Recipes by prominent TV chefs aren’t as healthy as supermarket ready meals, according to researchers from the University of Newcastle.
Meals by Jamie Oliver, Lorraine Pascale, Nigella Lawson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were compared to those from Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
The meals in the TV chefs’ cookbooks contained more calories, fat, saturated fat and sugar, although they did contain less salt.
A spokeswoman for Lorraine Pascale said: “Some of the recipes in Lorraine's book are healthy, some not quite so much so.”
A spokesman for Jamie Oliver said: “We welcome any research which raises debate on these issues.
“We would regard the key issue to be food education so that people are aware of which foods are for every day and which are treats to be enjoyed occasionally.”
Prof Martin White, from the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University said: “We're not bashing TV chefs, among them are chefs that have done a huge amount for healthy eating and tackling obesity.”
Maybe the chefs have hidden behind their spokespeople because they’ve been rumbled, not because of the embarrassment caused by having meals that are unhealthy when compared to supermarket ready meals, but because they secretly knew their meals were unhealthy and that they knew the more people who bought their books the fatter they’d get and the richer the chefs would get.
Then the chefs all became obesity and healthy eating campaigners, not out of guilt but because they knew once those who were overweight lost a few pounds they could then go out and buy the chefs cookbooks and put that weight back on making the chefs richer still, it’s a really vicious and ingenious cycle, or their just embarrassed.
Maybe now we might see a reduction in the number of TV chefs who seem to populate every channel all of the time, I’m not a big fan of cooking shows all they do is make me hungry, then they end and you realise I have none of the ingredients to make what they did, even if I did I’d probably set fire to the kitchen attempting it.
So I’ll just eat this quick and easy to prepare supermarket ‘junk’ food and spend the evening full of guilt and self-loathing, but as this study has shown I don’t have to anymore I can sit there with my supermarket ready meal while watching a TV chef and think, you’re just trying to fatten me up so you can pay for a holiday.
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