We know that usually fresh is best … but sometimes you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to cook or want something easy to take to work for lunch. Frozen meals are convenient and popular (have you looked in the freezer section lately?!). More and more frozen meals are claiming to be healthy which is great in theory, but now you’ve had a sleeve, how do you choose?
There are a few things after a sleeve that you need to look for. The most important being:
- Serving size
- Ingredients
- Nutrition
Serving Size
After a sleeve, you can generally eat about 1 cup of food. This equates to around 200g for a serve. If you look at the frozen meal section, you’ll notice that most are much bigger than this with the average being around 300-400g (or more!) per serve. In fact, I only found a few that were in the 200g-300g range and these tended to be the kids meals.
Quick tip: Choose a meal with 300g or less serve size.
Quick tip: Eat the protein and vegies first so you’re getting the best possible bang for your buck, especially if you can’t finish the portion.
Ingredients
Many frozen meals are heavy on the pasta, rice and noodles which makes them cheaper to manufacture. However, after a sleeve, you need to focus on protein and vegies, which can make it difficult to choose a healthy frozen meal.
Meals based on vegies and protein tend to be lower in calories and higher in vitamins and minerals as well as fibre (which helps fill you up). Skip frozen dinners with cream sauces, gravies, or fried foods.
Quick tip: When reading the label, look for those frozen meals that are based on vegies and protein (like fish, meat, chicken or lentils/beans), rather than carbohydrates if you can.
Quick tip: Check the front for the number of serves of vegies – the higher the better! The highest I found was 3.
Quick tip: Use wholegrains rather than more processed carbohydrates (the fibre will be higher and they’ll usually claim wholegrains on the front of the pack).
Nutrition
There’s no getting around it, to find a healthy option here you’ll need to read the Nutrition Information Panel on the back of the pack. When I compared the frozen meals, I used the ‘per 100g’ so we were comparing apples with apples as all the serve sizes were different. I came up with the following criteria when comparing the 95 frozen meals I looked at. Each criteria was representative of a cut off of the best 10-25% of the group as well as some criteria commonly used for recipe analysis. Bear in mind that some healthy meals will meet some, but not all, of these recommendations and obviously varieties change over time.
- Less than 400kJ per 100g
- More than 5g protein per 100g
- Less than 1.5g saturated fat per 100g
- More than 1.5g fibre per 100g
- Less than 120mg of sodium per 100g (or as close as possible)
If you want to see the whole list of the products I compared, click here to download the Excel Doc.
I’ve pulled out my best of the best for our community members here, but if you’d like to download a handy wallet guide for choosing frozen meals to stick in your handbag, pop your email in below and I’ll send it to you!
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