Exposed: Myth That Convenience Food is Unhealthy

For devotees of Delia Smith, this may come as a surprise.

Home-cooked food isn’t necessarily healthy food and the supermarket- bought packaged version may be better for you.

The doyenne of food writers has championed the virtues of home- prepared meals for decades. But food experts said yesterday that for many families leading busy lives, there was too little time for cooking, even of simple dishes, and the prejudice against convenience foods risked a backlash against healthy eating.

In a briefing for journalists organised by the Science Media Centre, experts in nutrition pleaded for greater tolerance of the ready meal as a necessary constituent of the modern diet. "Convenience foods are a fact of 21st century living and fill a need in today’s hectic and demanding lifestyles. They help to create time," said Becky Laing, a scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Human Nutrition Unit. The average amount of time spent preparing food has slipped to 20 minutes a day compared with two hours a day in 1980, according to a Department of Health report.

In two-thirds of families both parents now work outside the home, up from half in 1980, and working hours have lengthened and journey times increased.

Ms Laing said: "As a nutritionist I know that some convenience foods are healthy. But as a mother I feel bombarded with messages to do home cooking for my family. When Nigella Lawson says put cream in a dish, that is bumping up the fat and the calories. I do use her recipes but I am always substituting ingredients for lower-calorie and lower-fat versions. I don’t mind experimenting but people who have less money or less time may be less willing."

Though some convenience foods were rightly termed junk food because they were high in fat, sugar and salt, many others were not. Frozen fruits and vegetables were the perfect example of a healthy convenience food – quick from the freezer, readily available and often higher in nutrients than fresh produce which had been stored.

It was the ingredients that determined whether a meal was healthy or unhealthy, not whether it was bought from a supermarket or prepared at home. Examples of shop-bought 400g servings of lasagne, ranged from 410 to 559 calories, from 14 to 29.6g of fat and from 1.7 to 2.5g of salt.

But there was equal variability in the homemade version, Ms Laing said. "The calorie and fat content will differ whether we use beef or lamb mince, whether we drain off excess fat and how much pasta we use in proportion to the meat sauce. If you make the sauce with whole milk and throw in some extra cheese you instantly bump up the saturated fat content."

Portion sizes also varied widely among shop-bought meals, while homemade dishes could be more easily tailored to individuals’ needs. But there was a danger here, too, Ms Laing said. "How many of us have cooked up a dish that would seem sufficient to feed the 5,000 but then it gets eaten because it’s there?"

The fruit smoothie, low-fat yoghurt and quick-cook pasta or rice were examples of convenience foods that could be part of a healthy meal – healthier even than one of Nigella’s cream and cheese-laden recipes.

Ms Laing said: "Convenience foods come in all shapes and sizes. If we continue to press the message that it is impossible to eat healthily while using convenience foods then we simply make healthy eating unattainable. Instead, we need to press manufacturers to develop more healthy but convenient options – and we need to encourage people to read the labels and look at what they buy."

Gill Fine, from the Food Standards Agency, said many celebrity chef recipes put taste ahead of health. "It would be quite a good idea for some celebrity chefs to provide the nutritional background of their recipes as well the ingredients," she said.

Meanwhile, scientists at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich are working on the formulation of a food that would reduce the appetite of those who ate it. Using natural plant lipids, obtained from leaves and also from oats, they are developing a product that would slow the absorption of fat from the intestine, prolonging satisfaction after a meal and postponing the return of hunger.