I’ve read that frozen veggie are actually healthier than fresh, and (I’ve found) they are usually cheaper. A cauliflower is $2.99, sometimes on sale for $1.99. A 16 oz bag of cauliflower is $1.99, often on sale for $1.00.
But fruits? Very expensive things, fruit. My husband is a fan of fruit (while I only really love veggies and tomatoes), and it gets expensive in a hurry. And being diabetic or doing lowered carb without spending a fortune? Forget it!
I do eat some frozen - especially since reading that the nutrients in frozen are just as high as fresh. Unfortunately, many of the veggies that I like just don’t taste good when they’re frozen and recycled - ie. tomatoes, red and green peppers, onions, squash, etc. I do eat green beans and broccoli frozen, but I don’t like the texture of most veggies when they defrost. I’m not a picky veggie eater in terms of WHAT veggies I’ll eat, just how I’ll eat them.
jsgoddess, fruit is RIDICULOUS. I don’t like apples much, but I love pears, bananas, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries. Berries can easily run me $3.99 for one small pint! And I can eat that in 1-2 sittings. Luckily, bananas are cheap, but I can’t eat more than one a day.
Ava
Your salad was about 500 calories- a reasonable amount for lunch. However, if you had chosen one of the other salads on the menu (the Madarin Chicken, BLT or Taco one) it would be in the 700 calorie and 30 grams of fat range- well into the territory of sloppy burgers. Healthy food choices arn’t so obvious or easy to get, especially in fast food places. I’d tone down the self-rightous a bit if I were you.
I’m having a hard time swallowing this “healthy food is expensive” bullshit. I have been eating completely clean for six months on a bodybuilding regimen, and will continue to do so indefinitely. I track all of my daily food intake on a spreadsheet, etc.
Healthy food is cheap.
Trendy healthy food is expensive.
The next time you go shopping, look at the prices on some of these items:
Oatmeal (The real, boil in a pot kind.)
Tuna
Cottage Cheese
Peanut Butter
Brown Rice
Although it may not be very tasty, you can live off those foods. But the main thing is, they are cheap. I will have a hard time believing that frozen pizzas and pot pies are more expensive than a week’s worth of the above foods. Eating well is easy, it just takes planning.
Browse the forums here: www.johnstonefitness.com for an idea of what it takes to eat well and stay healthy.
In regards to package lables:
I once had a candy bar that listed on the side: contains 2.8 servings.
I kid you not, 2*.8*. I could understand if it said 2.5 or something similar, but .8?
What, am I supposed to save the portions of my candy bar until I have a full serving? Am I supposed to bring out my calipers to see what .8 is?
When you start getting into silly percentages, it makes you realize that some companies try anything to make their food sound low cal.
I think that in regards to labeling, companies do need to be more accurate in regards to what people eat or drink. One can of beans I had said it served 6. It was a can the size of a regular soup can; 6 portions.
That’s an extremely limited list of foods. I could be grossly mistaken, but aren’t a lot of the complaints here that fruits and vegetables, which are vital to a healthy diet, are prohibitively expensive?
I believe kittenblue has come closest to naming the real culprit. The inability to heed, or even hear, one’s own body signals regarding something my father-in-law likes to call “a genteel sufficiency” is likely the result of a process which begins in the cradle when a baby cries from hunger, eats until sated, repeats often, and never learns to eat more than he needs so he can make it to the next scheduled 4 hour feeding.
Early schedules, processed artificial infant milk, untimely introduction to solids and our obsession with chubby babies must play some role in this problem. I believe education and subsidies should be leveled at new mothers faced with the power to feed a baby as nature intended, thereby providing a sound foundation of healthful food and healthy lifestyle.
Formula feeding and childhood obesity have been linked: study
But, of course the language is backward, as it always is when we dare speak of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is believed to ‘reduce the risk’ of obesity, as if formula feeding were the biological norm and the introduction of this powerful new substance we call human breast milk will help guard our kids from all sorts of nasty diseases.
I must also disagree with the poster who referred to babies as ‘clean slates’ who don’t prefer one taste over another. Babies most certainly do prefer sweet tastes over others…my breast milk is far too sweet for my adult palate, but my baby literally lives on it. Manufactured artificial infant milk has a lot of sugar added, and it’s probably a safe bet to assume the sugars therein are of a more processed and refined type than those found in human milk.
