13 Unhealthiest Frozen Pasta Meals You Can Buy At The Grocery Store

There's often no sense in assembling a pasta-based meal from scratch when there's a cool world of frozen pasta meals available to do the prep work for you. These solutions for reluctant home cooks replace even easy weeknight pasta recipes with creations that require no more labor than opening the box, pulling back the label, and baking until hot and bubbly. Though they certainly cut down on the trouble-taking that preparing a fully homecooked meal entails, one problem many frozen pasta meals don't solve is the issue of providing nutritious fare with minimal kitchen labor. In fact, they often make the situation even more dicey.

Checking in on the world of frozen pasta meals, we found an array of dishes that load diners up with a mix of calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, and sometimes sugar that can make cautious diners throw down their forks in frustration. We've isolated a selection of the worst offenders, meals that top out on the less-desirable elements as they pile on the dangerously delicious pasta flavors. Some stick a noodle or two over the line, while others leap right into the deep end of poor nutrition decisions. We'll explain more about our methodology at the end, but for now here are some of the unhealthiest frozen pasta meals you can buy at the grocery store.

The queen of the single-serving frozen pasta meal, Michelina's mimics an Italian nonna's beloved recipes for the microwave dinner age. This company's green box has become an unavoidable presence in the solo-meal freezer section, offering a simple path to hot dining for office lunches and trouble-free dinners. Though some offerings are mindful of fat and calories, options like Mac & Sharp Cheddar seem to take the opposite approach, providing comfort food with virtually no redeeming nutritional qualities whatsoever.

One microwavable package of this mac attack means you'll be gobbling down 310 calories, and 15 grams of fat, seven of which are saturated and equate to 35% of your total daily allowance. There are also 35 milligrams of cholesterol (12% of what you should have in a day) and 920 milligrams of sodium (40% of your 24-hour consumption). If you've ever had one of these modestly-priced meals, you'll know that the modest flavor makes none of this nutritional fumbling worth the trouble. Steer clear.

Of all the convenient Stouffer's frozen entrées on the market, the Large Family Size Meat Lovers Lasagna Frozen Meal is the one that feels the most family friendly, perhaps because pasta, meat, sauce and cheese layered into a lasagna is one of life's truest pleasures. In this case, a single slice of this comfort food classic will afford you 320 calories, with 16 grams of fat coming along for the ride. Of those fat grams, seven are saturated, representing 35% of what you should be eating in an entire day. There are also 45 milligrams of cholesterol and 690 milligrams of sodium. That's a whole lot of disregard for your physical well-being in one meal.

If you're looking for satisfying pasta meals to feed your family, consider their health ahead of their enjoyment and walk away from this gargantuan error in nutritional judgment. It may be meant to feed a household, but that doesn't mean you should let it feed yours, especially if you have watching over their health high on your to-do list.

Legend has it, if you sing "Rigatoni Bolognese" as an operatic run, the ghost of Luciano Pavarotti will appear at your table and offer you fresh parm. All opera ghost jokes aside, Marie Callender's serves up a blight on your plans for longevity with this attractive dish, a deep-freeze pasta bowl that puts all the wrong ingredients in all the right places. Luckily, every box contains a map leading you through the labyrinth of nutritional switchbacks and dead ends, in the form of the nutrition facts on the back.

Consulting the digits on the back of this package, we find a gobsmacking 480 calories per bowl. Swirled up among the sauce and the slow-simmered beef Bolognese are 15 grams of fat (six of which are saturated), and a too-generous sodium shake totaling 1130 milligrams. And if there's meat in the recipe, there's bound to be cholesterol there too, and in this instance there's 30 milligrams of that. Call baloney on this rigatoni and find something better to dine on.

Panera is known more for comfort food than nutritional fare, and when the company offers a frozen pasta meal, you can bet it adheres closely to the template set forth by the menu in the restaurant. Which is why you won't find Panera Chicken Caprese on the food pyramid anytime soon — or anytime later, for that matter.

As a single-serving bowl meant to be enjoyed as a solo meal, this mix of shells, chicken, and sauce will add 400 calories to your tally for the day, introducing 12 grams of fat into the conversation, seven of which are saturated. And don't forget the 85 milligrams of cholesterol and 960 milligrams of sodium that help fill up your nutritional bingo card too. It may look creamy and delicious on the box, but eating this caprese concoction equates to playing chicken with your health. Put the fork down and back away from the table, you can find better things to eat than this.

