to not expect glucose syrup in a cottage pie?

[SpringForEver]

I don't often buy ready meals.

However, picked up a Sainsburys Love your Veg lentil and sweet potato cottage pie to save cooking and to snuggle up on the sofa and relax instead.

Skimmed the ingredients to ensure no palm oil, fine. I expected the potato to be sweet potato, also fine. However I didn't expect the lentil bit to taste like a dessert, it was hellishly sweet, overpoweringly so, even when drowned out with brown sauce to make it edible which it wasn't really.

Took a look at the ingredients list more carefully and it contains glucose syrup. That is the stuff used in commercially made cakes, which I avoid due to the side effects. This is what happens when sugar is censored, absolute crap is used as a replacement.

Ready meals will never replace food but that was truly disgusting, have learned my lesson, no more Sainsburys pre-made crud in future.

All ready meals have a lot of artificial ingredients in them. You are better of batch baking at a weekend from scratch and freezing. They use those instead

There is a reason why processed food and ready meals are so full of sugar and salt - it’s to try to trick our taste buds into thinking they are tasty.

This is a result of our quest for low fat

Strip out fat and things taste like shit. The irony being that fat isn't bad for you.

We are slowly killing people with sugar

Its also got rapeseed oil in it which is really bad for you - again in our 'battle against saturated fat' and 'healthy heart' is totally misguided. It messes with your fatty acid production, vital for healthy life.

A bit of butter would have been far more healthy

I thought that rapeseed oil was on a par with olive oil?

Aside from the fact it was disgusting, I object to the projection of it being somehow 'healthy'.

I have objected for years to what has been done to food and spent precious time reading ingredients that I could have spent doing something else. First there was the addition of soya flour to bread in the 90's and it has gone downhill since then, GM tomatoes were next. I know there had already been margarine instead of butter but that had reverted back to butter being better by then, however it has now changed to olive oil spread being mixed with palm oil and various other crap, so the Olivio I used to buy is now no longer olive oil spread, I never stopped buying butter, it was a case of varying dietary requirements.

The last few years have just been absolutely stupid with all the changes and the removal of proper ingredients from food, changes to what we are allowed to have. Low salt, low fat, low sugar/sweeteners, palm oil, GM soya flour sneaked into bakery, and pea flour also sneaked in (chickpea) some of these things cause adverse effects but people just buy the stuff and have no idea.

As I said earlier, I rarely buy a ready meal, I also rarely buy fast food so when I do it is more of a shock as it is even more foul than the previous time. I do batch cook, but not for myself, most of my food is freshly cooked or raw and I know what is in it, just once in a while I would like a treat that is actually a treat and not an ordeal.

This is exactly the reason I don't buy ready meals. At one time, when M&S were the only ones who really did them, we might have had one as a treat. Whilst they tasted fab, the main drawback was that the portions were on the small side (for DH). They don't taste so fab any more, but they're hardly the treat they once were.

I do always put sugar in tomato sauce, when making it at home. Along with ground cloves. But no palm oil.

@mooncuplanding rapeseed oil is healthier than many other alternatives. I think it even has less saturated fat than olive oil.

Sugar is in EVERYTHING processed. Even stock cubes have glucose syrup in it. Everything processed like that does. Best thing is to just make your own stuff and freeze it. I have shepf of homemade ready meals because I always cook an extra portion. And used to do my own stock, again to freeze. But I have been forgetting to make it lately

I don't have any 'ethical' objections to ready meals, everyone has times when cooking from scratch is not a priority, but 99% of them taste foul due to the shite that goes in them.
'Cook' and Charlie Bigham range are marginally better I've found. Soups are similar; I'd love to buy more pre-made soup but it all tastes the same, I think due to heat treatment or something.

@oftenhamgry

Rapeseed oil is a highly processed oil (and GM) and there is lots of evidence it is really bad for you

It’s selling point has been, like you say, that it’s low in saturated fat. However that relies on the assumption that saturated fat is bad for you and causes heart disease, when there is actually no evidence for this at all

@mooncuplanding I've never seen evidence of it being really bad for us. But I will happily get educated on that if you have any links?

Seed and vegetable oils are high in Omega 6. We need the right ratio of omega 3 to 6 and using these oils tips that ratio in the wrong direction. More 6 than 3 causes inflammation which leads to chronic disease. They become rancid really quickly and when you heat them the fat molecules get damaged and "flip" creating trans fats. You're far better off cooking with stable saturated fat like ghee, coconut oil and good old fashioned lard.

Don't blame the butter for what the bread did so to speak.

Lard has made a come back in my house

And I'm the thinnest I have ever been as an adult

We've all been so duped on this fat issue

I just bought some of the Sainsbury's Love your veg sausages - after reading your post I've checked the ingredients - sugar in them too, albeit well down the list.

That's the first and last time I'm buying those. It serves me right for cheating and not making my own!

We use proper fats (lard, dripping, bird fats etc) and love it. It was a huge mistake to declare saturated fat - which humans have always eaten - as unhealthy.

My diet is 70% of calories from fat. I lost 8 stone and am the healthiest I've ever been.

Carbs (all sugar when metabolised) made me fat and sick.

I bought some dates in a packet recently not realising that they were coated in glucose syrup - didn't look at the packet properly or I wouldn't have bought them as it does say on the front of the packet.

They were horrible, not only were the skins hard and flaky but the actual dates themselves were hard and chewy too.

I hate throwing food away but they have gone in the bin as the are actually inedible.

I can highly recommend Bad Sugar by Allen Carr (not to be confused with the chirpy comedian).

@Impicciona

Amazing!

It is life changing when you realise fat don’t make you fat!

Energy, mental clarity, no hanger and of course weight loss

Just to clarify that last post for anyone thinking whaaaaat?

High fat diets don’t make you fat

But it’s the carbs, mix it with high carbs and you will get fat

I'm T2 diabetic, and there are very very few ready meals that are low in sugar. So I never buy them for myself.

It's so unnecessary to add that much sugar.

There was a program on breakfastd few years back. A docktor from Southport(?) claimed these healthy low fat yogurts and whatnot brekkies are what's making us fatter. His claim was that proper English breakfast is the best and normal fats actually help.

I believe he was right (the study also showed it).
I have always had real butter at home, can't have pard, but will not give up my rape seed oil, eat ham, fatty lamb ribs etc nad i started losing!
Then I checked these low fat products. They are full of sugar and starch. We need sugar and starch, but in small quantities, not like this.

That doctor was probably Dr Davin Unwin (@lowcarbdoctor on Twitter)

He has one of the lowest cost GP practices in the country because he prescribes low carb to patients rather than drugs. He gets better results too! Reversing Type 2 diabetes regularly.

He’s got loads of stuff on YouTube and is pretty amazing. He publishes a lot of research on the benefits of low carb and the dangers of sugar

As a family we always had butter, full fat milk, fat on meat, and dripping to cook with/spread on toast. There was only margarine as an alternative, she used it only for making cakes.

We were not overweight.

It's not just carbs and the sugar/sweeteners in things, it is also the unhealthy fats that are added. Look at the ingredients in a tub of 'healthy' spread, then try to find one that doesn't have palm oil.

My mother always had sugar in tea, she didn't get fat, however she had the choice of whether she wanted sugar whereas we are not permitted to choose what goes into food unless we make it ourselves.