A serving of Jamie Oliver's Italian Pan-Seared Tuna recipe contains more than three times the recommended daily dose of salt. Photograph: Ian West/PA
Supermarket ready meals are often healthier than TV chefs' recipes, according to a study published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
The paper, 'Nutritional content of supermarket ready meals and recipes by television chefs in the United Kingdom: a cross sectional study', by Simon Howard, Jean Adams and Martin White, compared nutrient contents of supermarkets' own-brand ready meals with recipes from four TV chefs.
The celebrity chefs' recipes were found to be more unhealthy in terms of energy, fat and fibre content. Their recipes all have higher fat, saturated fat and calorie contents per serving than the supermarket ready meals. They also tend to have less fibre per serving than the microwaveable offerings of Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's.
Sarah Boseley has more on the story here, where she writes:
White and colleagues think the traffic light warning scheme should now be applied to recipes from TV chefs, who could also put nutritional values on screen, on websites and in cookery books
The BMJ study used data on 100 ready meals from Asda, Sainsbury's and Tesco as well as 100 recipes taken from Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food and his 30 Minute Meals, Nigella Lawson's Kitchen, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday and Lorraine Pascale's Baking Made Easy.
According to the paper, neither set of meals met national or international recommendations for a balanced diet, but the chefs' recipes would be more likely to receive the red "traffic light" warning symbols used under Food Standards Agency criteria.
In aggregate terms, the chefs' recipes contained a median of 605 kcals per portion - 22% more than the ready meals studied. Sugar content was also 22% higher than in ready meals, while the recipes' fat and saturated fat content were shown to be 58% and 35% higher respectively.
The chefs' meals typically contained only half (51%) the fibre of the supermarket options, but one redeeming feature was their sodium content, which was found to be 18% lower than that of the ready meals.
Of all the meals and recipes studied, Lorraine Pascale's recipes scored the worst, with the highest calorie and saturated fat contents and the highest salt content of all the chefs' recipes. Pascale's recipes, taken from her book Baking Made Easy, fared better for fibre, where they were shown to have the third highest content per serving.
The NHS recommends that adults should not eat more than 6g of salt per day, but a single serving of Jamie's Italian Pan-Seared Tuna would put you more than three times over the limit.
A summary of the median amounts of selected nutrients is shown below, at both an aggregate and broken down level. Click the link beneath the tables to access the full data-set, including details of all 200 recipes and meals that were used in the study.
Data summary
|
Category |
Energy (kcal) |
Protein (g) |
Carb (g) |
Sugar (g) |
Sodium (mg) |
Fat (g) |
Sat fat (g) |
Fibre (g) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recipes | 605 | 37.5 | 49.5 | 8.3 | 658 | 27.1 | 9.2 | 3.3 |
| Ready meals | 494 | 27.9 | 51.1 | 6.8 | 800 | 17.2 | 6.8 | 6.5 |
|
Name |
Serving size |
kcal per serving |
Salt per serving (g) |
Sat Fat per serving (g) |
Fibre per serving (g) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sainsbury's | 450 | 496 | 0.8 | 8 | 8.3 |
| Tesco | 425 | 481 | 0.9 | 7.4 | 6.4 |
| Lorraine | 443 | 863 | 2.9 | 23.8 | 5.9 |
| Asda | 400 | 487 | 0.8 | 4.9 | 5.6 |
| Jamie 30 min meals | 547.5 | 636 | 2.2 | 11.6 | 4.7 |
| Hugh | 352.25 | 548 | 1.1 | 11.2 | 2.9 |
| Jamie Ministry of Food | 676.5 | 589 | 1 | 5.1 | 2.9 |
| Nigella | 401.5 | 573 | 2 | 8.6 | 2.6 |
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