Supermarket salads fattier than a McDonald’s meal, study shows
In a UK study, researchers from Which?, a consumer magazine, looked at 20 salads from major grocery stores and found many contained high quantities of fat. At least two of them were fattier than a meal at McDonald’s; others had misleading labels, the BBC reports. Marks and Spencer’s Pasta with Tomato & Basil Chicken, for example, had 760 calories and 46g of fat, nearly 70 per cent of a woman’s daily intake of fat and half of a man’s. (A Big Mac and medium fries, by comparison, contains 820 calories and 40g of fat.) Meanwhile, a tuna salad sold at Tesco was said to contain 275 calories and 20.5g of fat, but that was for just half the pack. “This latest research backs up what we’ve been saying for ages – a clear, consistent labelling scheme is important to help people spot how much fat, sugar and salt is in the food they’re buying,” Martyn Hocking, Which? magazine’s editor, told the BBC. Nutritionist Nathalie Winn with World Cancer Research Fund pointed out that maintaining a healthy weight is the most important factor in preventing cancer, after not smoking, and recommended that people make their own salads.