SACN Guidelines

Why Don’t We Treat Food Like We Treat Everything Else?

We get that we want to make up our own minds on what we eat. But surely we need a bit of information to help us choose what to put into our bodies?

When we buy a car – the manufacturer tells us what fuel it needs, i.e. diesel or petrol – we listen and that’s what we put into our car.

When we go to the doctor with a sore throat, they tell us what we need to take and do to get better – we listen and we do as we are advised.

Why is it different with nutrition and food?

It’s not!

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Expert Advice Exists – We Just Ignore It

The Government have specialists who have the unique ability to look at the bigger picture with what’s going on in the UK, NHS figures on health etc. They then issue Guidelines to help us make healthy choices – yet we choose not to listen – we know better, right?

No, we generally don’t!

It doesn’t hurt to at least look at the advice and make an informed decision about what we eat and what we feed our children, our elderly relatives or the infirm members of our family/circle.

Introducing the SACN Guidelines

This is where we introduce to you The SACN Guidelines (The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition).

They set out the guidelines on what each age group should eat.
Children are little balls of energy running everywhere and cannot sit still for one minute, their bodies are growing and developing. Adults could be sitting at a desk 8 hours a day. An adult with a manual job, on the go for 8 hours a day. The elderly who do not get around as much and sit for many hours a day.

Common sense tells you that they will all need different nutrition.

view the guidelines

Meals That Match Real Needs

We take this advice very seriously and our children’s range is designed to ensure we get 1/3 of a child’s daily requirements of Macronutrients into each of our meals – for every age group, one size does not fit all.

Many food suppliers will supply one size dish to cover ages 1–10 – this does not work at all. How can you serve the same portion size to an 18-month-old and then to a 10-year-old? You can’t!

Macronutrients are the nutrients that a child needs in large portions every day – so Protein, Calories, Carbohydrates, Good fats – while keeping the bad stuff like Salt, Sugar and Saturated fats as low as possible.

Different Ages, Different Needs

In a hospital setting a children’s ward can range from 0–18. Serving a 16-year-old young adult the same size meal as a toddler just doesn’t cut it.

In a school setting the ages range from 4–16 – again, a meal cannot be the same size for all.

Caterers tend to take the easy route and we understand why. To feed sometimes up to 1,000 patients or pupils in each setting can be extremely hard – which is why we have made it so easy for them to follow our serving guides with correct portion sizes for each age group.

Handmade, Clean, Honest Food

Our adult range has been arrived at with important input from our own and our clients’ dieticians and is always a work in progress to improve where we can.

Our meals are handmade and we never add any salt or sugar – ever. Salt and sugar are in most things we eat, even the things you would not expect to find them in, so we do not need to add any more.

Our recipes are clean with no nasties – just good old-fashioned ingredients and lots of herbs and spices to give them flavour without the salt or additives.

Real Meals, Not Ultra-Processed

Ready meals generally get a bad rep – and we see why, as many of them are ultra-processed and full of salt and sugar. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Our meals are made in just bigger kitchens with bigger pots and pans, prepared and cooked by real people, not machines.

This, along with good ingredients and then blast freezing to trap in the nutrients (as opposed to ultra-processing to give the meals a shelf life), means that when it comes out of the freezer it is in exactly the same condition it was in before it went in – a healthy, tasty meal.

Let’s Go Back to the Car Analogy

Would you expect your car to run correctly on the wrong fuel? Would you expect it to run properly with water in the tank?

Of course not – yet we do this every day to our bodies. We eat too many fatty foods and gain too much weight. We stop eating to lose weight and deprive our body of its fuel. We read an article that says something is bad for you – we listen to sometimes unfounded claims – yet we do not take advice from fully equipped people in the know – SACN.