How healthy are sausages really, and which are the best ones please!

[Boyswillbeboys]

My DCs love sausages but I'm always a bit worried that they are full of all the manky bits butchers have left over.

Any advice on which brands are the best to buy?

And what about hot dogs? My boys love them but I normally don't buy them .. are they really the devils work or are they ok once in a while?

I try to get the ones with the highest meat content - normally the 'best of' ranges - they are high in salt and fat so we only have them at the weekend really. I get the hotdogs(frankfurters) out the chill cabinet as they tend to contain more meat than the tinned ones. I think it is the Herta ones we get - again they can be salty so they dont have them too often.

They are not healthy at all

but the posh ones with lots of meat in make me feel better about serving them up religiously.

I think chippolatas tend to have less salt in them than bigger sausages. I could be wrong.

the only ones we have been able to find without sulfites (the nasty carcinogenic bits) have been real meat company ones or sainsburys so organics. These are just as healthy or unhealthy as pork as that is what they are made of.

Look for ones from outdoor reared pigs as they tend to have had a better life.

get the ones with 75-85 % meat in them - debbie and andrews and morrisons best are very good for this. Bake them in the oven on the rack of a roasting tin with no oil or grill to keep the fat content down

i think they vary enormously

some have a lot of rusk type stuff some are fatty AND MOST ARE SALTY and some have poreservatives

i would buy them on taste and be less inclined to have pork as beef i reckon comes from better condtions

lamb ones are quite nice too

www.sainsburys.com/groceries/frameset/navigation_frame.jsp. These are about as healthy as sausages can be.

Alternatively go to a butcher and ask about mean content and addiative. I have a very good butcher near me who offers mean products including sausages for Slimming World, which means they are much lower in fat.

the meat content of the sausages doesn't make them better from a healthy point of view (after all, there is nothing unhealthy about carbs is there?) just better form an economical point of view. People often confuse the two.

As for them being full of manky bits of meat, well that is just absurd. There are strict guidelines for the quality of meat used in food production. Just because bits of meat that aren't sold whole by the butcher are used doesn't actually make them manky or any less healthy. Protein is protein as far as the body is concerned, whether it came from a prime cut or was removed from the bone via a spinning machine.

If you're worried about how healthy sausages are just look at the ingredient list, that's what it's there for, and look out for the fat and salt content and any added artificial ingreidnets.

With sausages, a lot also depends on how you actually cook them. So grilling them in a grill so the fat drips off will be better than frying them or even baking them on a tray in the oven.

Hot dogs aren't the devils work either, just look at the ingredients list and choose sensibly. Moderation is the key. It is not the poison that kills us, but the dose.

Of course, if it's the quality of the pig's life you're worried about, listen to Carmenere!

I get Dutcy Originals chippolatas. Don't seem too bad as sausages go. Also they're so expensive that we can only have them twice a year, which helps!

Thanks everyone, I hadn't really even thought about the salt content, just the other additives, rusk etc. I will definitely check out your recommendations. Sorry if the word "manky" offended you, I'm just a bit squeamish about the thought of there being bums, noses etc in the sausages, bits the butcher couldn't get people to buy otherwise!

I don't think you can beat a good reputable butcher. I simply will not buy supermarket sausages, they taste disgusting, the texture is completely different than butcher shop sausages. I trust a butcher much more than a huge manufacturer supplying the supermarkets.

Not healthy in the slightest, but yum. I've just discovered this brand - really lovely and meaty.

The Duchy original ones are fabulous! Very tasty, high meat content, animals have been reasonably well looked after etc.

I second Daphnemoon- your local butcher will probably have a supplier of 'premium' type sausages. Ours has Lashfords, which are just delicious.... the only problem is the size- individual sausages are huge!

You can't beat a good Lincolnshire Banger!

Garden Centres with farm shops sell the best ones - often really bizarre flavours - had pork and blueberries for example a few weeks ago!

they won't be putting bums and noses in it though, just the meat, or muscle and fat, from around those areas! It's fine if you're squeemish about eating those things, as long as you understand that they are no less healthy than any other muscle and fat from the animal, your body doesn't differenciate, it is all broken down into amino acides anyway.

Rusks, again, are not unhealthy either. It is just a breadcrumb mix, used to help bind the sausage meat and bulk it out, so altohugh a higher proportion will mean a less economical sausage for you, it does not make it less healthy as far as your body is concerned. It just makes it carbohydrate instead of protein.

A sausage made of nothing but meat wouldn't be a sausage. It would just be a finger-shaped minced meat thing. To be labelled a sausage it needs ingredients other than meat.

Can anyone recommend a decent cocktail size sausage? DD is a fussy eater and this week in packed lunch gave her Sainsburys Butchers' Choice ones - 75% meat but have sulfites. Unusually, she ate them all!

Would like sulfite-free ones and it has to be cocktail size ones as she seems to have a fear of anything too meaty looking!