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April 25, 2013

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Celebrity chefs recipes may be bad for your health

THE dabs of butter and splashes of cream in recipes of celebrity chefs may be impressive on the plate, but not necessarily so good for your health.

Research published in the Food and Public Health journal by University of Coventry scientists said yesterday that recipes of celebrity chefs were "exacerbating" health problems such as obesity in Britain by encouraging people to eat fatty dishes.

TV shows and top-selling cookbooks as well as TV cooking competitions have legions of eager fans testing out recipes.

But researchers at Coventry's health professions department found that 87 percent of the 904 recipes from the 26 cooks they tested fell substantially short of the UK government's healthy eating recommendations.

"If people regularly use the recipes found in these cookbooks, it could be that celebrity chefs are exacerbating public health nutrition issues in the UK," study author lecturer Ricardo Costa said.

The study comes just months after a survey, published in the British Medical Journal, found that recipes by TV chefs were less healthy than ready meals.

The researchers said they had sampled randomly from best-selling books and websites in such a way as to ensure a balanced representation of different types of meals.

"This study is not about naming and shaming celebrity chefs. However, given the level of trust the public tends to place in the nutritional integrity of these cooks' recipes it's important to highlight where they're falling short of healthy eating benchmarks," Costa said.

After an analysis of each of the recipes, the academics discovered that only 13 percent used ingredients that presented an overall nutritional composition that would be considered healthy in accordance with benchmarks set by Britain's Food Standards Agency.

The results also show that all celebrity chefs whose ingredients were analyzed promoted recipes that contained undesirable levels of certain nutrients, particularly saturated fatty acids, sugars and salt which are linked to obesity and risk factors associated with diabetes and heart disease.





 

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