Make it healthy: A chicken pot pie, without preservatives
Grocery stores are packed with products that may tout convenience, but contain ingredients that aren’t healthy. Today, we highlight Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie.
Back when I was little, I remember going to Marie Callender’s with my mom. I’d always order New England clam chowder along with cornbread, never thinking to order the Heartland Chicken Pot Pie. Over time, with the help of ConAgra Foods, Marie Callender’s began a line of frozen foods, offering all manner of cook-and-eat meals, including chicken pot pies.
Mariecallendersmeals.com says, “Marie Callender’s is more than a brand. It’s a philosophy, born from the real-life experiences of Marie Callender herself. … Marie learned the joy that came from sharing a good meal made from wholesome ingredients, and realized that something as simple as sitting down to dinner could strengthen the fabric of family and friendship.”
Unfortunately, those wholesome ingredients become something else in this convenient version. This chicken pot pie may have “white-meat chicken, carrots, celery and peas” along with a flaky crust, but the 10-ounce pie is also a fat-sodium bomb. (I shudder to think about the 16.5-ounce size that’s offered.)
One-fourth of your entire day’s calories is spent on this 10-ounce pie. Recommended total fat consumed in a day for the average person is 65 grams and this product has 38 g — of which 14 g are artery-clogging saturated fat. (It’s suggested you have up to 20 g a day.) Blood pressure-conscious eaters should also beware: This pot pie contains almost half of the sodium the average person should consume in a day (1,000 mg of a recommended less than 2,400 mg).
And that’s just the beginning. Other terrible ingredients include autolyzed yeast extract (which contains monsodium glutamate), hydrogenated soybean oil (read: trans fat) and, an ingredient I wasn’t familiar with: “interesterified soybean oil.”
In 2006, when the Food and Drug Administration required the listing of unhealthy trans fat on labels, companies began replacing it with another chemically modified oil that acted like trans fat — interesterified oil. Since then, studies have shown that this type of oil decreases good HDL and increases bad LDL cholesterol levels — just like trans fat. The best advice? Avoid it and other products that list “high in stearic acid” or “stearate rich.
Authors David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding of Eat This, Not That book fame include carrageenan and caramel color on their list of “Top 10 Scariest Food Additives.”
Carrageenan, a thickener and emulsifier, “has been linked to cancer, colon trouble and ulcers.” And, according to the authors, caramel color, when produced with ammonia, “puts off 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, chemicals that have been linked to cancer in mice. The risk is strong enough that the California government, a bellwether for better food regulation, categorized 4-methylimidazole as ‘known to cause cancer’ earlier this year. Unfortunately, companies aren’t required to disclose whether their coloring is made with ammonia, so you’d be wise to avoid it as much as you can.”
I share Marie Callender’s opinion that sitting down and eating with your family is extremely important. I, however, will be enjoying Mrs. Hering’s (see recipe) chicken pot pies with my family, not ConAgra’s.
If you’d like a healthier substitute for a processed food in your pantry, email your request to [email protected].
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