Popular TV chefs are serving up meals that are less nutritious than ready meals in supermarkets, it was claimed today.
Best-selling cookbooks contain recipes high in salt and saturated fat, according to a study in the British Medical Journal.
Researchers said most supermarket ready meals also failed to comply with healthy eating guidelines – but they were still better than celebrity recipes.
Researchers at Newcastle University and NHS Tees compared 100 recipes from five best-selling cookery books with 100 own brand ready meals from three leading supermarkets.
They concluded that none of the meals complied with World Health Organisation guidelines for avoiding diet-related diseases.
But celebrity recipes contained more energy, protein, fat and saturated fat and less fibre than ready meals.
Just 4% of ready meals met WHO guidelines.
Researcher Professor Martin White calls for public health experts to "collaborate" with television chefs to improve the quality of their food.
He says: "This study shows that neither recipes created by popular television chefs nor ready meals produced by three leading UK supermarket chains meet national or international nutritional standards for a balanced diet.
"The recipes seemed to be less healthy than the ready meals on several metrics."
* A second study from Oxford University says speed-bumps can help diagnose appendicitis.
Researchers say patients with the condition will generally complain that bumps aggravate their illness when they are being taken to hospital.
* And as part of its quirky Christmas collection, the journal reports a study of reindeer noses.
Researchers in Norway and the Netherlands used hand-held video microscopes to compare human and reindeer noses.
They found that reindeer noses have a high density of blood vessels and a "super-rich" concentration of red blood cells, which help them survive in low temperatures – and, the researchers say, help to explain the legend of Rudolf the Reindeer’s red nose.
BMJ 18 December 2012
Leave a Reply