Post subject: Cheap or expensive to eat healthily?

One of the excuses I sometimes hear for bad eating is that it's cheap.

But I think you can eat healthily cheaply also. What do you think? Do you think it's easier to eat cheaply on a healthy or unhealthy diet?

Aaron

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Junk food is quite expensive actually; if you cook yourself, it's so much healthier and it's much cheaper generally speaking. $4 - 5 for a hamburger meal seems inexpensive, but once you check the price of meat, bread, and vegetables, it's far more expensive.

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But what about buying hamburgers in supermarkets? (as opposed to MickeyD's, BK, etc.) They are very cheap in supermarkets, and cheaper than buying a few chicken breasts... no?

Aaron

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Ah, you are absolutely right. Ok, eating healthy may not be the cheapest, but it's not that expensive, and certainly you can make it cheaper than MacDonald's. Fair assumption?

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Yep, that's fair to say... it seems wrong that bad food is competitive on price.

Aaron

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This misunderstanding may come from expensive "healthy" diet programs.

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I refer to the post on the BBC programme I mentioned here.

It was said it was an 'expensive therapy' as it cost around £8000 per year. Now, if you divide this down, it works out at about £150 per week. I know many people who spend this (and more) a week on absolute crap food - picture the ones in the supermarket with the trollies loaded to the top with colas, crisps, junk foods, white dead bread, tinned foods full of Es, sweets, biscuits etc etc.

Would it not be better to spend this same money on food that is healthy?

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What's white dead bread? I guess it's your cheap Mother's Pride type stuff... is that right? And, if so, I've often heard this kind of stuff is unhealthy but I've never been too sure why... what is it that's bad?

Aaron

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All bread made from white processed flour is dead, really. The cheaper the dead(li)er. The really cheap ones have lots of nasty additives too.

I have just made a delicious meal...

Bismati long grain brown rice with sesame seeds
A few button mushrooms
Onions, garlic, carrots, raisins, rocket...from a local allotment
Herbs from my own garden
Sea salt

It cost me almost nothing, there's still rice for another meal. All the other ingredients were organic.

Someone once told me a good way not to cry when peeling shrooms was to wear your glasses. I can now officially confirm that this does NOT work!

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Thais wrote:

Someone once told me a good way not to cry when peeling shrooms was to wear your glasses. I can now officially confirm that this does NOT work!

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Shrooms? Is that mushrooms?? And they make you cry?! I thought that was onions... what am I missing here?

As for bread, we have a breadmaker... is that a much healthier way of making bread?

Aaron

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Its not expensive at all to eat healthily - if you don't fall for those BS diets that claim you have to eat THEIR products.

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This is true. We often get this perception that healthy diet can be costly because of some diet products' aggressive marking campaign. Commercialism is creeping into our way of life here as well.

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Also packaging. We pay a lot for those stupid wrappers - all 6 of them - over the item we actually eat.