This is a Jenny Craig frozen meal: crumbed fish and wedges. It comprises a portion of crumbed fish, topped with a cheese sauce, a portion of seasoned potato wedges, julienne carrots, steamed broccoli and squeeze of fresh lemon.
Fish and veggies? What could be more nutritious? Well, the truth is almost anything, say three of Australia’s leading nutritionists and dietitians.
Following the release of a British research study last month that found some Weightwatchers products to contain more kilojoules than standard brand alternatives, The Australian Women’s Weekly decided to put Australia’s biggest weight loss companies under the microscope to discover how their food product fares nutritionally.
Three experts, one an academic, one a high-profile consultant and another a leading specialist in food habits and eating disorders, agreed to interpret the results from an academic and scientific analysis that compared a selection of Jenny Craig’s weight loss food products to national dietary guidelines.
According to the latest figures, 15 per cent of women and 11 per cent of men are already participating in weight loss diets in Australia either on their own or with Jenny Craig or any of the other weight loss companies – Lite and Easy or Weightwatchers, for example – in this industry. That represents about 2.3 million Australians.
Almost all of them, and millions more besides, are aware of what Jenny Craig promises – the easy path to weight loss and a better life. Follow our plans, eat our food and exercise as we advise and you’ll lose weight. We will teach you about portion control, they say, make you slimmer and perhaps give you the key to lasting happiness.
In a bid to discover just what it is that Jenny Craig really sells, The Australian Women’s Weekly sent me to become one of their members. My mission was to buy the food they offered and listen to their marketing pitch.
We then had their pre-packaged foods -two shopping bags full, representing a week’s groceries, which cost $159 – cooked, plated, photographed, dissected into constituent components and weighed by our staff at The Women’s Weekly Test Kitchen.
All this information was then sent to food researcher Fiona Willer at the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane.
Fiona, a lecturer in Food Science, Food and Nutrition and Advanced Food Studies and a Master’s degree research candidate, then ran the results through an academically recognised nutrition tool called The Australian Recommended Food Score (ARFS), a system that analyses diet quality compared to the National Dietary Guidelines and is validated against the results of a national survey of more than 9000 middle-aged Australian women.
It also gives an indication of how well a diet meets the nutrient needs of the human body – “Nutrients are the bits we get from food that the human body needs so it doesn’t die,” says Fiona. “Things such as iron so we don’t become anaemic.”
Higher scores are better because they are associated with less use of medical services, sufficient nutritional intake and better health.
My menu, a 7000 kilojoule per day eating plan for a middle aged man weighing around 100 kilograms, included foods such as the crumbed fish and wedges, a “hearty beef” pie, a sausage roll, chilli con carne, macaroni cheese, a bean and cheese burrito, Thai pumpkin noodles and a pizza-all-round, many of which strongly resemble popular takeaway and restaurant foods.
Also included were breakfast foods and treats such as choc chip bites and a nut and grain chew bar along with berry oat clusters and flakes, fruit and fibre cereal.
Analysed without fresh foods, which is not how the company designs or recommends the program but may well be how some customers participate, the packaged foods returned a score of 19 out of a possible 74 points, a result that is, says Fiona Willer, categorised as poor.
“That means that the nutrition offered by this food is substantially below what we would expect to find in the average diet of a middle aged Australian woman,” says Fiona. “And that’s an average, every day, nothing out of the ordinary diet where people are not making an effort. So it’s a bad result.”
“What is vitally important in good food is what it contains, not what is taken out of it,” says accredited practising dietition Fiona Sutherland, a specialist in food habits and eating disorders and a director at nutrition consultancy BodyPostive in Melbourne.
“The problem with the food from Jenny Craig is that it is low in kilojoules but they are not nutritionally rich, which is what the human body really needs to function well. Fresh foods such as avocado, green leafy vegetables and lean meat are nutritionally dense but Jenny Craig’s foods don’t provide that.”
And it is meals such as the crumbed fish and wedges that bear out that thought. “Nutritionally, this is Jenny Craig scrapping the bottom of the barrel,” says Fiona Willer.
“By far the biggest ingredient in this meal is potato wedges at 38 per cent – hardly the centre piece 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 – is the fat used by fast food giant McDonalds in their French fries until 1990, when they switched to vegetable oil.
The crumbed fish is down the list at 19 per cent – just less than broccoli at 20 per cent – but of this only 13 per cent of the meal is actually fish, a small piece of flounder that weighed 35 grams after heating and was not much bigger than a man’s thumb.
At various points in the production process, Jenny Craig has added salt – 565 milligrams; sugar – 5.5 grams; a total of 10.4 grams of fat (2.3 grams saturated fat) and a multitude of enhancers, flavours, colours, starches, thickeners and other ingredients.
“This meal is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” says Fiona Willer. “That’s the thing about putting beef fat into fish meal. To be completely honest, you would be better off going down to the local fish and chip shop, ordering a grilled piece of fish and a salad – and maybe even a few chips – and you would have a fresh, more nutritionally valid meal than the one Jenny Craig presents without the salt, the beef tallow, the preservatives or anything else.”
