Are Microwaveable Packaged Meals Really That Bad For You?

[JasonRox]

If you had a case, you wouldn't have to imbue your argument with emotion and derision to make your point.

But since you have demanded facts, then you'll have to supply facts yourself.

Since no facts on both sides, everything discussed so far is meaningless...

 

[JasonRox]

Oh, that won't be a problem at all. You're just the one in charge of cooking and cleaning.

Most girls want a take charge kind of guy...

 

[maverick_starstrider]

If you had a case, you wouldn't have to imbue your argument with emotion and derision to make your point.

But since you have demanded facts, then you'll have to supply facts yourself.

I'm pretty sure the burden of proof doesn't lie with the skeptic. Unless you can actually demonstrate that something is harmful which is not obviously so (to my knowledge, no one has dropped dead from those funnily named additives in microwaveable dinners) then I'm going to assume it's not. The OP asked a question, you responded in the negative without a scrap of justification, I'm not responding in the positive merely commenting that people who respond in the negative never seem to have justification. Besides, if you COULD actually demonstrate that these things were harmful you'd have a hell of a lawsuit you could launch against michelenas or slimfast. As for commenting on my humour and derision (if you can call it that) they've ALWAYS had a place in discourse.

 

[GeorginaS]

I tend to eat "things" rather than actual meals - a banana for breakfast, a can of peas for dinner. Whatever is available. I eat more or less like a raccoon.

That's what I do! I eat "things". I didn't quite have the proper way to describe it. And most of it is eaten while standing in the kitchen. I tend to keep a hunk of some kind of meat I've cooked in the fridge so I can lop off a hunk for my protein fix. I have a bag of cheese chunks in the fridge so I can grab a piece of that. Later, I'll munch on a bowl of snap peas while reading or being on the computer. It's all really a piece of this and bit of that. I do my best to keep good stuff around that's easily grabbed to munch on. I snack on sugar-free popsicles.

It's yoghurt with hemp hearts for breakfast, tea for lunch, and "things" throughout the evening.

There's an establishment near here called The Dinner Factory where you go and they have stations at which there are all the prepared ingredients to assemble various recipes that they supply. It's all fresh ingredients but pre-chopped/sliced/diced and set out. They have all sorts of varied (the recipes change monthly) and interesting recipes that sometimes have ingredients you'd have to purchase a whole bunch of just to get a teaspoon of for some recipe. So it's actually cost-effective to go to there because they have the item in bulk and you only use as much as you need. Plus, it's super quick to assemble real meals.

So you assemble your choice of fresh meals, and bring them home, and refrigerate or freeze them. I have a bunch of those in my freezer. I have a bunch of a lot of meals in my freezer. (Now that I have lovely large-size freezer.) I rarely eat a thing out of there. I have this fantastic bison stew in there waiting to sit in a slow cooker for the day. Some day. I'll do it. And then, once it's cooked, if I don't bring it to work and feed it to everyone there for lunch, it'll likely go bad in my fridge. I don't know why I even bother trying to make meals when I'm single.

Now, when I live with someone, it's a whole other thing. I cook a meal from fresh ingredients every evening. But, right now, it's MiH's raccoon's diet.

Where were we?

 

[Evo]

That's what I do! I eat "things". I didn't quite have the proper way to describe it. And most of it is eaten while standing in the kitchen. I tend to keep a hunk of some kind of meat I've cooked in the fridge so I can lop off a hunk for my protein fix. I have a bag of cheese chunks in the fridge so I can grab a piece of that. Later, I'll munch on a bowl of snap peas while reading or being on the computer. It's all really a piece of this and bit of that. I do my best to keep good stuff around that's easily grabbed to munch on. I snack on sugar-free popsicles.

It's yoghurt with hemp hearts for breakfast, tea for lunch, and "things" throughout the evening.

