There is a new diet fad sweeping America - diet meals delivered, pre-prepared. Essentially, it is a service for those too lazy to put effort into food preparation who also want to lose weight. Apparently, the irony that they are trying to lose weight by expending less energy is lost on the customers of these new services.

Regardless of how sad it may be to rely on a 3rd party to prepare your meals - something most of us have managed to avoid since our teens - and the recent news that people who are thin because of diet rather than exercise may actually be quite unhealthy, there is no doubt that these services are popular. Their success is clearly down to convenience - both in terms of food preparation and calorie counting. As with anything else though, each company is going to be offering a different quality of service for a different price.

Thankfully, Epicurious have put together a comparison of the prices and quality of the top 5 services: The Good, the Bad, and the Unhealthy: Rating Prepared Diet Food.

It’s well worth a read, and it appears that the top two performers, eDiets and Zone, are streets ahead of the competition. Nothing similar seems to exist in the UK yes (as far as I could determine), though it would be surprising if nobody launched a scheme along these lines in the near future.