Are Ready-made Meals Unhealthy? A Nutritionist's Guide to Choosing Convenience Foods
Ready-made meals have a slightly unfortunate reputation. For some people, opening a packaged meal for dinner feels like admitting defeat, particularly when social media is full of perfectly organised fridges, Sunday meal-prep sessions and beautifully cooked dinners.
But convenience food isn't automatically unhealthy. And cooking every meal from scratch isn't a requirement for eating well.
In fact, convenience can be an incredibly useful part of feeding yourself and your family.
Why convenience matters
Time, energy, cooking skills, cost and access to food all influence what we eat. Research into food environments identifies convenience as an important driver of food choice, which means telling people simply to “cook everything from scratch” isn't particularly useful nutrition advice.
Sometimes a ready-made meal isn't competing with a homemade dinner. It's competing with takeaway, skipping the meal altogether, or standing in front of the fridge eating random ingredients because you're exhausted.
Context matters.
So, are ready meals healthy?
There isn't one nutritional profile that describes every ready-made meal. Products can differ considerably in their ingredients and nutritional composition. A recent Australian study examining 777 ready-made meals found nutrition and health claims were widespread, which is another good reason not to judge a meal purely by the claims splashed across the front of its packaging.
Instead, turn the packet around. Most packaged foods in Australia have a Nutrition Information Panel showing energy, protein, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrate, sugars and sodium per serve and per 100 grams. Food Standards Australia New Zealand
What should I look for?
Rather than searching for the mythical “perfect” ready meal, I look at the meal as a whole. Does it contain some vegetables? Is there a useful source of protein? Will it actually satisfy me? How does its sodium compare with similar products?
Sodium is particularly useful to compare because the amount can vary substantially between packaged foods. Food Standards Australia New Zealand recommends using the Nutrition Information Panel to compare the sodium concentration of similar foods. Australian and New Zealand governments recommend adults consume around 2,000 mg sodium per day, equivalent to roughly 5 g of salt. Food Standards Australia New Zealand
That also doesn't mean one higher-sodium meal has somehow ruined your diet. We're looking at patterns, not individual dinners.
Make convenience work harder
One of my favourite approaches is to use a convenience food as the starting point, rather than expecting it to provide everything. A frozen meal might get a handful of frozen vegetables added. Soup might get some beans and wholegrain toast. A supermarket curry could be served with extra vegetables. A simple pasta meal might get spinach stirred through it.
You've still got the convenience, but you've made the meal work a little harder nutritionally.
What about processed food?
“Processed” isn't synonymous with “bad”. Freezing, canning, cooking and pasteurising are all forms of food processing. Australian dietary guidance focuses on eating a variety of foods from the five food groups while limiting foods high in saturated fat, added salt and added sugars. Eat For Health That's a much more useful framework than trying to classify every packet in your kitchen as good or bad.
The bottom line
If you enjoy cooking from scratch, fantastic. I literally run a cooking school, I'm certainly not going to discourage you! But cooking confidence also means knowing when not to cook everything from scratch. A ready meal can be practical. Frozen vegetables can be practical. Tinned beans can be practical. Pre-cut ingredients can be practical. Nutrition needs to work on busy Tuesdays as well as beautifully organised Sundays.
And sometimes the most nutritious choice available to you is simply the meal you're actually going to eat.