The 11 Unhealthiest Store-Bought Marinara Sauces You Can Buy

For those nights when you just can't face cooking, store-bought marinara sauce is your best friend. A classic red sauce made primarily from tomatoes, along with other vegetables and flavorings like onion, garlic, and herbs, marinara is as simple and tasty as they come. And when bought in a can or jar, all you need to do is heat it, slather it over some pasta, add your cheese of choice, and sit back in deep, rich comfort. It's bliss.

Unfortunately, though, things may not be as rosy as they first appear with your store-bought marinara sauce. Mass-produced marinara sauces are typically designed to deliver flavor fast, and to last for a while on the shelf without spoiling. And to achieve this, these sauces, like many processed foods, often contain additional salt, sugar, and fats, improving their taste and preserving them, but also making them potentially less nutritious. And your romance with this convenient foodstuff might end pretty quickly when you learn just how unhealthy some brands can be. But with the head-spinning selection of marinara sauces available out there, how do you know which ones to avoid? Save your time endlessly reading those ingredient labels, folks. We've done all the legwork for you and put together the unhealthiest store-bought marinara sauces that you should be leaving on the shelf.

Store-bought pasta sauces have a knack for advertising their products with clever words that arguably imply they're rustic or more homemade, and therefore, containing potentially fewer ingredients. But it's important to separate fact from fiction. Emeril's Home Style Marinara Sauce is an excellent example of this. While "home style" might suggest that it's made in the manner that you'd make it in your own kitchen, it has a few additions you likely wouldn't make yourself.

The first is the level of sodium in this sauce. A ½-cup serving of Emeril's Home Style Marinara Sauce delivers 20% of your recommended daily sodium intake. When you consider that it does so while coming in at just 90 calories, which can be less than one-twentieth or lower of your advised daily caloric intake, you're getting a huge amount of sodium for not that much food.

And there's one other ingredient in Emeril's Home Style Marinara Sauce that you probably won't find in your own cupboard: soybean oil. While soybean oil is high in unsaturated fats, the type of unsaturated fats it contains are predominantly omega-6 fatty acids, which may increase the potential for inflammation throughout the body, per Mindbodygreen. This inflammation can be even worse if you're not getting enough of those all-important heart-healthy omega-3s.

Look, we're all for things being sweet and tasty. But it's entirely possible to have too much of a good thing, and that's unfortunately what the Francesco Rinaldi Sweet & Tasty Tomato Sauce seems to provide.

This marinara sauce has a pleasing deep red color and is flecked with green herbs, which might lead you to believe that it's somehow less processed than other, unnaturally-red sauces. But all that sweetness in Francesco Rinaldi Sweet & Tasty Tomato Sauce comes from a pretty big whack of sugar. Each portion of sauce has a pretty enormous 11 grams of sugar in it. For comparison's sake, that's a very slight bit more grams of sugar than you get in a Reese's Pieces Peanut Butter Cup (which has 10.6 grams) — and that's for a food that's meant to be savory, y'all. 

That's also a large amount of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It's also useful to remember that having too much sugar is not great for you, and consistently excessive amounts may contribute to conditions like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, via Healthline. And if that's the "sweet" part of this Sweet & Tasty Tomato Sauce covered, then the "tasty" part might be down to its higher sodium levels. A mere half-cup serving will see you eating 450 milligrams of sodium, which is a pretty hefty whack of salt in one go.

Anything that has "no sugar added" on its label is bound to be better for you than a product that doesn't announce its sugarless creds, right? That's arguably what Prego Traditional No Sugar Added Pasta Sauce is counting on people believing. And it's certainly true that its lack of added sugar brings its overall sugar content down slightly to six grams per serving, which is far from the worst-going in terms of marinara sauces.

But this store-bought brand is slightly less forthcoming about its sodium levels, which are unfortunately pretty high. Over a fifth of your recommended daily sodium intake is in a single serving of Prego Traditional No Sugar Added Pasta Sauce. And while jarred pasta sauce might be an occasional purchase for some, it's vital to remember what opting for high-sodium options regularly means in the long run. "Salt [added to food] is the major cause of high blood pressure, and high blood pressure is the major cause of death worldwide," warns Queen Mary University of London's professor of cardiovascular medicine Graham MacGregor, per Live Science. MacGregor adds that, "The evidence for salt [in causing premature death] is overwhelming, equivalent to the onus of smoking." The choices that we make when we're at the supermarket can affect us way more than we think — which is why it's always useful to check the labels of what you're buying, to ensure it fits into your lifestyle.

Newman's Own is an iconic brand, and its pasta sauces are the favored choice of countless customers across the United States. But what is actually in each jar? At first glance, things don't look too bad. Newman's Own proudly proclaims on its jars that it has "no added sugar," and that it contains extra virgin olive oil, which both seem like indicators of health and quality.

But all of this goodness comes at the expense of something else, and it's the marinara sauce's sodium levels. As pasta sauces go, Newman's Own Marinara Sauce is pretty salty, with every serving containing 490 milligrams per 124 grams of sauce. It's worth bearing in mind that this amount is almost a third of the quantity of sodium that we should be getting daily to keep our body in good health, and the average American eats far more than this, per WebMD. And eating too much sodium can, of course, have some pretty worrying consequences, with high blood pressure being one of them.

As well as trying to opt for lower-sodium foods (check the label on that marinara sauce jar, people, and maybe don't go for Newman's Own next time), you should always be on the lookout for warning signs of excessive sodium intake, like feeling bloated or puffy, lack of quality sleep, and needing to pee more. Start with steering clear of this marinara, though.

Everything about Classico's Organic Marinara Pasta Sauce screams wholesome. From the old-style jar and ridged lid, to the label portraying an idyllic countryside scene (accompanied by what looks like hand-drawn tomatoes, no less), to the "USDA Organic" watermark, this is a product that feels like it could be all killer, no filler.

It is filled, however, with salt. Of all of the store-bought marinara sauces available out there, Classico Organic Marinara Pasta Sauce has one of the highest sodium levels we've come across, with 530 milligrams in each serving. While the label states that this is provided by "sea salt," there's no getting around the fact that salt of any kind equates to sodium and the equally-important fact that too much sodium can be bad for your health. Pasta sauces like this one can frequently be sodium-packed, which is why it's so important to keep an eye on nutrition labels to find a lower-sodium option, says the NHS. If you do opt for a salty pasta sauce, you may want to consider where you could reduce sodium in other areas, or cut down on other commonly-salty foods like pizza, potato chips, and even sauces like ketchup or mayonnaise.