In the July issue of *The Australian **Women’s Weekly,* we decided to put Australia’s biggest weight-loss companies under the microscope to find out how their food product fares nutritionally and just what is in the frozen meals.
The Weekly cooked, plated, photographed and dissected pre-packaged foods into their constituent components and weighed by our staff at The Weekly’s Test Kitchen.
All this information was then sent to academic Fiona Willer at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. And the results weren’t good, particularly for Jenny Craig.
“Nutritionally, this is Jenny Craig scraping the bottom of the barrel,” says Fiona.
“By far, the biggest ingredient in this meal is potato wedges at 38 per cent – hardly the centrepiece of a balanced main meal – but within the wedges, the second biggest component after potato is beef tallow, a rendered beef fat and a source of saturated fat. The only reason that would be there is for taste and texture. Fat is flavour and Jenny Craig knows that.”
Incidentally, tallow – essentially lard – was the fat used by McDonald’s in its French fries until 1990, when it switched to vegetable oil.
