beans mash and sausages is a healthy meal

[madhurjazz]

Mother in law thinks its junk food. But the beans contain 1 of your 5 a day, mashed potatoes are just veg and a good source of carbs and the sausages are full of essential protein.

We often have ketchup, this has been shown to reduce many cancers like prostate, and a glass of juice.

Seems healthy to me and not junky.

I don't think it's healthy. It's just meat (bad for you), carbs (potatoes don't count as one of five a day) and beans (quite sugary, but the pulses element is good).

It is, however, one of my favourite guilty pleasures . I'm veggie so I have quorn sausages, but I don't think they're really any better!!

We have sausages and beans most weeks. Not mash though - I prefer baked potatoes or baked wedges. Sausage and chips just isn't the right combo.

We have decent sausages and don't have a big portion but they are lovely in their salty herby fattiness. NOM.

Meat isnt bad for you people choose not to eat meat fair enough but it is not bad for you.i just think people get to het up about food it must be exhausting pulling apart a dinner. Balanced food is good for you although beans with mash is rank 😂

What is so infuriating is that fats, sugar and salt are fine if they are presented by Nigella Lawson or one of the many affluent tv chefs. Then they are Good, Honest Food with two fingers to the Nanny State.

I don't know as much about nigella, but I don't think that is the issue.

if you take good quality food/meat, and make a sausage out of it and add salt, it will be fine.

But if you take processed food, already loaded with salt and add salt, then that's bad.

Salt isn't bad, it's just that now our (collective) salt intake is through the roof, even though we haven't been putting any more of it in our food. The culprit is processed food which is loaded with it. If you read the label on a processed food package, it's really unbelievable how much sugar or salt it contains.

Oh I love a thread that encourages all the MN 'nutritionists' to wade in and talked in horrified terms about the dangers of baked beans and mashed potatoes.

Chili, but conversely if your general diet is low in salt and in processed food, then the occasional sausage does not lift you into the danger bracket

And why did your MIL feel the need to tell you the meal you cooked was 'junk'? I hope you gave her a long hard stare OP.

Peas and sweetcorn comment was tongue in cheek, considering the pearl clutching in this thread.

However, I do enjoy mash with kale, don't knock it til you've tried it!

I've also read that 'they' decided that potatoes don't count towards the five a day because a lot of people would just eat chips and think that they were getting their five a day, which is ironic really because out in the real world where most people eat nowhere near five a day it is the vitamin C in potatoes eaten as chips and in things like tomato ketchup and pizza sauce that stops them getting scurvy.

Lol at the idea that instead of sausage mash and beans you should just have pork steak, mash and vegetables, because well, it isn't sausage mash and beans is it?.

I would put sausage mash and beans in the amber category, where green is all totally healthy organic quinoa and mung beans, red is total shite like crisps and cake and amber is OKish, does contain some nutrition but not everyday food, once or twice a month is fine, you wouldn't want it much more often simply because there is so much other food to eat out there so wouldn't want to miss out on those to eat sausage mash and beans all the time.

I would want it to be decent quality high meat sausages though, or vegan/vegetarian alternative.

Poor old potato, these days it's considered to be not much further up the nutritional scale than crystal meth.

My DC have good quality butchers sausauges, mash and beans once a week they like it, me and dh like it and I do not class it as an un healthy meal

None of my DC have ever been over weight, 4 very healthy DC so it's done them no harm.

Some People on here could make a cucumber look un healthy. It's like the whole don't give the child too much fruit comment you get on here

It's just meat (bad for you)

FFS - how has the human race survived up to now?

meat is only bad for you in daft quantity's if you ate red meat every day of course something bad is going to happen .If you ate lots of high fat foods,processed foods,sugar crap in general every day then yes it would be bad

red meat is recommended once a week so if we add ,white meat,vegetables,fruit,grains,fish in equal quantities with the occasionally bit of rubbish

you would be fine ,you can eat the stuff thats not that healthy as long as it alongside the healthy its all about balance

high amounts of anything is bad there needs to be balance.A little natural sugar is fine good even a lot can cause horrid health implications same gos with salt.

what annoys me is how people seem to go to opposite extremes

completely cutting out whole wheat essential grains because o carbohydrates are somehow bad for you

If you ate them all the time in replacement of vegetable of course they are bad but in moderation they are important

fruit has sugar ,all fruit has sugar but sugar is not a dirty word.Its fine as long as its not eaten in vast quantity

life would be incredibly boring if we kept thinking about how bad that decadent looking jam and cream scone was

Children dont need their diet restricted adults can be restrictive as they like children need to see food as something to enjoy mash and sausage is fine for a childs dinner once you start telling children we dont eat this that or the next thing then imo you can likely cause food issues.

So, I summed up how this thread would go in my first response then?

FWIW, potatoes are vegetables. There is no debate around that. But they're vegetables that don't fit into the 5-a-day mechanism of getting a good variety of vitamins. 5-a-day is simply a supposedly easy to understand way to improve the way people eat. It excludes some things that we do consider fruit and vegetables because in order to get the benefits of the vitamins a food contains, we'd end up taking in 'too much' of something else. So, not all of your 5 can be fruit because it's too much sugar. White potatoes don't count because they're starchy and have too much readily available very simple carbohydrate. Smoothies (and supposedly smooth soups too) can only count for so many because the first stage of digestion is done before you consume it so again, the sugars and carbs are too readily available. I think olives may also be an exception. It doesn't mean these foods cease to have vitamins, just that you should eat them less freely than other sources.

But that won't matter to the people on this thread who've lost all common sense and consider sausage, mash and beans to be the devil's spunk. Common sense goes right out of the window when people cease to look at diet as a whole rather than analysing every meal.

It is most certainly isn't junk food. There is plenty of nutrition in it. But nor should it be a staple meal in its simpler form. I have it every couple of weeks. Because it's bloody lovely and I'm not a misery.

I'm amazed at this thread. When did food become the enemy? This thread highlights far unhealthier attitudes towards food than the meal will ever be.

We've become a nation so obsessed by eating what's right, it makes the wrong foods irresistible.

I blame Hemsley & Hemsley.

When you start moving into 'sausages give your kids cancer' territory people will switch off.

But there is a correlation with processed meat and cancer. Why is it unreasonable to discuss this?

We're all going to be eating differently over the next several decades because of scientific advances that allow us to live a better quality of life. I don't think it's even remotely hysterical to shape your overall household diet around carcinogenic/antioxidant information.

It is hysterical for the OP's MIL to chide her for any one dinner she serves her children.

Did anyone watch their show? Gave me the rage. Pseudo-tritionists.

Just to put the cancer thing into perspective for anyone who cares;

According to the stats I've just been looking at on the Cancer Reseach website, there are roughly the same amount of bowel cancer deaths linked to eating red and processed meat (3,340) as there are deaths estimated to be prevented by the cervical screening programme (3,500) per year.

Very interesting Saucy.