Question: I’ve decided to start meal planning again, as my recent experiences with food delivery boxes have been disappointing (poor-quality produce and meat etc). Are there any rules for how to make a good meal plan?
Answer: What’s for dinner tonight? This age-old question perplexes many a hungry person. Creating a weekly meal plan could solve both the daily dinner conundrum and improve your health, according to a 2017 study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.
Poor meal-planning ability and a lack of cooking skills can lead to habits such as buying highly processed meals and packaged frozen dinners. Although these processed meals are relatively inexpensive, they are typically higher in overall energy content, sugar, sodium and saturated fat, making them a less-nutritious option. Similarly, leaving dinner decisions until the last minute can lead to other less-nutritious food choices, such as buying fast food or takeaways.
And sadly, our modern tendency to rely on ultra-processed food may harm our health, according to a new study published in the journal eClinicalMedicine. Using data from more than 197,000 adults involved in the UK Biobank study, researchers identified links between greater consumption of ultra-processed foods and a higher risk of certain cancers, particularly ovarian cancer in women.
Ultra-processed foods tend to contain little or no identifiable whole foods as ingredients and include industrially derived food substances and additives. They are typically energy-dense, high in salt, sugar and fat and low in fibre. Examples include sweetened breakfast cereals compared with regular granola or homemade porridge, or flavoured snack bars containing processed grains such as popped rice, sweeteners and the like.
If the ingredients list for a product has few items identified as real foods then it is more likely that it fits into the category of ultra-processed rather than processed food.
By aiming to prepare homemade meals, we can improve our diet quality, given we control what ingredients and meals we eat. But given that many families have two working parents or are led by a single-working parent, time pressures around main meal preparation are real.
Meal planning – consciously deciding what to eat for the next few days – is one way to reduce the barriers to healthy eating for busy people, because those who decide in advance what to prepare for dinner are much more likely to cook homemade meals.
French researchers theorised that meal planning might encourage greater home-cooking preparation and benefit diet quality and health. Using participants in the NutriNet-Santé study, an ongoing web-based prospective study in France, they collected information on meal-planning practices and diet quality of more than 40,000 people. In findings published in the 2017 International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity study, they found people who planned their meals were more likely to stick with nutritional guidelines and eat a greater variety of food.
Although this was an observational study and cannot prove that creating and following a meal plan leads to healthier eating (it shows only a link between the two), there is reason to suspect it does. For starters, studies have found that more frequent food preparation in the home is consistently linked to better diet quality, and meal planning promotes more homemade meals.
A meal plan can evolve as seasonal food and your household’s tastes change. However, a far healthier approach to dining at home will remain. Plus, there’s the bonus of removing that weekday stress of deciding what’s for dinner.
Meal Planning Checklist
Create a meal plan for a few days, a week or even a fortnight. A fortnightly plan can probably be repeated without diners experiencing meal fatigue and then updated throughout the year to reflect seasonal changes.
- Choose a variety of protein sources for the week: eg, 2-3 red meat meals (maximum, for optimal health), 2-3 chicken, one seafood and one vegetarian. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, your plan will differ, so create what fits your food preferences.
- Chat with your household and write down a list of favourite meals. Use a spreadsheet or small whiteboard to assign the meal ideas to the various protein or vegetarian slots. Ideally, try alternating protein sources daily to prevent meal fatigue, eg, Monday - beef, Tuesday - chicken, etc.
- Check out recipe websites, cookbooks and social media for healthy recipes to fill the remaining spaces.
- Be intentional about including 3+ servings of vegetables and whole grains into your daily meals (ie, choose brown rather than white rice or potatoes with skins on).
- Aim to bulk-cook some meals to reduce your workload. For example, cook a double batch of beef casserole in a crockpot on Monday, save the second batch for a pie or shred into burritos on Wednesday, or freeze for the second week.
- Create a standard shopping list of the ingredients required for the weekly/fortnightly meal plan. Some great smartphone apps are now available that store recipes and automatically create shopping lists; this can significantly reduce the time and effort of meal planning, too.
