Why You Might Want To Skip This Popular Pasta Sauce

Jarred pasta sauces can be a lifesaver on busy weeknights when cooks are looking to assemble a meal without hours of simmering a homemade sauce on the stove. Unfortunately, like many premade products, their value varies based on a number of factors, from nutrition to price to flavor. We reviewed the options to determine the most unhealthy pasta sauces you can buy, and one stood out. That's the Ragù Creamy Basil Alfredo Sauce, which has a variety of drawbacks that make it worth leaving on the shelf.

Sauces with a creamy base can often be more indulgent, and this Ragù offering is no exception. To start, it clocks in at 90 calories for each quarter-cup serving. By contrast, tomato-based alternatives like Ragù's Old World Style marinara or the higher-end Rao's tomato basil sauce only have about 40 calories for the same serving size. However, it's worth noting that the Alfredo offering is comparable on a calorie basis to some other creamier jarred sauces.

A closer look at the nutritional elements reveals that one serving includes 330 milligrams of sodium (good for 14% of your suggested daily value) as well as a similar percentage of suggested saturated fat (15%). Meanwhile, there's virtually no protein or fiber, two key building blocks of a healthy diet.

Another reason to consider opting for a different sauce choice lies in the ingredients list. Although most grocery store shoppers are used to a long list of inscrutable additives, there's no need for them in a sauce as simple as Alfredo. Our three-ingredient alfredo sauce recipe requires just cream cheese, garlic powder, and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese — none of the xanthan gum, disodium phosphate, or whey protein concentrates found in the Ragù jarred version.

To be sure, there's little to like from a health perspective in this creamy basil sauce. However, it's worth noting that Ragù appears to have moderately improved the nutrition profile of the sauce since our reviewer initially evaluated it in 2024, slightly dropping the fat and sodium levels, if most other factors remain relatively similar. Nevertheless, there's still a long way to go before this sauce could be considered anything other than a convenient indulgence.

In any case, there seems to be little complaint from shoppers. It earned a 4.7-star rating on Instacart with over 80 reviews, with most praising the flavor and simplicity of using it. After all, sticking to the same old tomato sauce all the time is among the biggest mistakes everyone makes when cooking pasta. On the other hand, those concerned with keeping their weeknight pasta dish on the lighter side may want to skip this herby, creamy choice and grab one of the many other options sitting on the shelf.