The fact is only a small proportion of the Jenny Craig’s processed foods examined in this analysis measure up to national dietary standards. At best, when it is dressed up with additional fresh vegetables and fruits (purchased by the customer), the food the company provides can only be described as being of average dietary quality.
At their worst however, analysed without the supporting fresh fruit and vegetables, which The Australian Women’s Weekly acknowledges is not the company’s recommended course, the food is revealed for what it is – highly processed, packaged food that is rich in added salt, fats, and sugar that is intended to satisfy taste rather than genuine nutritional value.
Jenny Craig’s 19/74 score can be further broken down into eight categories: Vegetables 9/22; Fruit 0/14; Grains 4/14; Dairy 2/7; Fats1/1 and Alcohol 0/2.
If no fresh fruit was consumed separately by the program participant, “The only fruit that was offered were a few soggy little sultanas and that wasn’t enough to even qualify as a serve,” says Fiona. “As for protein, the four points comes from the beef and chicken that was offered and some nuts and a few chickpeas, but that was all.
In fact, because the piece of fish in the menu was fried and to count the fish must be steamed, baked or grilled and as such it didn’t have enough nutrients to make in the list. There was protein in it but there were no essential fatty acids. It’s just not good for humans if that is the only fish they’re having.
“But even to think of putting beef fat into fish meal is ridiculous. If you wanted beef, you’d have a steak. It’s there to add flavour. Fat is the deliverer of flavour components and that’s fine but not when it is packaged up as diet food.”
Protein comes from a variety of sources, not just meat. It comes from pork, lamb, veal but also fish, canned fish – high in Omega3 – baked beans, soy beans, tofu, chickpeas and other lentils and beans and, finally eggs.
Jenny Craig recommends the addition of four eggs to this weekly menu. The addition brings the protein score up to 6/14.
In fact, Jenny Craig also recommends the addition of a range of fresh fruit and vegetables to the menu but even with the addition of these foods the score only rates 32/74, one point below the national average score of 33 and well below the 23 per cent of the 9000 surveyed Australian women who recorded scores between 40 and 50.
Fiona says that the results draw her to a single conclusion: that Jenny Craig’s food lacks nutritional depth and variety.
“It’s processed, packaged food,” she says. “The connotations that go with that are the same as when you process and package anything: You lose you lose things in trying to make it last a long time on a shelf and you lose essential nutrients by messing with its normal biological form.
“We don’t know how much you lose. We haven’t figured that out yet, but we know that there are things in food that are protective that are sure to have been damaged in that processing and packaging. It’s interesting to note that Jenny Craig also provides a weekly dose of multivitamins with its menus. It’s almost as if they are acknowledging that there are problems with their plan.
“What we do know is that the best thing possible in a dietary sense is eating fresh fruit and vegetables, a wide variety, both cooked and raw: a wide variety of mostly plant-based foods.”
That’s an approach that Dr Joanna McMillan, a Sydney-based dietitian with a PHD in nutrition, says really will transform your life. She recommends the plate-based method to define a balanced diet, the same method that forms the basis of the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating.
“Divide a dinner plate into sections like a pie-chart,” she says. “Seventy five per cent of the plate should be covered in food derived from plants – vegetables, salads, nuts and grains, pulses – and about 25 per cent from lean meats, fish or other sources of protein and dairy. And it’s not very difficult to achieve.
“One of the major problems that I see with a diet such as this one from Jenny Craig is that the portions are very small and that means people would be hungry almost all the time. Vegetables, lots of them, allow people to feel full and satisfied.”
It’s not just the portion sizes that worry dietitian Fiona Sutherland. She says that Jenny Craig’s determination to reproduce foods that look like takeaway and restaurant meals may also seriously damage people’s future relationships with food.
“The meat pie, the burrito, the sausage roll, the pizza all round are all foods that replicate takeaway food,” she says. “It’s simply an attempt to substitute an energy dense, nutrient poor food with something similar but of a smaller size.
“These products cannot possibly offer clients a way to gain knowledge about, and connect with, nutritious foods in the long term, which is ultimately the real key to health and weight management.”
A series of questions about their food was sent to Jenny Craig Australia New Zealand. Their full responses are offered on The Australian Women’s Weekly website at www.aww.com.au. Jenny Craig also issued the following statement:
“We work with our clients to transition them to a healthier lifestyle and we offer a wide range of products that suit various tastes, cultural backgrounds and trends within the industry. Our consultants work with our clients on a one-on-one basis to ensure they learn the lessons to assist them to maintain a fresh and healthy approach to eating that can be maintained as part of their everyday lifestyle”.
The problem, says Fiona Willers, is that Jenny Craig puts its emphasis on weight loss. “If you reduce kilojoule intake then you will lose weight,” says Fiona. “If you eat this Jenny Craig menu, you will lose weight. But the part of the story that isn’t being told is that when you are put back into a free eating situation you will put that weight back on because that is what the human body does And if weight loss is the goal, then it will seem like a constant battle.
“Instead, if we take the emphasis off weight loss and make it about healthy eating and behaviour then that problem disappears. Having a varied diet and getting regular exercise is much better for you than artificially controlling your weight over a life time. When weight loss is the goal – when weight loss at any price is the goal – that is when things go wrong.”
