Diet on Haute Cuisine?
by Spence Cooper on 08/17/09 at 9:50 am
Which Tastes best
For many Americans, struggling with weight gain — not to mention the related health issues — is bad enough, now devouring those extra slices of pizza may make you forget where you tossed your car keys. A new study with rats detailed in the FASEB Journal, found that just 10 days of eating a high-fat diet caused short-term memory loss.
“Western diets are typically high in fat and are associated with long-term complications, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure, yet the short-term consequences of such diets have been given relatively little attention,” said Andrew Murray, co-author of the study and currently at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “We hope that the findings of our study will help people to think seriously about reducing the fat content of their daily food intake to the immediate benefit of their general health, well-being, and alertness.”
Never missing a chance to capitalize on human weakness, weight loss companies say you can indulge yourself with haute cuisine and still lose weight — for a price.
But how good is the food?
The Wall Street Journal’s Peter King set out on a mission to find out if dinner entrees from four diet-food providers were appetizing, flavorful and filling.
Here’s what he found:
Jenny Craig
Jenny Craig offers frozen and shelf-stable meals. But before you can dine with Jenny, you must become a member, an expense that is in addition to the cost of the food. (Membership costs run from the “20 Pounds for $20″ special online promotion that is currently running to $399 a year.) “Jenny’s Cuisine” is available online or at the company’s 650 U.S. centers. The company says customers who order online get their frozen meals packed with dry ice via overnight shippers. (We picked up our dinners at a local center.)
The meals were hit and miss. Fish and chips (potato wedges) (frozen, 5.4 oz.; 250 calories) was very tasty (the potato wedges were especially good), but the slice of battered pollock was a small fry, leaving us hungry. Meatloaf with barbecue sauce (frozen, 8.2 oz.; 300 calories) was filling, featuring a firm patty and sauce that added zest without drowning the meat. Sweet and sour chicken with rice (shelf-stable, 8 oz.; 200 calories) was gooey, and the sauce was neither sweet nor sour.
EDiets
EDiets is an online weight-loss company that offers personalized diet information for a fee. If you sign up for its meal-delivery service, you get the advice free. EDiets’ food is all “fresh prepared,” a process a company executive told us consists of flash-freezing the meals and then sending them out chilled. Our eDiets meals came via FedEx in a polystyrene-foam cooler packed with ice and each had a “use by” date of two weeks after the shipment arrived.
As for the meals, they were mostly disappointing. Turkey breast with quinoa pilaf (9.8 oz.; 290 calories), rekindled memories of TV dinners in aluminum trays. The turkey was dry and had an aftertaste; the pilaf had no taste at all. Beef steak with quinoa pilaf (8.5 oz.; 320 calories) had large slices of chewy meat, but again the ubiquitous pilaf was tasteless. Kung pao chicken with peanuts and brown rice (8 oz.; 380 calories) was tasty and filling, with a spicy sauce and flavorful rice.
NutriSystem
NutriSystem is primarily a shelf-stable-based meal plan, though the company recently added a more expensive NutriSystem Select frozen-food line. The shelf-stable products are sent via conventional shippers like UPS. For the Select products, NutriSystem has teamed with Schwan’s, an upscale food-delivery service.
Our two shelf-stable meals — chicken with dumplings (10 oz.; 240 calories) and sweet and sour chicken with noodles (10 oz.; 200 calories) — were gloppy concoctions of indistinguishable flavors, but despite the low calorie counts, we did feel filled up. Our NutriSystem Select meal of turkey medallions with broccoli, carrots and cauliflower (10 oz.; 220 calories) was delivered via refrigerated Schwan’s truck and wrapped in an insulated freezer bag with gel ice-pack bags. This was the best meal in our 12-day diet-food odyssey; the turkey was moist and tasty, and the vegetables were flavorful and vibrant with color.
Lean Cuisine
Lean Cuisine offers scores of portion-controlled lunch and dinner meals with the convenience of buying them at the supermarket. A dieter could cobble together a weekly menu similar to the ones offered by Jenny Craig, NutriSystem and eDiets with the help of breakfast and snack products made by freezer-case rivals Weight Watchers Smart Ones and Healthy Choice. Two of our Lean Cuisine meals were very good. Chicken marsala with linguine (8.1 oz.; 250 calories) featured two tasty but thin silver-dollar-size breaded chicken patties in wine sauce. We were hungry for more after we finished. Parmesan-crusted fish (9 oz.; 290 calories) offered a decent-size piece of pollock, along with penne pasta that was firm and could have passed for homemade. The sesame chicken (9 oz.; 330 calories), with its four soggy nugget-like pieces, may be an ethnic dish — in McDonald’s.
Of our 12 meals (six frozen, three fresh-prepared, three shelf-stable), the frozen entrees generally tasted better and were more appetizing. While none of the meals rose to the touted claims of being “restaurant quality,” none was truly terrible either. So if your main worry about starting a diet plan is that you won’t be able to stomach the food, you can eliminate at least that weight from your shoulders.
One downfall of most frozen diet foods is the sodium content. We recommend that when trying to lose weight, you head to your doctor and nutritionist. When eating these meals, make sure to check out the portion size and sodium content.
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