Lasagna is such a rich stack of nutritional questionability that it's impossible to imagine it could ever be a healthy choice when assembled in its most processed form. Michael Angelo's Lasagna is an artful concoction that piles it on thick, giving lovers of hearty homestyle dining something to sink their teeth into. It all sounds cozy and delicious, but anyone willing to read the label will discover just how unadvisable such teeth-sinking really is.

How far ahead does this frozen classic lasagna twist the hands on your daily nutritional clock? A one-tray eat-alone serving cranks out 390 calories, with 13 grams of fat (six of which are saturated) grinding the gears even further. Turn the minute hand forward another 50 milligrams for the cholesterol count and 800 milligrams for the sodium content, and you've carved out a good portion of your nutritional numerology. Maybe you're fine with ticking down a generous heap of nutritional tomfoolery in a single slice of Italian freezer food, but your internal organs would like to have a word.

Adding spice to the world of frozen dinners is a Zatarain's specialty, and the company's New Orleans Style Shrimp Alfredo is a supreme example of its cuisine-blending tendencies. With juicy shrimp bobbing lazily in a bowl of snaky linguine, it might appear that balance has been achieved between carbs and protein that health-minded customers can consume without woe. But the generous coating of creamy Alfredo sauce covering everything undoes any potential good that might have come from this convenient heat-and-eat meal.

It's a solitary bowl in a single box that takes five minutes to heat before eating, and yet it serves up more than its fair share of the questionable stuff you should be limiting throughout the day. At 470 calories, 17 grams of fat (seven of those are saturated), 55 milligrams of cholesterol and 670 milligrams of sodium, you've eaten up a creamy dish of what your doctor might call "bad judgment." Yes, it's probably delicious, but when has that ever been an excuse for a mistake like this? That sort of ill-advised reasoning was invented for justifying gourmet desserts, not frozen pasta.

Cavatappi may sound like an exotic big game animal from the African savannah, but it's really just another curly-squirrely form of pasta. In this Home Chef Heat and Eat Loaded Cavatappi And Cheese With Chicken meal, it's a frost-laden perpetrator of nutritional betrayals to anyone who knows the subtle distinction between good eats and good eating. Sure, you may be captivated by the undeniably adorable curls of the corkscrew-shaped pasta, but it's all downhill from there.

Reading the back of the box, you'll discover that you're consuming 560 calories with a staggering 28 grams of fat, 15 grams of which are saturated, which is 75% of your whole day's intake. That's in addition to 1,880 milligrams of sodium representing 78% of what you should be eating in a 24-hour stretch. And the 100 milligrams of cholesterol at 33% means you've knocked out so much of your RDAs, bread and water wouldn't be a bad way to spend the rest of your day's eating. Or, you could just work around this freezer meal and find something more beneficial to feast on. Choose wisely.

Admit it, your taste buds perk up when you read names like Banquet Mega Meal Dynamite Penne & Meatballs. It sounds like a golden ticket to a bigger and better dinner, with all the bells and whistles you'd get if you ate out. But these bells and whistles are actually blaring alarms letting you know that there's a nutritional disaster waiting in the box. You may have to listen closely to hear them, but they're there.

And the reason they're sounding off? How about because of the 590 calories and jaw-dropping 27 grams of fat, nine of which are saturated? Those are good reasons to ring bells and blow whistles. The 65 milligrams of cholesterol and 1,150 milligrams of sodium help justify the red alert for the nutritional flub this frozen pasta is bringing your way. Sure, there's a whisper of good fortune in the 24 grams of protein you're getting, but it's buried under so much sound and fury, it's not worth the risk. Stay on the safe side of the street with something better.

The elegance promised by this Private Selection Italian Sausage & Meat Lasagna presents no modest allure to those who love rich Italian fare that can be stored in the freezer. This six-serving selection lets you share a homestyle family meal with your loved ones without having to learn what it takes to make lasagna from scratch. And with zesty sausage included in the recipe, there's bound to be a bit of upscale enjoyment that makes it feel as if you've finally found a restaurant-level dish to keep on hand.

Every plate with a slice of this grand culinary gesture slapped onto it will be holding 370 calories that bear 18 grams of fat, seven of which are saturated, as well as 50 milligrams of cholesterol and 690 milligrams of sodium. Go for a more mindful entrée and you'll have a meal with a healthier outcome that you can enjoy with a cleaner conscience.

