Is Eating Healthy More Expensive?

[Dave]

I get this question all the time. The answer really depends on how you eat. If you eat all your meals at restaurants, then there's little question that it is going to be more expensive to eat healthy. Restaurants can turn a profit off of a bowl of pasta much easier than they can a nice grilled chicken breast and some steamed veggies (which they may not even have on their menu because not many people order it).

If you make your own food it really depends on what you put in that food. You can choose the healthiest ingredients and work from scratch. The question is just how healthy do you want to be. Clean eating from a given list of foods, like the P90X Nutrition Guide, may be good enough. Most people are going to see real benefits from that. I would assert that is simply one step in the right direction.

Here is a great article from Mark Sisson on the prevalence, and problems, associated with genetically modified crops. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/gmo-monsanto/. I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy, but this makes sense to me. These companies are not growing food to make you healthy. They are growing food to make a profit. Their bottom line explains why they genetically introduce pesticides into their seeds.

If I told you that I had two green peppers. One was $0.50 and one was a $0.75, but the $0.50 one had pesticides that could not be washed off of it because it was grown from a genetically modified seed, which one would you choose? Maybe you don't have a choice, because that $0.75 pepper is outside of your budget. I get that, I really do.

In my estimation eating clean, on whatever level you choose, is like paying up front for something rather than deferring the cost. McDonald's may be a lot cheaper than a meal with some actual nutritional value, but you'll pay for it in the long run. You may pay for it with a shorter life span. You might see a significant up tick in your prescription bills when you get older. From what I hear, heart surgery isn't cheap.

I’m not an elitist and I’m not saying that if you are not eating organic, then you may as well be eating Burger King. What I am pointing out here is that there are greater forces in play. That choice between the two peppers above isn’t a choice you are actually presented with. The information about these type of crops doesn’t make the nightly news. Instead you just see two veggies. One is cheaper than the other. Which one do you pick if you think they are exactly the same?

Eating clean and healthy can be done on a budget. It may not tickle your taste buds the way that MSG filled bowl of Mongolian Beef does, but it is something that can be done. We are talking about your health here. If that's not important enough to spend a few extra dollars on, in a country where we throw money around like it is going out of style (even now), then I don't know what is.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this topic. Post them here.

Dave

[jbarr89]

I, personally like to mix and match a variety of healthy foods that I purchase from the local farmers market or grocery store; it's fun to me and it gives me piece of mind knowing what all went into the meal that I am about to eat.

[Dave]

I, personally like to mix and match a variety of healthy foods that I purchase from the local farmers market or grocery store; it's fun to me and it gives me piece of mind knowing what all went into the meal that I am about to eat.

Thanks for contributing. Locally grown foods tend to be less likely to have these issues, and I'm glad to hear people still love the Farmer's Market!

[FitRunner]

I saw a documentary segment on how the crappiest calories are in fact the cheapest recently, something I've suspected for a while as a college student.

I grew up eating clean, home-cooked food, and heard over and over that in addition to being 'real' food (to this day, I don't consider potato chips food as much as just something edible that tastes good), it was cheaper. But that was mostly in Sweden, where labor rates make all labor-involved foods very expensive. (We never had deli meat and virtually never went out to eat.) In college in IL I got the distinct feeling that my grocery shopping was more expensive than my roommates' after repeatedly failing to convince them they could save money buying raw, unprocessed food rather than mac and cheese in boxes. Guess I was right.

However, I think you're right on the money with that there are multiple kinds of hidden costs with a lot of seemingly cheap foods. Health costs and intangible well-being costs are some, but also environmental costs of various kinds. What you consider a priority - as measured by where you put your money - will depend, but I am currently feeding two people on $100 a week - no processed foods of any sort and absolutely no eating out.

Some of the most publicized evniromental-animal treatment issues can be easily prioritized looking to maximize both health and budget. Eating a lot of beef, for example, is clearly linked to bad health in various ways. (Although I'm not personally sure whether that's caused by the beef or because eating a lot of beef makes us eat less of something else. Not that it matters in terms of what to do about it.) Therefore, it's not going to be a large percentual increase in cost to buy grass-finished ground beef rather than regular, because you won't be consuming enough to let the difference really add up.

You can also find lists of organic produce that retain the most pesticides, so that you can put the money premium you pay for organic to best use. Two of the cheapest fruits out there are not on that list - apples and bananas - so you don't have to make do with a pound of fruit a week to get at least some of the benefits of organic on a serious budget, for the same reason grass-fed beef can be affordable provided you don't consume lots of it.

Also... I have a winter salad recipe that makes nearly 1000 very filling Calories without a single drop of dressing for about $2 of ingredients. (Cabbage, beets, carrots, apple.) Add the olive oil in a vinaigrette and you're talking 8 HUGE meals volumewise for cents each. Just sayin'.

[Dave]

Love it! Seems that I've found a nutrition nut here on the Boards. Awesome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is a learning process, and I continue to learn more every day. I'm really glad to have someone to bounce ideas/theories off of. Keep it up.