There's an establishment near here called The Dinner Factory where you go and they have stations at which there are all the prepared ingredients to assemble various recipes that they supply. It's all fresh ingredients but pre-chopped/sliced/diced and set out. They have all sorts of varied (the recipes change monthly) and interesting recipes that sometimes have ingredients you'd have to purchase a whole bunch of just to get a teaspoon of for some recipe. So it's actually cost-effective to go to there because they have the item in bulk and you only use as much as you need. Plus, it's super quick to assemble real meals.

So you assemble your choice of fresh meals, and bring them home, and refrigerate or freeze them. I have a bunch of those in my freezer. I have a bunch of a lot of meals in my freezer. (Now that I have lovely large-size freezer.) I rarely eat a thing out of there. I have this fantastic bison stew in there waiting to sit in a slow cooker for the day. Some day. I'll do it. And then, once it's cooked, if I don't bring it to work and feed it to everyone there for lunch, it'll likely go bad in my fridge. I don't know why I even bother trying to make meals when I'm single.

Now, when I live with someone, it's a whole other thing. I cook a meal from fresh ingredients every evening. But, right now, it's MiH's raccoon's diet.

Where were we?

Buwahahaha! Oh Georgina, you're me!

You, me & MIH should get together.

 

[Pythagorean]

I'm eating packaged microwave meals every day. My girlfriend cooked up large yields of like five different dishes and froze them all for me so that I wouldn't eat McDonald's and HoHos while she was gone.

 

[DaveC426913]

The OP asked a question, you responded in the negative without a scrap of justification

Actually, no I didn't. You'll see that I have not taken sides in the argument.

My only issue is with your claims and demand for facts. You accused others of using their own personal mythos as a basis for their arguments, then went on and did the exact same thing.

 

[JasonRox]

I'm pretty sure the burden of proof doesn't lie with the skeptic. Unless you can actually demonstrate that something is harmful which is not obviously so (to my knowledge, no one has dropped dead from those funnily named additives in microwaveable dinners) then I'm going to assume it's not. The OP asked a question, you responded in the negative without a scrap of justification, I'm not responding in the positive merely commenting that people who respond in the negative never seem to have justification. Besides, if you COULD actually demonstrate that these things were harmful you'd have a hell of a lawsuit you could launch against michelenas or slimfast. As for commenting on my humour and derision (if you can call it that) they've ALWAYS had a place in discourse.

LOL

So death or no death determines whether it's harmful?

LOL

 

[Moonbear]

Furthermore, your comment about people needing to change their lifestyle to lose weight is just downright silly. People lose weight by eating low fat microwaveable dinners and diet shakes ALL THE TIME.

And then as soon as they stop eating those, because they haven't actually changed their lifestyle habits, just temporarily ate low calorie meals, they gain the weight right back. I do love the ingenuity of the advertising though...people will pay exhorbitant amounts of money just to get meals with less food in them than they usually eat. And, if they need to buy meals portioned by someone else in order to lose weight, that IS a change in lifestyle...clearly their prior lifestyle was to eat too much.

P.S. when your mother told you that eating your brussel sprouts would make you grow up to be big and strong, you do realize she was lying.

My mother never told me that. She served brussels sprouts ONCE when I was a kid. We always had a wide variety of fruits and vegetables (fresh during the summer, frozen or canned from the garden in winter). I'm not sure what your point is with this statement. You seem to have some objection to cooking or eating fresh foods, but other than ranting about eating too much of grandma's pasta, which is not something my grandparents ever served to me and isn't an argument for anything, I'm not at all sure what your objection is. Nobody is arguing that a steady diet of pasta is a healthy diet either.

You want some references, here have a review article for starters.

Food Addit Contam. 2004 Feb;21(2):93-124.
Chemical interactions between additives in foodstuffs: a review.
Scotter MJ, Castle L.

