Healthy Choice Café Steamers

I don't purchase many Healthy Choice meals for review because I have generally found them to be so awful. I was encouraged by their new line of Café Steamers, however. These are unique bowls that have the sauce in the bottom and the food in a little plastic steamer basket sitting in the bowl. You cook the food in the microwave and the sauce steams the food in the basket above.

The package of Cajun Style Chicken and Shrimp also has the little "heart check" symbol from the American Heart Association. This means that the product meets certain criteria for fat, calories, sodium, etc. that make it "heart healthy." It's a shame that they don't take into consideration whether the food is any good. But the program is a blanket one that food manufacturers pay for that allows them to put the symbol on any product that meets criteria. The program is not an independent critical review, as it should be, but a scheme to raise money for the American Heart Association.

And this product is not edible. It shouldn't be endorsed by anyone. The chicken tastes like the chicken that I had in those awful frozen pot pies as a kid. The shrimp are tiny little tasteless bullets with the texture of rubber bands. The sauce is an ugly super-sweet tomatoey mess that is nothing like Cajun. Ugh!

My greatest scorn for this product (it really is that bad) is the rice. First of all, it's white rice that tastes like Minute Rice. The processed flavor dominates the rest of the meal and (amazingly) much of the rice was actually undercooked. With what we know now, white rice really shouldn't be considered "heart healthy" by the foremost heart healthy organization in the world.

Back to the drawing board for Healthy Choice. More importantly, back to the research for the American Heart Association. Change the criteria to include more lots more veggies, more fiber, high quality carbohydrates and please, oh please, some review of the actual edibility of a product.

Eat well, eat healthy, enjoy life!

Timothy S. Harlan, M.D.
Dr. Gourmet