There's nothing better after a workout than a banana. The sugars in the banana are a little high, but as long as you are not eating them right before bed or killing 4 or 5 of them at a time while sitting on the couch, I think they are awesome.

One thing I'm really diving into right now is the coconut. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-wonderful-world-of-coconut-products/.

Dave

PS - I'll try to expand my links of off Mark's Daily Apple. That's my big resource right now, so I keep finding excellent stuff there that I feel compelled to share.

[Mpresev]

Perhaps part of the reason for so many types and cases of cancer may be due to consuming foods that are loaded with chemicals. I kind of like the idea of growing one's own vegetables to have total confidence in what goes into the production of the produce.

I watched a Jillian Michaels show on KCET about sky rocketing your metabolism and she suggested to vote for organic foods. It's not a concern with thick skinned fruits like Banana's because chemicals won't penetrate thru.

I'm soon to convert to organic fruits, vegetables and meats. At the moment my foods right now are non organic.

[FitRunner]

There's nothing better after a workout than a banana.

One thing I'm really diving into right now is the coconut. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-wonderful-world-of-coconut-products/.

I love bananas after a workout. In fact, my default thing to eat between meals is a banana. (A habit I now know perhaps I should try to moderate, having seen the number of calories in one, lest I fall into the eat 4-5 on the couch category.) They're pretty filling and they travel well. And they're just yummy.

I love curries and I like the flavor of coconut, but I don't know much about coconuts other than that coconut oil is up there with palm oil in saturation. However, I know nothing about how much of that oil there is in your average coconut, nor what else there might be in them. Since so many people have eaten them for such a long time I bet there's good stuff there - I'll check it out, thanks for the tip!

Teresa

[demaak]

Hi, just a point I'd like to add, if you are buying meats, and you opt to buy the cheaper stuff, with more fat, because it is cheaper, what you are doing is PAYING FOR FAT! If you compare side by side the cooking of the cheaper meat and the extra lean stuff, you will find the frying pan of the cheap stuff fill up with fat that you have to drain. But when you pay more for the leaner stuff, you can actually eat what you paid for and not pour all the fat out. I'm sure there is a better way to say all this, but this is how I could think of it right now.

[Dave]

demaak Great point. Monica cooked some ground turkey last night and was noticing how much of it had disappeared. We looked at the package and she must have picked up the wrong one. It was kind of depressing to see how much it shrank.

She did recover and managed to make a great Thai dish that is a beef salad take (with turkey). Super good stuff. She's the cook for sure.

[FitRunner]

demaak and Dave: Yeah, that's true. I have been doing things like buying chicken thighs rather than breasts thinking it was an acceptable compromise, and it was ok for a while, but we both got really sick of the greasiness. In anticipation of our P90X start, I've been experimenting with the phase I recipes and got a shock when I calculated the calories in the turkey burgers I made last week. Not even close to what it was supposed to be. :eek: That's when we realized that there was a significant difference between "ground turkey" and "ground turkey breast". The store where I got it only carried one kind. We made sure to find out where to buy the ground breast!

[jbarr89]

Hey Dave, you said that you like to keep referencing marksdailyapple, check out www.nomeatathlete (http://www.nomeatathlete.com) also for some other info. True, he is a vegan but some of his recipes are VERY tasty, I've tried a few. I'm pretty sure that he gets them from the book "1000 vegan recipes" but still the guy knows his stuff when it comes to being a vegan and still being able to perform as an athlete. I'm not trying to preach being a vegan, I'm sure that you had enough of that over the weekend, I am not a vegan or even consider myself a vegetarian, but I do however like to sway more to the vegetarian lifestyle choices the majority of the time for the health benefits.

[Dave]

Jason Sorry I missed you on Facebook earlier. The treadmill was busy punishing my soul, as it always does. One thing I should probably do a better job of is making clear that I'm not locked into any one theory on nutrition. I'm committed to learning. I think Mark Sisson's stuff is clear and it makes sense to me. Right now I'm learning more about the Primal Blueprint and I think it is interesting. When you break it down to core principles and brush aside the carnivorous aspects of it, the plan is about limiting insulin. To me that makes perfect sense. I'm interested in how he plans to do that and the theories in the book. For me, veganism just doesn't work. I think it is great. Tony's Chef Missy Costello is vegan and she loves it. Tony was vegan for years, then vegetarian and recently started eating free range chicken again (new girlfriend...). I'm no a vegan. I'm not a vegetarian. That doesn't mean I think it is right or wrong. It just means that it doesn't work for me. With that said, it has been 3 months since I've had a steak. Before that I think I went about a year without that sort of red meat. Everyone has to have their own preferences and I think everyone, including me, should eat more veggies!

[jbarr89]

Thanks Dave, I guess mostly I'm just worried about taking information from different sources and mixing them up and it causing the opposite effect. I think I need more structure so maybe I'll pick up Mark's book and see what I can get from it. I think I'll be better for me if it's just black and white with no gray areas, know what I mean?

[Dave]

Jason Since the convo went Primal, I put my response over on the Primal Blueprint thread. It is here in the nutrition forum. Let's take the convo over there so people looking for information can find it easily.

Thanks,

Dave