Say you got a different one each day with veggies, and for the rest of the day you eat a variety of whole wheat bread, yoghurt, some fruits. Would eating a frozen dinner each day throw a wrench in the works?
Generally speaking, most ready made microwave dinners are terrible: salty, fatty, unhealthy-y.
However, two things:
There are lots of generalizations here. If you’re referring to a traditional crap meal that we all grew up with, it is going to be unhealthy. But in recent history there are many healthy options available. If you don’t believe me go to a nice grocery store in an affluent neighborhood and check out all of the options. Many don’t have preservatives or a ridiculous amount of sodium in them. But they are often expensive. I think there are “healthy choice” options that are legitimate as well. So could you make it work and eat healthy off of these meals? Sure. You would waste money and be limited in your options, but it could absolutely be done. But it would be better to just learn how to plan and cook and do that instead for several reasons.
Impossible to say without knowing specifically what dinner you’re having and what your definition of healthy is.
Microwave dinners are packed full of preservatives, which aren’t the healthiest of substances in large quantities. But could you survive on them without developing a deficiency? Probably.
For survival, you can. For long-term cardiovascular health, you shouldn’t. They contain very high amounts of salt. One I recently checked was just a basic pasta + bolognese sauce combo, it had 4.6 grams of salt vs the 5 grams maximum recommended daily intake, and that’s not even including the additional 1-2 g of salt per slice of bread you’d get the rest of your day (not to mention cheese, ham, snacks, etc.) The quality of the fats used is terrible, too (saturated fats, trans fats from hydrogenated oils). If you only have access to a microwave to prepare your meals, you can still do frozen veggie mixes to which you can add your own seasonings, frozen lentils or chickpeas, sweet potatoes and regular potatoes which you cook in their own skin, you can cook meat or fish, and even poach eggs in the microwave.
I have Celiac’s disease. So in college the food court had to offer some sort of option for me and the handful of other allergy kids. It was a cheap public university with pretty subpar food to begin with. All there offered the allergy kids was a fridge and freezer in the back filled with frozen allergy kids meals.
So I basically did just live off frozen meals for dinner for two years. However, these were usually Annie’s or some other type of slightly health conscious microwaveable meals.
Well, this is like a solid 75% of what /r/mealprepsunday is about.
Now, if you mean store bought and at a specific pricepoint such as costing less than $4.99 a meal, then your options are a lot more limited. Good ones are likely to push you to $10-15 per meal, which adds up fast if you do it every day. $50 a week, $2600 a year.
If you’re willing to prep your own microwave meals the sky is the limit. Tons of people meal prep dishes ready to microwave and it’s typically not different than what you put on your plate. Make a pot of beans, pot of rice, mixed veggies, portion them into a dish, stick it in the freezer or fridge and now you have a healthy microwave meal.
What kind of question is that? it is the year 2022, are there really still people out there who think a microwave is something bad for your health or something “evil”? No it does not give you cancer, no it does not destroy vitamins. Obviously it depends what you put in there of food, if it is unhealthy fast food, or healthy food you cook.
Most likely unhealthy. There are exceptions but healthy microwave dinners are very expensive due to the cost of preparing and preserving food in a healthy way, it’s highly unlikely to be healthy unless you paying a hefty price from a local operation you know the process of.
I have terrible depression and sometimes for weeks at a stretch all I can manage is microwaved food. BUT bags of frozen, pre-chopped vegetables are like a dollar a pound at smiths. I add a half a pound of frozen squash to my microwaved pasta and call it a meal. Broccoli to Chinese food, carrots to American food, etc.
My spouse and I each have several chronic health conditions and I’ve been looking for microwave dinners that are healthy. I haven’t really been able to find any. They all contain one of the following: too much salt, too much oil, too much sugar or other refined carbs, or too much meat. And some of the ones that are somewhat-healthy are super expensive for a tiny portion.
In theory the diet your describe is healthier than a lot of diets though. As long as your nightly dinners aren’t super greasy or sugary.
WTF is healthy when already almost everyone dies of cancer? We haven’t figured health out yet in my opinion. But microwave dinners all day are gonna for sure gonna make you one of the unhealthiest among imo already unhealthy people.
You will not be healthy if you eat microwave dinners every day. You will be alive, but your digestive system will quit the team. Your cholesterol will be out of control. Your arteries will start slamming shut. You will be irritable and unhappy, impatient and lethargic. Overall, your quality of life will tank and you will become vulnerable to many diseases you otherwise wouldn’t have been.
Look, in the year 1800, our ancestors had less than a 5% chance of becoming obese. They ate red meat, potatoes, butter, sugar, tons of carbs, tons of omega-6s. All the stuff that’s bad for you. But they were far more active than we are. And they weren’t consuming animals that ate plastic bags in their feed. And they didn’t eat laboratory foods either, like Yellow 5.
I will say, though, that modern-day France is a bit of an anomaly. French people eat like shit. They eat tons of carbs and cheeses, etc. Lots of sweets. But their health overall is pretty good, and they have low obesity rates in France. This is known among nutrition scientists as the French Paradox. There are some theories as to why it exists, one of them being the amount of alcohol they consume in France. Not too much, but not too little either.
Either way, it’s been well documented that frozen microwave dinners are terrible for your health, so I wouldn’t experiment on your health with them if I were you. You’re going to get fatter and sicker. The end.