healthy ready meals

We all love to treat ourselves at Christmas. Friends, family and food are a potent mixture, which makes it irresistibly easy to keep reaching for your next mouthful. All of this adds up, which has led to the average UK Christmas dinner being one of the unhealthiest in the world. It can be different with Oakhouse Foods… While it’s something of an open secret, every year there’s always a new study released, detailing exactly what our indulgence adds up to. One of the most recent has totalled our festive food intake at 7,000 calories on Christmas day alone! An average person will consume the following:

Confused about all the ways you can keep your heart healthy? We’ve got the perfect guide! We constantly hear that it’s important to look after your heart but the advice is numerous and it can be difficult to keep track of it all. Check our handy guide for a breakdown of how you can easily maintain a healthy heart.

As the nights draw in and we begin to feel a cold snap in the evenings, it’s clear that autumn is on the way, and along with it the start of cold and flu season. Did you know that the food choices you make now could help you fight off the coughs and sniffles later on in the year? Now is the time to start boosting your immune system for winter. Eating certain, vitamin and mineral rich foods is one of the easiest ways to give yourself a fighting chance against the inevitable germs that come your way in the autumn in winter.

 There has been a large increase in demand for meals to be made without certain ingredients to cater for a wide variety of dietary requirements due to a heightened level of awareness of allergens. However, due to the increase in demand, manufacturers and re-sellers have cottoned on to this; in turn increasing prices for the customer. Thanks to this almost unscrupulous move by the providers to wring more profit from this sector, the gross worth of this market has increased by almost £600 million in only 5 years; now worth an astonishing £806 million.

Do people with diabetes need a special diet? Not according to the Food Standards Agency. New guidance is revealing that following a healthy diet is now enough to help combat the effects of diabetes. Essentially this means that all “suitable for diabetics” labelling and diabetic meal plans will be replaced with the same diet advice that applies to everyone, whether they have diabetes or not. Leading diabetes organisations say that having a balanced diet is the healthiest approach to managing the disease, and you should aim to eat a variety of food from the following groups:

Eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is something that we’ve had drummed into us for as long as we can remember. A new study could be about to change all of this… The study from the University College London examined the diet and lifestyle of 65,000 men and women between 2001 and 2013. The conclusion? Those who ate seven or more portions of fruit and veg a day were reaping in the health benefits. Their overall risk of death was lowered by 42%, while the risk of dying of cancer was slashed by 25%. These figures are in addition to the existing five-a-day benefits, such as a lower risk of stroke, obesity and type 2 diabetes.