14 Of The Unhealthiest Lean Cuisine Frozen Meals
When it comes to frozen meals that appear to be healthy, Lean Cuisine is king. The Nestlé-owned brand has been supplying lower-calorie, lower-fat microwaveable meals to customers for over 40 years, and in that time it's racked up dozens of flavors to choose from. With a mission that seeks to supply nutritious meals at high speed, Lean Cuisine meals are designed to clock in at under 400 calories, with recipes created by dietitians in order to give you the best nutritional bang for your buck. Many of its meal options are also intended to cater to specific diets, with gluten-free and low-carb options, as well as meals verified by the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association as fitting in with their respective nutritional guidelines.
However, while many Lean Cuisine meals are undeniably healthier than some other frozen meal options available at the supermarket, some aren't as impressive as you might think. Lean Cuisine meals can be high in sodium or heavily processed, and can be heavily reliant on refined grains like white rice or pasta, which have little nutritional value. In this article, we selected unhealthier options in Lean Cuisine's range by highlighting its highest-sodium and highest-sugar offerings, as well as looking at choices that are low in fiber or protein, or appear to be overly processed.
1. Lean Cuisine Steak Portabella
With a visually appealing box that has a picture of vibrant green broccoli, hearty mushrooms, and protein-rich steak, it's difficult at first glance to see why the Steak Portabella is unhealthy. And it's fair to say that it does have a few benefits going for it. The meal has only 190 calories, and while that may not be particularly filling, this can be appealing to folks looking for a lower-calorie option. Additionally, the Lean Cuisine Steak Portabella only has 10 grams of carbs which, again, may be useful for individuals on a low-carb diet plan.
However, it's the sodium content that really raises eyebrows. There are almost 800 milligrams of sodium in a comparatively small amount of food, covering roughly a third of your recommended daily value. Sodium is, of course, important for providing taste to foods, as well as helping our bodies and their nervous and muscular systems operate properly (per the Harvard School of Public Health). But excessive amounts of sodium can put strain on your cardiovascular system, and lead to high blood pressure, with potential knock-on effects like stroke. It's also worth noting that while this meal advertises itself as a "good source of protein," it provides 14 grams. That's not a tiny amount, but you could reasonably expect more in a low-carb meal like this.
2. Lean Cuisine Baked Chicken
Using lean, white-meat chicken and cooking it with a low-fat baking method might not sound unhealthy. Unfortunately, though, this Lean Cuisine meal falls rather short nutritionally. The main issue with Lean Cuisine Baked Chicken is that it's devoid of almost any fiber, with just two grams in each serving. This is hardly surprising, considering it's accompanied by mashed potatoes, which aren't very fiber-rich, but it isn't ideal.
It's recommended that adult males get around 38 grams of fiber per day, with 25 grams for adult females. Hitting this intake can provide you with a range of health benefits. A solid amount of fiber in your diet can help with weight management, thanks to its satiating effect, and it can also keep blood sugar and blood pressure in check (via Medical News Today).
As well as being low in fiber, Lean Cuisine Baked Chicken is also concerning for another reason — its ultra-long ingredients list. The quantity of its ingredients indicates how processed this food item is, and folks who're looking to eat a diet without unnecessary additives or preservatives may want to steer clear. There are some pretty curious items on the ingredients list too, including instant coffee.
3. Lean Cuisine Comfort Beef Pot Roast
Few recipes are more comforting than a good old-fashioned pot roast. But in the case of the Lean Cuisine Comfort Beef Pot Roast, you may not be as comforted by its nutritional information. Despite being full of beef, this frozen meal is surprisingly low in protein, containing just 14 grams per serving. As such, it may not be as filling as some of Lean Cuisine's other options, especially considering its relatively low fiber content.
There's also another reason to avoid the Lean Cuisine Comfort Beef Pot Roast, and that's because of its sugar content. Each portion of food has seven grams of sugar in it. This, unfortunately, is a common trait of foods that market themselves as being lower in fat or healthier; low-fat food options can frequently be higher in sugar, as well as sodium, due to the manufacturer's trying to create flavor that's lost by the removal of oil and butter. Unfortunately, not only can this fail to have the desired effect — these food items are often still pretty flavorless — but it can also raise your sugar intake beyond what you'd like, and cause your blood sugar to rise too.
4. Lean Cuisine Marketplace Chicken Teriyaki Stir Fry
Stir-fries are generally considered to be pretty healthy meals, thanks to the super-fast frying style not requiring too much oil and helping to lock nutrients into your vegetables. Frozen stir-fries, on the other hand, may be a different story, and the Lean Cuisine Marketplace Chicken Teriyaki Stir Fry proves this. This frozen meal strays into unhealthy territory due to its high levels of sugar, containing 13 grams per serving. This appears to be supplied by both brown sugar and regular sugar in the teriyaki sauce, which gives it sweetness.
