Where healthy eating used to be based around the amount of fat in food, today eating well is a much more complicated process. Components like salt, sugar, carbs and the types of fats in food all play a part in labelling a product as healthy.

All these considered, it cannot be denied that sushi is one of the healthiest fast food options out there. Nicola Mills is group managing director of Pacific Retail Management, the umbrella company for Go Sushi and Wasabi Warriors, which will be launched this year, and she says that the many health aspects of sushi will be a key focus for the company’s future marketing campaigns.

“It’s actually part of our 2011 campaign, where we’re doing a lot on the health benefits of sushi. In fact, one of our consumer promotions that we’re doing this year is ‘Lose Your Rolls By Eating Out’, so we’re just highlighting the low fat side, low sugar, low salt, but we’re also talking about the fact that it has omega-3s and proteins and all the really good stuff that’s in sushi too,” she explains.

Freshness of ingredients is paramount when working with sushi, where raw ingredients like prawns and salmon are commonly used. And, according to Mills, health and freshness go hand in hand.

“It’s difficult really to make sushi unhealthy. It’s a $15.6 billion market, for people looking for health, and so that’s what our focus is. It’s very much about freshness and what’s good for you.

“We have a lot of raw, fresh ingredients and we have cooked chickens and some cooked tuna, but we don’t have a lot of salt. There’s not a lot of sugar. It’s quite a raw product, it’s not overly processed. It’s made very fresh and we’re not putting cheeses and all those sorts of things in it,” says Mills.

Most people wouldn’t list a burger as the first healthy food they can think of, but according to Simon Crowe, founder of healthy burger franchise, Grill’d, burgers can be a healthy choice and for him, like Mills, it’s all about fresh ingredients.

“At the moment, everything that you buy at Grill’d is made fresh to order and is made in full view of the customer, so transparency is a big part of what we do. The category comes with a negative perception, so we’re trying to debunk that myth, and if you think about what goes in a burger: bread, salad, toppings, meat be it beef, lamb, chicken or vegetable, then there’s no reason why that can’t be a nutritious meal,” Crowe says.

The franchise deals with smaller providores and has its buns delivered fresh daily by local bakers, which means they have less salt and less sugar than burger buns that have been shipped across the country.

The health argument has, for many years, revolved around the word fat and Crowe says that this approach is much too narrow for consumers wanting to make well-educated, healthy food choices.

“If you look only at fat, then you’re missing the mark. We as a society have been educated to focus on fat more than anything else and probably inappropriately so. Yes, we need to be conscious of fat, no question, but it’s more about what the saturated fat is versus the total fat. We use avocado in a lot of our burgers, so it’s a great fat. It’s not a saturated fat and that would skew results if you were looking only at fat.”