University researchers are claiming celebrity chefs could be a cause of Britain’s obesity epidemic after finding nine out of ten recipes fall foul of healthy eating guidelines.
Nutrition experts at Coventry University checked more than 900 recipes from the most popular celebrity chefs, and found that nearly 90 per cent fell “substantially short” of government recommendations.
Researchers scoured the Good Food Channel and Amazon’s best sellers list, selecting the 26 chefs with the highest profile on both TV and in print, before using diet analysis software to find out how nutritional their recipes were.
Dr Ricardo Costa, senior lecturer and researcher in dietetics, who led the study, said: “When we first set out to do this we thought it would be about 50/50 – some would be healthy and some wouldn’t.
“But when we looked at the results and found that 87 per cent were over the healthy eating guidelines, we weren’t expecting that at all. That’s why this is such a novel paper.
“Certain celebrity chefs are promoting healthy eating but their messages aren’t consistent when they go over to their own business to do things on their own terms.”
The paper, published in the Food and Public Health journal, found that all celebrity chefs analysed promote recipes containing undesirable levels of certain nutrients – particularly saturated fatty acids, sugars and salt –which are linked to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
And 92 per cent of the chefs presented at least one meal where the saturated fatty acid content was above the recommended level for an entire day – with one recipe containing more than five times the healthy benchmark.
However, the university is keeping the results from individual chefs under wraps.
Dr Costa said: “We chose the chefs that had the most exposure to the public through books and TV series so all the key players are there. But this study is not about naming and shaming celebrity chefs.
“When we submitted it for ethics one of the issues was that everything should remain confidential because the results may affect certain people in certain ways.”
But the university is planning to pass the detailed results to the British Dietetics Association in the hope that they can work with the celebrity chefs in question.
They have suggested a “tightening up of regulation” around celebrity chefs who are involved in promoting government healthy eating initiatives, saying this involvement encourages “a culture of confidence” among the general public in their culinary practices.
Dr Costa also believes there’s a marketing purpose to including unhealthy recipes.
He says: “I think chefs put these forward as their best recipes and of course the more fat you put in, the more flavour there is so they’ll convince people it tastes nice and they’ll buy the next book.
“One of the reasons we did this research was that we’ve been providing cooking sessions, developing recipes in our own kitchen labs and our clients or patients come in with these recipe books and we’ve found that we’ve had to modify almost every single recipe they bring in.
“That’s what led us to do the study.”
The researchers hope their conclusions encourage people to pay more attention to recipes and modify them to suit their own personal lifestyles.
The research found that male celebrity chefs’ recipes contained more energy, macronutrients, sodium and salt per portion than the recipes of their female counterparts.
It also found that celebrity chefs from overseas fared better than British chefs in the overall quality of their recipes’ nutritional composition.
And while British recipes were higher in fibre than recipes from international celebrity chefs, on average both sets of recipes combined would deliver only 18 per cent of the guideline daily amount of fibre.