It's important to remember that brown sugar doesn't have any nutritional benefits over regular sugar, as its brownness simply comes from mixing molasses into white sugar granules, and not from any fiber, vitamin, or mineral content. Additionally, the simple sugars provided in the Lean Cuisine Marketplace Chicken Teriyaki Stir Fry may contribute to a rise in blood sugar, followed by a blood sugar crash. This can be exacerbated by the relative lack of fiber in the dish, with the frozen dinner containing just three grams per serving, a pretty small amount for a food item designed as a main meal.
5. Lean Cuisine Favorites Cheddar Potatoes with Broccoli
Lean Cuisine meals are designed for people who are keeping an eye on their calorie intake — but at the same time, its recipes are often a spin on hearty classics that seem as though they'd still satisfy your appetite. This is arguably precisely what it's going for with its Favorites Cheddar Potatoes with Broccoli option.
With only 220 calories and a meager nine grams of protein, this main meal won't just leave you hungry but will leave your body wanting for some of its most crucial nutrients. Getting enough protein helps to maintain hunger and manage blood sugar fluctuations, which can contribute to an increase in appetite. But it also underpins basically every maintenance process our body has, with the nutrient helping to build everything from our smallest cells to our biggest muscles. Crucially, if we don't get sufficient amounts of protein, our body starts to resort to using our muscles for fuel. This can cause our muscles to become smaller and weaker. Given that we should be consuming roughly 15-30 grams of protein in every meal, this Lean Cuisine option will leave you wanting.
6. Lean Cuisine Marketplace Cheese Tortellini with Red Pepper Sauce
One of the most attractive things about Lean Cuisine is that it seems to offer folks a chance to enjoy their favorite foods healthily. However, it's worth questioning how much more healthy some of its choices, like its Marketplace Cheese Tortellini with Red Pepper Sauce, actually are. This frozen option still manages to pack 3.5 grams of saturated fat into its teeny 219-gram serving size. In addition, it also doesn't provide a huge amount of protein per portion, containing just 12 grams. It's also got a quarter of your daily value for sodium in one meal, and not much fiber at all.
Saturated fats, it should be remembered, can have a different health effect than other types, like monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. When eaten in high quantities, saturated fats can cause a rise in LDL cholesterol, which collects in your blood vessels and can be a risk factor for heart disease, per MedlinePlus. Additionally, fat is more calorie-dense than other types of nutrients, which means that making dietary choices that embrace high-fat options may see you consuming more calories than you would for the same amount of high-protein food. Essentially, while this pasta dish has a low-calorie count overall, it's important to think about where those calories are coming from.
7. Lean Cuisine Protein Kick Ricotta Cheese and Spinach Ravioli
One of Lean Cuisine's product lines, its "Protein Kick" range, appears to be targeted purely at folks who are looking to get more protein into their diets. So it's pretty strange that its Protein Kick Ricotta Cheese and Spinach Ravioli option doesn't really have that much protein at all. With 10 grams per portion, it's not devoid of the nutrient — but plenty of other Lean Cuisine meals have far more while not being marketed as high-protein, making this item more suitable as a snack than a main course.
Importantly, too, this meal is as rich in sugar as it is in protein, with 10 grams in total, including four grams of added sugar. These sugars amount to almost 10% of your daily value, despite this being a savory option. Luckily, the combination of the protein and the sugar makes the latter's effects on blood sugar less drastic, as protein helps to control the absorption of glucose into the bloodstream, but we can't help but think that having less sugar and more protein might have been a slightly wiser move for this meal.
8. Lean Cuisine Protein Kick Pepperoni Pizza
A pepperoni pizza that also has the word "lean" on its packaging sounds a little too good to be true. Unfortunately, in the Lean Cuisine option's case, it is, with the flavor coming from somewhere else entirely. The Lean Cuisine Protein Kick Pepperoni Pizza packs an impressive amount of protein into its portion size, with 21 grams — and with just three grams of saturated fat, it's also fairly low-fat. But it also has a massive 860 milligrams of sodium in each serving. That's almost 40% of your recommended daily intake in one go.
We're willing to bet, too, that a lot of that sodium comes from the pepperoni slices on top of the pizza. Pepperoni is a processed meat, making it a type of food that's been proven to have potentially detrimental effects on health when eaten long-term. Processed meat's high concentration of salt and preservatives can increase the risk of breast, prostate, colorectal, and pancreatic cancer (per UCLA Health), with a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition also finding a link between processed meat consumption and dementia. Instead, it's a good idea to try and find your protein from lean, unprocessed sources.
9. Lean Cuisine Five Cheese Rigatoni
Five different types of cheese in a Lean Cuisine meal sounds like a pretty good deal until you take a closer look at the nutritional content of this meal. With four grams of saturated fat per serving, the Lean Cuisine Five Cheese Rigatoni is one of the fattiest options in the company's product line. And while, at 360 calories, it may still be lower in calories and fat than a comparable frozen meal that doesn't focus on health, it's important to remember that there could be leaner options out there.
Furthermore, this option is unlikely to keep you that full for long, containing only 14 grams of protein. With almost 700 milligrams of sodium, it's also on the higher end of the salty scale for Lean Cuisine's meals. To top it all off, there are three grams of added sugars. These sugars are usually added to meals to give a flavor boost, especially when they've been processed and packaged to be frozen, but even small amounts can add up throughout your day, with excessive added sugar intake contributing to a host of health issues like type 2 diabetes and obesity (via the CDC).
