“Supermarket Ready Meals Contain Double as Much Sugar as a Can of Coca-Cola”

October 26 2015 by in Junk food

Thinking about getting a supermarket ready meal for lunch? You might as well buy two cans of Coca-Cola instead. They contain approximately the same amount of sugar!

The Telegraph: Supermarket ready meals contain double as much sugar as a can of Coca-Cola

Action on Sugar teamed up with The Telegraph in an investigation and found that most of the popular supermarket ready meals contain a frighteningly large amount of sugar. As Graham MacGregor, Action on Sugar’s chairman and a professor of cardiovascular medicine, put it:

Fifty grammes of sugar in any ready meal is far too much. The amount they are stuffing in is ridiculous. You wonder who on earth has the gall to put so much sugar in.

A dish sold by Sainsbury’s had a total amount of 61.2 g of sugar – which is equivalent to almost 13 teaspoons of sugar. The dish weighs 400 g, which means that almost one-sixth of the dish’s weight consists of sugar.

Still interested in that ready meal? Our suggestion is making your own lunch boxes filled with good, healthy food.

2 comments

1
Apicius
October 26 2015 2
A trick used by restaurants is adding sugar to the vegetables side dishes. So, if you think the sautéed in butter frenched string beans, julienned bell pepper and creamed spinach was a perfect addition to your ribeye steak...think again! Chefs often add teaspoons of sugar to vegetables, making them very palatable. The celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain confesses about his industry's horrible practice in his famous books, like Kitchen Confidential and Nasty Bits.
2
chris c
October 27 2015
"Ah but it's low fat!"

I sometimes used to buy "ready meals" so I could deconstruct them and make them out of Real Food. Something my mother bought once took 45 minutes in the oven, after it had reached operating temperature, so not very "ready" at all. Mostly they are full of wheat and Omega 6 alongside the sugar, plus things that aren't actually food at all.

Tonight I shall probably fry a giant mushroom and a slice of lamb's liver in olive oil, grill some bacon and boil the last of my runner beans. Takes less time to cook than it takes to type this.

2 comments

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