that you don’t know about.
I suspect that they all contain too many carbs, especially refined carbs. I see white on those packages.
not enough veg, too much salt and sugar, overpriced (o:
Wonderful, these are all excellent, excellent answers. I’ll post more thoughts tomorrow.
From experience they are low in vegetables, low in fibre, high in salt and sugar – yet all have nutrient claims.
I’d have to be able to hold them in my hands to read the labels in order to be sure, but these would be my expectations of products like these.
Thanks to all for your brilliant answers. I’ve posted a follow up about my issues with ready-meals here.
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