Nobody expects to pick up a Nigella Lawson book and find mung beans and lentil salad recipes. Equally, it is a pretty safe bet that Marco Pierre White would be more likely to serve pig’s trotters than Quorn burgers were you to be invited for dinner.

Celebrity chefs tend to corner markets: indulgent, classic haute cuisine, fish, rustic and so on. So I was not surprised to see a Jamie Oliver recipe in a magazine for homemade granola with berry compote. It was described as a healthy pud that was quick, easy and delicious.

With nuts and seeds, dried fruits, honey, oats and yoghurt on the list of ingredients, it appeared to live up to its healthy image. Yet an uneasy feeling told me that I might be better off with sticky toffee pudding. Indeed, when I analysed the recipe it had 912 calories and 33g of fat per serving. You could have sticky toffee pudding and a piece of cheesecake instead and still be 162 calories better off.

It is not that Jamie had the ingredients wrong. He had just used a lot of them and, maybe, had not appreciated that too many nuts, seeds and dried fruit, combined with more than a jar of honey and a family-sized pot of yoghurt, can turn a “good for you” idea into a calorific minefield.

It is an easy mistake for a chef to make, but one that makers of peach and apricot cereal bars, crunchy tropical breakfast cereals and lemon sunrise muffins play on ruthlessly to lure us into the hidden calorie trap.

Take a typical flapjack. Most of the ones you buy at railway stations, garage forecourts and paper shops weigh about 100g. As they are packed with oats, usually with a few raisins thrown in and a picture of the sun rising over a golden crop on the packet, you could be forgiven for thinking you were making a virtuous choice.

My advice is to put it back and have a croissant instead. While the flapjack has been made to appear like the healthier option, it packs 493 calories and 27g of fat. By contrast, a standard-sized 60g croissant has 223 calories and 12g of fat.

The potential for confusion is endless. Breakfast cereals are another case in point. You know the culprits. Their packaging includes pictures of fresh papaya and plump grapes on vine leaves. But the nutritional box will tell you that you are chomping almost four teaspoons of sugar and three teaspoons of oil per 50g bowl.

Beware too of the “baked, not fried” brigade. I have often grabbed a packet of “delicious baked pretzels with less than 10 per cent fat” only to kick myself for being so gullible. A 175g bag has 718 calories and a lot more than a tablespoonful of oil. Baked they may be; healthy they are not.

The same goes for “fat-free” sweets. Recently, I saw a packet of jelly beans labelled with this extraordinary claim. Of course they are. Jelly beans always will be free of fat because you don’t need any to make them. You just need lots of sugar.

This brings me back to celebrity chefs. I read a piece by an anonymous chef advising mothers to stop giving children sweets in their lunch boxes and instead pop in a packet of banana chips. These are slices of dried banana deep-fried in oil. A 100g packet contains 511 calories and 31g of fat.

You could give your offspring a real banana (virtually no fat and certainly no added sugars), a yoghurt (full of calcium and some protein) plus a two-bar KitKat (115 calories, 6g of fat) and they would still be 209 calories and an awful lot of extra nutrients better off.

www.amandaursell.com

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