What's really in takeaway foodWhat's in a takeaway meal

Takeaways tested for calories, sugar, fats and salt

What we found

You can see our detailed findings by type of meal over the next few pages, but overall we found:

• Healthy options weren’t always obvious.
• The same meal cooked by different takeaways or sold by different supermarkets varied widely in nutritional content. This applied particularly to the Indian and Chinese takeaways. These tend to be independent outlets that use their own recipes.
• The fat content in pizzas from chain outlets was sometimes quite different from the information on their website.
• Supermarket meals cost more than 50% less than the takeaway versions. On average, they also had slightly fewer calories per portion (see ‘Our research’ for an explanation of the portion sizes that we used). But our taste test suggests that what you save in money and calories you may sometimes lose in taste.

Trans fats

Trans fats, also known as hydrogenated fat, are added to food to increase shelf life, but they increase blood cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. It’s recommended that they should make up no more than 2% of the calories you eat. For someone on 2,000 kcals a day, this is 5g of trans fats. 

There were trans fats in our takeaways, but not more than 1.5g in our portions.

The six supermarkets that we looked at say they don’t use trans fats in any of their ready meals.

Why did Which? do this research?

Naan can have a thick layer of butter on it

Did you know that a single Indian takeaway can contain more saturated fat, and a Chinese meal more sugar, than you should eat in a whole day?

Finding out facts such as these is quite difficult for consumers. Takeaways large and small aren’t legally required to give you any information about the nutritional content of their food.

However, some pizza chains do have information on their websites, though not at the point of sale.

So we decided to find out about nutritional content for you. We tested Chinese, Indian and pizza takeaways to see how many calories and how much sugar, fat, saturated fat and salt they contained. 

We then compared the results with details given on the packaging of equivalent supermarket meals.