Healthy Food Choices: Microwave Dinners

Microwave meals can be high in sodium, calories and fat. Learn how to keep your microwave and stay healthy in this video.

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Microwave dinners can be high in sodium, calories & fat
Look for tomato sauces & vegetables
Check the serving size

About this Author

Alice Merritt is currently the Campus Dietitian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has a masters degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public health with a concentration on nutrition. Alice has worked as a registered dietician for four years, and believes that helping people reach their nutritional goals will lead to a long and healthy life.

ALICE MERRITT: Now I'm going to talk to you about microwave dinners. Microwaveable dinners can be really helpful when we're in a hurry and on the go. But you want to be careful because a lot of microwave dinners are high in sodium, calories and fat. One thing to look for when you're looking at microwaveable dinner is to look for things that are in tomato sauces, have a lot of vegetables in them, brown rice, whole wheat pasta. Another thing you want to pay attention to is the serving size. A lot of times, things are packaged in what we would think would be 1 serving but if we look at the nutrition label, it actually could be 2 or 3 servings per package. Other things you can do increase the healthiness of microwaveable meals is cook the microwaveable meal and then add in some vegetables with it. Add a side salad, add sweet potato. All these things can increase the nutrition content and make microwaveable meals more healthy. Important things to remember about microwaveable dinners is you really want to investigate the nutrition label. You want to look for things that are lower in sodium, lower in calories and lower in fat. It's also helpful if you can look for something that's a single serving, unless you're serving a group or a family. Another thing that's helpful about microwaveable meals is if you make an excess of casseroles or have leftovers, if you freeze those, they actually become very healthy, quick microwaveable meals in themselves. These are some healthy tips to follow when looking at microwaveable meals.

Healthy Food Choices: Microwave Dinners Video

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