The 11 Unhealthiest Pasta Sauces You Can Buy

How unhealthy could a jar of pasta sauce be? At its core, the recipe is a simple combination of tomatoes and seasoning, sometimes sharing the jar with other vegetables, a little cheese, and maybe some ground beef. But when you dig deeper into the recipes used by the most familiar brands, you find more than just these ingredients; there's also a fair amount of oil added, which increases calories and fat. Depending on the formulation, you may discover that pasta sauce exists on a spectrum; at one end are the healthy, low-calorie options that invite indulgence, and at the other are unhealthy concoctions that are better enjoyed in moderation.

To prevent you from making mistakes with your pasta sauce preference, we rounded up the unhealthiest pasta sauces in the marketplace, common brands with uncommonly high concentrations of troublesome ingredients that can detract from an otherwise satisfactory pasta experience. To compare the sauces, we've examined the nutrition information for a half-cup serving of against the FDA's recommendations for a 2,000 daily calorie diet. Guidelines indicate recommended daily allowances of less than 65 grams of fat, less than 2,400 milligrams of sodium, and less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol. We ended up with a variety of red, white, and pesto sauces that challenged those guidelines, and these are just some of the worst offenders. 

As a premium sauce option, Rao's stands above the rest, giving pasta lovers a higher-end option for dressing out their fettuccine and spaghetti. The company's red sauces are relatively favorable, but when you spin a bottle of Caramelized Onion sauce and check out the label, you find a different story altogether. 120 calories per half-cup serving is 20 more than a half-cup of basic Marinara. It's surprising to learn that including onions in the basic recipe could add 20% more to the calorie count, and not something casual shoppers might think to double-check before putting a jar in their cart.

Luckily, the 8-gram fat content and 330-milligram sodium content keep this ravioli juice from being any more unhealthy than necessary. But if adding a vegetable to the recipe jacks up the calories so considerably, it's probably better to skip the caramelized onions and stick with the ground-level red sauce instead to keep the calorie count in your whole meal under control. At the very least, you can make an informed decision before making your purchase.

Alfredo is a notoriously indulgent sauce that combines cream and cheese to make a silky white topping for pasta, chicken, and seafood. With Prego Homestyle Alfredo sauce piled on top, those relatively benign foods get an added blast of calories, fat, sodium, and cholesterol that can make simple eating into a complicated affair. You can count on a half-cup serving to add 160 calories, 14 grams of fat, and 780 milligrams of sodium to your plate. If you're tracking your macros closely, that leaves you almost no space for cannoli at the end of your meal.

The biggest surprise in this sauce is the cholesterol count, which at 60 milligrams per serving is higher than any other sauce on the list. While it doesn't come close to the 300 total milligrams allowed per day, it does come in the form of a cream sauce; whatever animal-based proteins you might add on top will only increase your consumption. You could always use less than a half-cup of this Prego sauce, but you'll still be augmenting your pasta with some less-than-desirable elements, something to keep in mind as you shop.

While marinara is usually a safe choice that keeps calories low while omitting strange additives, Emeril's Homestyle Marinara somehow bucks the trend to create one of the least healthy sauces on the shelf. There may only be 90 calories in a half-cup serving, but it also comes with 430 milligrams of sodium, which is 20% of the daily allowance in the sauce alone. Considering that most pasta makers generously salt the pot when making their noodles, including Emeril's in the meal only adds that much more to the overall content.

Another surprising ingredient that shouldn't be making an appearance in pasta sauce is sugar, and this Homestyle Marinara contains a considerable 9 grams per half-cup serving. Mirroring the sodium, this is 20% of what's advisable to consume in an entire day, and it's all coming in a single serving of pasta sauce. There are far more favorable recipes to use when making jarred sauce, creations that keep the salt and sugar to a minimum. By tossing in the extra to make your meal messier, Emeril's doesn't do the tradition justice.

Target throws a twist in the less-than-healthy pasta sauce equation with Good & Gather Signature Butternut Squash Pasta Sauce, one of the few gourmet-style recipes around — and sadly, one of the more adverse regarding nutrition. We would have thought a squash-based sauce would have fewer calories than a luscious white sauce, but a half-cup serving of this vibrant orange concoction comes up with 170 calories to make your pasta a heavier prospect. Those calories come with 13 grams of fat, 360 milligrams of sodium, and an incredible 30 milligrams of cholesterol. There are also seven grams of sugar in the recipe, but considering everything else already listed, it's just one more reason to squash this pasta topping possibility.

Where does all of this unfavorable nutritional calculus stem from? Isn't butternut squash supposed to be a healthy option overall? Well, yes ... when it isn't combined with light cream, cultured butter (which includes even more cream), sunflower oil, and cheese. It turns out you can take what nature gave you and turn it into a pasta sauce that's better left on the shelf.

When you find a sauce that combines cream and pesto like Barilla Creamy Genovese Basil Pesto does, you can pretty much assume the nutrition facts aren't going to be favorable. The food producer takes an interesting route with its creation, adding sunflower oil and cashews to achieve a richer base than the usual pesto provides. But that also brings in 600 calories per half-cup serving, and where calories occur, fat isn't too far behind; in this case, it's 52 grams, or 67% of your daily allowance. If that weren't enough to deter you from buying, there are also 10 milligrams of cholesterol and 1,520 milligrams of sodium coming along for the ride.

Knowing that a single serving of a jarred pasta sauce can contain more of these elements than you should consume in one sitting makes it clear that shopping for a nutrition-forward pasta sauce is something of a challenge. But options like Barilla Classic Genovese Basil Pesto make it much easier to bypass the unhealthy ones with figures so glaringly out of whack.

To find the most unhealthy pasta sauces around, we headed for the pasta aisle and rooted through the biggest brands, as well as checking store signature labels and lesser-known jars. We assessed the per-serving contents for calories, fat, sugar, sodium, and cholesterol. We then compared them to the FDA's daily recommendation guidelines to find the least healthy options. Not all sauces we chose were unfavorable in all areas; some sauces were higher-calorie but lower-sugar, while others were lower-calorie but higher-sodium. The worst offenders became the best candidates for the list. While enjoying pasta sauce in moderation can mitigate the negative impact on your health and nutrition goals, some sauces are shockingly unhealthy and are better avoided.

Checking the labels confirmed our suspicions that the most unhealthy pasta sauces weren't just the traditional marinara sauces, but also pesto and Alfredo, concoctions that incorporate ingredients beyond the usual tomatoes-herbs-and-oil blend. While it wasn't surprising to learn these were less nutritious, seeing how much higher the numbers on the labels were was a real learning experience. We also found that servings are generally listed as one half-cup, though some use one quarter-cup instead; to keep things even among all sauces, we used one half-cup as the standard serving and adjusted the nutrient values accordingly.