10. Lean Cuisine Chicken Parmesan
Lean Cuisine's promise to keep its meals under 400 calories means that it has a few meals that nudge up against this limit, and its Chicken Parmesan is one of them. With 380 calories, it's one of the more calorific among its options. Importantly though, this isn't necessarily a bad thing — most adults need somewhere between 1,600 – 3,000 calories daily — but if you're following a calorie-controlled diet, it could be worth going for a different option.
In our eyes, the Chicken Parmesan is unhealthy for a different reason, and that's its sodium content. Each portion has 790 milligrams of sodium, accounting for over a third of your daily value. Elevated salt is unfortunately common in processed foods like this one, and so trying to limit it by reducing the amount of processed frozen meals you eat can be a smart move. Additionally, the Lean Cuisine Chicken Parmesan also contains four grams of saturated fat, which is a pretty high amount for a "lean" meal. To top it all off, it also has four grams of added sugars thrown in, all adding up to a fairly unhealthy dinner.
11. Lean Cuisine Chicken in Sweet BBQ Sauce
Unless your food achieves sweetness through low-calorie artificial sweeteners (which come with their own question marks about healthiness), it's pretty likely that the flavor is coming from sugar. That's exactly the case in the Lean Cuisine Chicken in Sweet BBQ Sauce. Each meal has 11 grams of sugar, four of which are added. These sugars come from various different sauces, including regular sugar, molasses, and maltodextrin, a highly processed, intensely sweet carb that's been found to disrupt gut health (via MedicineNet).
Elsewhere, this meal doesn't win many other points for healthiness. Aside from potassium, it doesn't seem to contain many vitamins or minerals at all. It also has a low amount of fiber, just two grams per serving, with the carbohydrate content coming in the form of starchy mashed potatoes. As well as sugar, there's also a substantial amount of salt, with the meal offering 630 milligrams of sodium. The proverbial cherry on top is that it also contains 3.5 grams of saturated fat.
12. Lean Cuisine Glazed Turkey Tenderloins
Turkey is one of the healthiest meat choices out there, with the poultry both lean and nutrient-packed. However, the healthiness of turkey can be largely negated when you're putting it in meals that are swimming with sugar or fat. Unfortunately, in the case of Lean Cuisine Glazed Turkey Tenderloins, it's the former that really makes a mark.
Each portion of this frozen meal has a huge 24 grams of sugar, way more than pretty much every other Lean Cuisine meal out there. This means that over half of the total carbohydrate count of 47 grams is comprised of sugar alone. Ten of these grams of sugar are added, too, accounting for 20% of the FDA's recommended daily value for added sugars in a meal that's only 300 calories. Bear in mind that this daily value is much higher than recommendations from other health organizations of how much added sugar we should be eating, like the American Heart Association, which advises that women should eat no more than 25 grams daily. As well as this, while you might expect a meal that places protein at its center to be rich in the nutrient, it might surprise you to learn that this frozen dinner only has 14 grams per serving.
13. Lean Cuisine Tortilla Crusted Fish
Lean Cuisine Tortilla Crusted Fish is the brand's take on a breaded fillet, and to the casual customer, it appears to be pretty good for you. The label promises 320 calories of food with just 440 milligrams of sodium and a mere two grams of saturated fat. Look a bit closer though, and you'll start to see the issues. The tortilla crust, made from yellow tortilla chips and enriched wheat flour, is almost entirely lacking in fiber. In the whole meal, you'll get just two grams of the essential nutrient — and because fiber can slow down digestion, causing food to remain in your stomach longer, this means that you'll be ready to eat again pretty quickly after your meal.
We're also not in love with the length of the Lean Cuisine Tortilla Crusted Fish's ingredients list. There are well over 80 individual ingredients shown on the label, all of which are going into a package that weighs 226 grams. A long ingredients list like this indicates that a food product is highly processed, and potentially made with cheap ingredients that are lacking in nutritional value. Unfortunately, that appears to be the case here when you look at the vitamin and mineral content, which is fairly lacking.
14. Lean Cuisine Korean-Style Beef and Vegetables
A meal containing an abundance of vibrantly-colored vegetables and super-healthy brown rice can't be that bad, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, the Lean Cuisine Korean-Style Beef and Vegetables somewhat ruins its healthy credentials through having an amped-up sugar content. There are a massive 12 grams of added sugars in this small meal, making up the majority of the 15 grams total in the dish. For women, this could represent nearly half of the amount you should be eating in a full day.
The fiber content of this meal is also pretty surprising. While brown rice is usually high in fiber, here that nutrient is nowhere to be seen, with just two grams per serving. This could be, unfortunately, because there just isn't much brown rice in the finished product, or because the fiber has been somehow reduced by the processing that the meal undergoes. Either way, you'd probably be better off cooking your own beef stir fry at home, serving fresh brown rice, and limiting the amount of sugar you add in, instead of opting for this meal.