This paper critically reviews the key literature on food additive-additive chemical interactions published over the last 30 years together with appropriate relevant information on food additive-food component interactions. Five main classes of food additive are included, reflecting the research effort to date: the sulfur (IV) species of preservatives, synthetic food colouring materials, nitrate and nitrite, ascorbic acid, and sorbic acid. Within each class, aspects of the chemistry (reactivity), functionality, stability, use and reactions with other specific food additives are reviewed. Where appropriate, the importance of interactions of food additives with other components of food (i.e. nutrients and non-nutrients) has been assessed and certain aspects of toxicology included. The practical outcome of this review is presented as a set of recommendations for future research in this area. The use of the data in this review is proposed as a training set to develop the framework into a diagnostic tool. This might be used ultimately for the development of a multilevel framework, operating systematically, to understand the important parameters that dictate the outcome of additive interactions.

PMID: 14754633 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

I suggest particular attention be paid to the section of that article talking about the interactions of common preservatives with micronutrients in foods to reduce the bioavailability of those nutrients. Being a review article, there's a plethora of further references at the end that you can follow.

 

[Born2bwire]

Microwave meals can be bad for you? Perish the thought. I eat one of these four times a day to keep my girlish figure: http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0744/

 

[Math Is Hard]

Microwave meals can be bad for you? Perish the thought. I eat one of these four times a day to keep my girlish figure: http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0744/

That's a lot of breakfast! If I am going to go crazy and take in 1030 calories in one meal, I'm sure not going to do it with a frozen dinner. It better be the tastiest freakin' food I ever put in my mouth.

 

[Moonbear]

That's a lot of breakfast! If I am going to go crazy and take in 1030 calories in one meal, I'm sure not going to do it with a frozen dinner. It better be the tastiest freakin' food I ever put in my mouth.

I'm still trying to figure out of that's a real product, or a spoof. 231% of the RDA for cholesterol?!

Maybe it's already off the market (it didn't even look edible) or has been reformulated...here's what was available on another site that provides nutrition labels
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-swanson-hungry-man-hearty-breakfast-i115915

More calories, but less cholesterol (only 85% of the RDA now ).

I'm going to have to check out the freezer section now and see if these things really exist. It looked ATROCIOUS from the photos. And to dare label it as a single serving?

 

[turbo]

Interesting article:

Exposure to non-nutritional food additives during the critical development window has been implicated in the induction and severity of behavioral disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although the use of single food additives at their regulated concentrations is believed to be relatively safe in terms of neuronal development, their combined effects remain unclear. We therefore examined the neurotoxic effects of four common food additives in combinations of two (Brilliant Blue and L-glutamic acid, Quinoline Yellow and aspartame) to assess potential interactions. Mouse NB2a neuroblastoma cells were induced to differentiate and grow neurites in the presence of additives. After 24 h, cells were fixed and stained and neurite length measured by light microscopy with computerized image analysis. Neurotoxicity was measured as an inhibition of neurite outgrowth. Two independent models were used to analyze combination effects: effect additivity and dose additivity. Significant synergy was observed between combinations of Brilliant Blue with L-glutamic acid, and Quinoline Yellow with aspartame, in both models. Involvement of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors in food additive-induced neurite inhibition was assessed with a NMDA antagonist, CNS-1102. L-glutamic acid- and aspartame induced neurotoxicity was reduced in the presence of CNS-1102; however, the antagonist did not prevent food color-induced neurotoxicity. Theoretical exposure to additives was calculated based on analysis of content in foodstuff, and estimated percentage absorption from the gut. Inhibition of neurite outgrowth was found at concentrations of additives theoretically achievable in plasma by ingestion of a typical snack and drink. In addition, Trypan Blue dye exclusion was used to evaluate the cellular toxicity of food additives on cell viability of NB2a cells; both combinations had a straightforward additive effect on cytotoxicity. These data have implications for the cellular effects of common chemical entities ingested individually and in combination.

This was a very simple in-vitro study that was designed to explore the possibility of synergistic toxicity in a very limited number of non-nutritional food additives. There are prepared foods with many, many more chemicals in them than one or two, so the results of this study should be sobering.

http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/90/1/178

 

[mgb_phys]

Exposure to non-nutritional food additives during the critical development window has been implicated in the induction and severity of behavioral disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Anyone who grew up in the 70s with Sunny Delight, lead in gas, lead paint, and eating sweets that were 99% tartrazine is probably immune to anything short of a nuclear strike.

