Chanda ranga: Ready Diet Meals

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Ready Diet Meals

Recent research by Mintel showed that Britons spent more than £2 billion on ready meals in the past year - more than anyone else in Europe.
Almost a quarter of us eat a ready meal more than once a week, a figure that's set to rise thanks to the fact that manufacturers are increasingly producing so-called "healthy option" versions of their traditional meals. But what is eating so much processed food doing to our bodies?
FEMAIL challenged TV documentary maker Nicky Taylor, 41, a divorced mother-of-three from Kidderminster, to spend a month eating only microwave meals. Here, Nicky reports on her experience...
Cooking is one of my great loves. I look forward to Saturdays, when I sit down and plan my family's menu for the week ahead, and then spend the afternoon trawling around the supermarket getting all the ingredients.
At home, absolutely everything is cooked from scratch, using fresh often organic ingredients.
I'm very organised when it comes to our meals and start every week with a homemade spaghetti bolognese in the freezer, a chicken and vegetable pie in the fridge, and a chicken carcass in a pan ready to be made into a wholesome soup.
So you can imagine my apprehension when I was asked to spend a month eating only microwave meals.
I've always seen ready meals as being full of artificial ingredients, preservatives and fat, lacking in taste and overpriced. I can honestly say I've never even thought of buying a ready meal until now - let alone actually tasted one.
My instructions are that every single bit of food that passes my lips over the next 30 days must be pre-prepared, bought from a supermarket and microwaved. In a bid to see if these meals contain any nutrients at all, I'm also to cut out all fresh juices and fruit. So here goes...

Ready Diet Meals