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Home-made jams, marmalade, lemon curd and other spreads usually have made much better ingredients than those on the supermarket shelves however these take time and skill to make. Therefore if you’re going to be buying from the supermarket, it’s best to get the most information you can about what goes into their concoctions.

In order for a jam to be considered a jam, it only requires 35% fruit content. Marmalade can contain even less – just 20% of it has to be made of fruit. The horror doesn’t stop there – commercial jams can include fruit from concentrate or frozen fruit, both of which will mean that the nutritional value of the fruit included in the jam will be so severely reduced as to be almost negligible.

Packaging-wise, you should try to stick to just buying those jams, marmalades and other spreads that are sold in glass jars. Resist the change to squeezy plastic bottles!