The Best Canned Foods to Stash in Your Pantry

In a perfect world, we would all be making meals from scratch using only the freshest ingredients. But when we need to juggle family, work and training commitments, we often don’t have the energy or time for such kitchen tasks. We’re simply looking to press the easy button to get a meal on the table. Besides, fresh ingredients aren’t always as fresh as we would hope, especially when out-of-season locally.

Enter canned food. Certainly, these humble staples can be a hack to getting grub in your belly quicker and with less effort than cooking from scratch. Yet, cans often get a bad rap and are thought to be nutritionally inferior and less flavourful than fresh or even frozen foods. But many canned foods are typically still nutrient-rich because the canning process has less of an effect on nutrition than you may think. With a lengthy shelf life, canned food lets you stock up without much worry about costly waste.

So bust out your can opener and add these four tinned foods to your diet for a quick nutrition boost. As for canned fruit cocktail—I still don’t go there.

Mackerel

In any given supermarket, you can probably cast your line for a tin of mackerel even though it often goes unnoticed in a sea of tuna and salmon. This swimmer houses troves of nutrients. Not only is canned mackerel high in protein (roughly 20 g in a can) to help you hold onto your lean body mass, the fatty fish is also a strong source of life-extending omega-3 fatty acids. A 2024 study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that subjects with higher omega-3 levels live longer and are specifically less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and cancer. There is also some evidence that greater intakes of omega-3s can help lessen exercise-induced muscle soreness. As a bonus, you’ll also net a healthy dose of vitamin D, a nutrient needed for proper bone health and muscle functioning but one that most of us fail to get enough of. You can add canned mackerel to sandwiches, pasta dishes and even salads. Or for a high-protein snack, smash it on whole-grain crackers.

Peaches

Nobody should endure a fresh peach in January that has all the juiciness of a rock. Canned peaches offer a more flavourful year-round option for this fruit. Surprisingly, the nutritional content of canned peaches, including amounts of vitamin C and folate, is comparable to that of the fresh fruit. There’s a stack of research demonstrating that when people eat more daily servings of fruits, fresh or…