 

[Dadface]

I have yet to eat a shop bought microwave meal which is as tasty as the home cooked version.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I'm going to have to check out the freezer section now and see if these things really exist. It looked ATROCIOUS from the photos. And to dare label it as a single serving?

Yes the Hungry Man frozen meals actually exist. I see them all the time in the market and even ate a few when I was a teenager. They're not even very tasty from what I remember.
http://www.hungry-man.com/

 

[Born2bwire]

Yes the Hungry Man frozen meals actually exist. I see them all the time in the market and even ate a few when I was a teenager. They're not even very tasty from what I remember.
http://www.hungry-man.com/

I believe they have discontinued their breakfast line and have toned back some of the horrific nutritional facts. Despite this, a single meal alone still provides a nearly complete day's worth of fat and sodium. Another example: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-swanson-hungry-man-xxl-dinner-i115944 Although I read on another website, a Men's Health article on the saltiest foods in the US (guess which one was mentioned for frozen dinner) that the turkey dinner was labeled as two servings.

 

[Moonbear]

At least they call it XXL, which is the size you'll be if you eat those regularly! While I was looking up articles related to this topic earlier, one thing I came across were a couple of studies reporting on excess salt intake as a risk factor for stomach cancer. The ones I saw were more epidemiological studies, so not definitive, and I didn't take time to look further. But, considering how much sodium is in a lot of these prepackaged meals, I may have to take a deeper look if there's more to the hypothesis. I previously hadn't considered sodium intake to be too much of an issue unless someone was already predisposed to high blood pressure.

 

[JasonRox]

At least they call it XXL, which is the size you'll be if you eat those regularly! While I was looking up articles related to this topic earlier, one thing I came across were a couple of studies reporting on excess salt intake as a risk factor for stomach cancer. The ones I saw were more epidemiological studies, so not definitive, and I didn't take time to look further. But, considering how much sodium is in a lot of these prepackaged meals, I may have to take a deeper look if there's more to the hypothesis. I previously hadn't considered sodium intake to be too much of an issue unless someone was already predisposed to high blood pressure.

Salt is everywhere. I ate chili in a can once and then read the label... it's loaded with salt.

Today, I made my own chili with virtually no salt added. Basically all the salt came from the Stewed Tomatoes in a can. For some reason, I don't eat much in a can. Even the beans I prepared myself... as opposed to getting it from a can. I guess next time I will prepare my own tomatoes too.

The problem I see with eat pre-packaged foods is that we don't know much about the long-term effects. Although we been selling them for years (maybe 30 I'm guessing), it only seems to have been on the mass consumption scale for like 15 years or so, and 20 years for the younger generation (born into it). So technically, that's still young. Someone my age or a bit younger (I'm 25), has been born essentially when it's started becoming popular on a huge scale (in the sense that people are willing to eat it all the time). The effects of eating a regular diet on these thing might not be noticeable until my generation, and those younger than me, turn atleast 35 years of age or so when things start emerging.

For me, I ate a lot of bad stuff but nowhere near as what I see out there. I prepare 90% of my meals atleast.

I do not want to be the one learning the effects of long-term use of pre-packaged meals. I'll go with the tried, tested and true method of eating and that is... cook yourself.

 

[Dadface]

I do not want to be the one learning the effects of long-term use of pre-packaged meals. I'll go with the tried, tested and true method of eating and that is... cook yourself.

I suppose we all have a little bit of Hannibal Lecter in us.I have thought about cooking myself but I couldn't find a good recipe.

 

[Huckleberry]

I suppose we all have a little bit of Hannibal Lecter in us.I have thought about cooking myself but I couldn't find a good recipe.

Try asking this guy.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

For the record both Trader Joe's and Annie's make good TV dinner style packages.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

For the record both Trader Joe's and Annie's make good TV dinner style packages.

I forget the name but there is some new store around here that my parents have told me about where they make fresh prepackaged meals that are fairly inexpensive. I don't remember for sure but I think that they have both precooked and uncooked. I'll have to figure out the name of the place and go take a look.

