The celebrity chefs and the supermarkets

Most of us take it for granted that a bit of home cooking is generally healthier than buying a supermarket ready-meal.

But not if you follow the recipes of some of our celebrity chefs, according to a study in the British Medical Journal that has made some headlines today. The study, which looked at 100 recipes by celebrity chefs and 100 supermarket ready meals, found that the recipes scored worse on calories, sugar, fat and saturated fat.

It's not a perfect study - it only looked at five cookery books, the top-sellers in December 2010, so the recipes aren't the most recent ones, and only four chefs are represented (Jamie Oliver had two best selling books at the time).

Jamie Oliver

It seems slightly ironic, given that Jamie Oliver is known for his efforts to make school meals healthier. Nigella Lawson, on the other hand, trades on her reputation for indulgent food. But the chef in the study with most calories and most saturated fat - the kind that is bad for your heart - was Lorraine Pascal, with her book Baking Made Easy. To be fair, a book about baking is unlikely to be full of health food, what with all that pastry and so on.

If you watch a few cookery programmes it soon becomes obvious that health is not high on the agenda here. A dietitian might suggest you measure your cooking oil out with a teaspoon. I can't say I've ever seen that done on TV - a drizzle of this and a glug of that is the order of the day. Vegetables are often not much in evidence. That said, it's easy to question whether people actually cook most of these recipes or just treat them as easy entertainment.

Nigella Lawson

Let's remember, though, that the supermarket ready meals weren't exactly covered in glory here - they just weren't as bad as the celebrity chef recipes. I still believe that cooking from scratch is the best way to make sure you know what's actually in your food. You can see how much fat or salt you're adding, and use less if you want to.

Earlier this year the Hairy Bikers made a series "How to love food and lose weight" which was the first television food programme I've ever seen make a consistent effort to be healthy. Apparently Lorraine Pascal has a series about healthy eating on the way. Perhaps this is the new trend - if so, I think it's a welcome one.