Anything with the word "mega" in the name is bound to set off nutritional alarm bells, even before you have a chance to read the facts on the back of the package. Banquet Mega Bowls Bacon Mac & Cheese goes to great lengths to tell consumers they'll be more than satisfied with this overly-large bowl of noodles, cheese and bits of bacon. A simple read of the ingredients clues you in to what's in store for your finely-tuned physical machinery.

With one of these single-serving selections, you'll be filling your fuel tank with a generous 440 calories that carries with it 15 grams of fat, five of which are saturated, and 25 milligrams of cholesterol to gum up the works. Sprinkle 1,400 milligrams of sodium on top of all that and you're gunning for a nutritional breakdown that's entirely avoidable. Even if the 17 grams of protein listed on the front of the box sounds enticing, there are much cleaner-burning ways to get that into your engine.

Even if you don't think of the elbow macaroni in Stouffer's Macaroni & Cheese as actual pasta, the ingredients and process used to make these curvy tubes says otherwise. It may be a more pedestrian version of a frozen pasta meal, and one that qualifies as a Southern staple rather than a true Italian delicacy. Still, pasta is pasta no matter what shape it takes, and this version is one of the worst frozen pasta choices in the whole icy collection.

Lean into a bowl like this and you'll be biting into a heavy-duty 480 calories that bring 21 grams of fat, nine grams of which are saturated, to your dining plans. Stouffer's makes sure you don't need to salt the dish thanks to the 1,280 milligrams of sodium in the recipe. The 40 milligrams of cholesterol that hitchhike along on the end of the fork are just one more reason that this cook-and-chew pasta-sicle leaves your nutritional concerns out in the cold.

Heat and Eat Cheesy Beef Taco Pasta from Kroger brand Home Chef pulls noodles in a novel direction by combining Mexican toppings over Italian pasta. It's a zesty way to spice up the ordinary frozen pasta meal, a stand-out among a repetitive collection of mozzarella and tomato sauce-based inventions that aren't very ... well, inventive. Sadly, this kind of creativity also means your dinner is playing fast and loose with your health.

One scoop of this fusion fare will jack up your nutritional scoreboard by 560 calories and a heart-stopping 25 grams of fat, 10 of which are saturated and represents half of your daily allowance. There's even one gram of trans fat in the mix, which is never good news. Add in 60 milligrams of cholesterol, 920 milligrams of sodium, and 10 grams of sugar that have no business appearing in a savory entrée, and you win this round of Nutritional Misjudgment with a higher-than-desirable that actually means you lose. It's like golf, but with a trip to the cardiologist in your future.

Costco isn't going to let the frozen pasta sector thaw without adding a selection of its own to the icy pasta-bilities. Kirkland Signature Italian Sausage and Beef Lasagna pretty much announces the ways in which this prime pan is going to fail the nutritional litmus test. Two different kinds of meat doesn't usually throw up a nutritional green flag, especially when surrounded by processed carbs, sodium-heavy sauce and fat-laden cheese, but this pan isn't here to interpret your blood panels: It's here to serve you dinner.

One serving of this in front of you and you're knocking back 410 calories, a colossal 22 grams of fat out of the total 65 grams you should have daily, 10 of which are saturated and a full 50% of your RDA. But wait .., somehow, it gets worse. If you can handle the 890 milligrams of sodium, there's also 80 milligrams of cholesterol headed down your gullet, and seven grams of sugar that come out of nowhere to punch you squarely in the innards. Your body is a temple, and this warehouse-grade frozen pasta is bound to desecrate it.

The obvious issue with how pasta is presented in both fresh and frozen forms is the way it's dressed, usually with heavy sauces, fatty meats, and too-generous portions of salt added to the recipe. While all of this ensures pleasing flavor, it also poses clear compromises to the health and wellbeing of anyone who consumes them. Though controlled portions can have less impact, the proposed serving size of the frozen pasta meals on this list contain unadvisable amounts of these questionable elements, based on the recommended daily allowance of calories, fat, cholesterol, and sugar — in other words, the usual suspects.

In all instances, our list of worst offenders contained more than 300 calories, while the total fat exceeded 10 grams and sodium was more than 500 milligrams in a single serving, with some of them being significantly higher. Saturated fat was called out for all of our meals, and any cholesterol and trans fat that appeared as part of the nutrition facts was noted as well. In the few instances that sugar was part of the recipe, we were sure to call that out, too.