 

[tgt]

I don't see a problem with frozen dinners, I eat them all of the time. Canned soups are much scarier.

How about 3 meals a day, every day? Given that the most expansive frozen dinners are ate and also a lot of variety in the frozen dinners?

 

[redargon]

sounds like you're looking for an excuse to eat them every day, so just do it and see what happens. If you don't notice any differences in 10 years, it's all good. If you notice any differences after 10 years, than it's too late anyway, so just keep doing it or try changing.

 

[tgt]

How would instant noodles compare with those frozen dinners?

 

[turbo]

How would instant noodles compare with those frozen dinners?

You can't be bothered to boil some noodles and combine them with a stir-fry of vegetables, seasonings, etc? Just a few minutes of work can leave you with a big batch of food that you can package up in portions and heat up at your convenience. It would be healthier, cheaper, and more easily customized to your tastes and needs. If you want to eat "Cup O Noodles" day after day, you'll be swamped with salt and MSG as quick as a blink. Why not cook food in batches, refrigerate or freeze as needed, and heat them up when you need them? You can pay for pre-packaged meals, but remember that you don't just have to pay the financial price for convenience. Years down the road, you'll be paying a price in your health and viability because of eating all that junk.

 

[tgt]

You can't be bothered to boil some noodles and combine them with a stir-fry of vegetables, seasonings, etc? Just a few minutes of work can leave you with a big batch of food that you can package up in portions and heat up at your convenience. It would be healthier, cheaper, and more easily customized to your tastes and needs. If you want to eat "Cup O Noodles" day after day, you'll be swamped with salt and MSG as quick as a blink. Why not cook food in batches, refrigerate or freeze as needed, and heat them up when you need them? You can pay for pre-packaged meals, but remember that you don't just have to pay the financial price for convenience. Years down the road, you'll be paying a price in your health and viability because of eating all that junk.

But what about the comparison between packaged dinners and instant noodles? Which is worse?

The sauces used in stir-fry and other dishes contain suspect things as well.

 

[turbo]

But what about the comparison between packaged dinners and instant noodles? Which is worse?

The sauces used in stir-fry and other dishes contain suspect things as well.

You are missing some BIG details. You can make your own stir-fry meals with natural ingredients and spices and combine them with noodles that you boil at home. You don't have to cook prepared foods - even seasoning mixtures or pre-packaged ingredients that might come out OK.

Is this better for you than eating pre-packaged meals that are loaded with preservatives, additives, and off-label crap that you will never know about? I vote for YES. It takes no talent and very little time to prepare batch meals that you can package up in really cheap, freezable, microwavable, containers for later use.

Here is your challenge. Buy a small package of mushrooms, a Bell pepper, an onion, and a bulb of garlic. Mince the garlic, cube the other ingredients, and saute them in some pre-heated olive oil or peanut oil, perhaps with some basil or other fresh herbs, a bit of salt and some fresh-ground black pepper, and combine them with some egg noodles or rice noodles. Can any of the commercial crap that you can buy compare to that? You don't have to try this too many times before you catch a clue. If you will look at the cost of your batch meal and compare it to the cost of pre-packaged commercial crap, you will see where you are sacrificing quality, taste, and health for "convenience".

 

[redargon]

But what about the comparison between packaged dinners and instant noodles? Which is worse?

The sauces used in stir-fry and other dishes contain suspect things as well.

Did they not teach you the food pyramid at school? You need a balanced diet of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals and vitamins. Noodles are not going to give you all of those, so what do you think? At least a packaged dinner (depending on it's quality) should give you more of the different elements that you require.

Why the questions over food? just moved out and have to fend for yourself, or building a bomb shelter and need to know what to pack it with?

 

[Office_Shredder]

Guys, look.

Fats, oils and sweets. Top of the food pyramid. What else was at the top of a pyramid? GOLD! And then someone stole it. Just like the government is trying to steal your fats and oils! Wake up sheeple!