Healthful first food. Self-regulating feeding procedures. The rest becomes habit.
I also agree with Ilsa Lund that eating healthful foods is not expensive…eating trendy healthful food is. Strawberries are expensive in December, but they are dirt cheap at our local farmstands right now.
Buy locally grown in season from farmers markets and stands. Buy frozen in the winter.
Not sure if anybody has tackled the possible cultural reasons for the problems of the girl who died of heart failure. The article says that she was Bengali. I would imagine that traditional cultural practices in their native India would find fat, chubby babies to be healthy and robust and more able to deal with unpredictable food shortages in the future.
If the family switched to the high-fat and processed foods of the typical Western diet, the problem would have been horribly compounded. The child’s metabolism would be genetically programmed for the lean and balanced diet of a peasant. Instead, Big Macs rain from the sky and the body holds on to all that fat. I know that Native Americans and Polynesians suffer from similar problems since their communities switched from healthy indigenous foods to Western diets. Not to mention a more sedentary Western lifestyle that seeks to keep exercise to a minimum.
I think Farmwoman makes a good point about self-regulation. Maybe my kids aren’t typical, but one of the things I’ve noticed (and admired) about them is their ability to stop eating when they are full. I think it’s a natural talent that babies and young kids have, and, too often, we train them out of it. I’ve tried very hard not to succumb to the “clean your plate whether you’re hungry or not” tradition that I grew up with, and it was difficult not to be nervous when my 2-year-old would announce that she was “done” after half a slice of turkey and a few strawberries at dinner. But I let her be done, and she didn’t starve to death or get rickets. Now I have a trim, healthy 7-year-old who would rather feed her french fries to the pigeons and go climb a tree. Not that she doesn’t love candy and ice cream and cookies and all that–but when she isn’t hungry any more, she puts the cookie down. When was the last time you saw an adult abandon half a chocolate chip cookie?
I bought some strawberries for $2.50 at the farmer’s market yesterday. They were great, but $2.50 I can buy dinner at Taco Bell. And I’m lucky to live in an area with farmer’s markets and supermarkets that carry local produce. Most depressed areas have corner stores that might carry a few produce items and perhaps a sad supermerket with old moldy food.
I don’t know where you live, but even some of that stuff is expensive - oatmeal isn’t bad, but I get oat bran because it fills me up better. A 16 serving package (loose oat bran, not single servings) is $2.79.
Peanut butter- I don’t eat the sugar-laden stuff, I eat the Smuckers’ Natural that’s pure peanuts and salt. It’s typically $4.99 for 16 oz around here. I won’t get the Skippy/Jif/Peter Pan etc brands because of the excess sugar.
I don’t eat tuna very often, but it is fairly cheap. I don’t eat cottage cheese, and the SO doesn’t like brown rice, so we don’t eat either of those either.
Where I live, healthier food is expensive. I don’t know what kind of Tinkerbell-Fairy-Tale world you live in, but I can assure you that it is not bullshit. I stick to fresh foods as much as possible, and it gets outrageous shopping for two people.
Ava
Tuna? Check.
Cottage cheese? Check.
Can’t eat oatmeal or brown rice much if you’re diabetic. The cheaper the peanut butter, the more sugar it has in it.
And I don’t see any vitamins in this list other than D in the cheese.
I’m curious as to why our strawberries were $.99 for a big container at a local store two months ago, and now they’re $2.99 for the same container? I’m not being sarcastic, but it seems as if I can get fresh strawberries cheaper in the winter locally. And they are GOOD strawberries, either way - big, juicy, and not too tart.
My mother-in-law has promised to take me to an Amish market around here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stock up on my favorite fresh veggies and fruits for cheap, and learn my way there so I can do the weekly shopping there.
Ava
Vitamins? Big ol’ box of dollar store brand multivitamins. Cheap.
Fruits and vegetables are not necessarily essential to a healthy diet, given proper supplementation, which can be cheap.
Oatmeal and brown rice are very low GI, are they really a problem for diabetics? If you are diabetic, you can’t very well eat fucking frozen pizzas.
I still maintain that, although difficult, eating healthily is cheaper.
If you can produce a shopping list that has eggs, oatmeal, brown rice, chicken breasts, cottage cheese and tuna at a premium compared to frozen pizzas, hamburger helper, ice cream, potato chips, candy bars, tv dinners and Big Macs, I’ll eat my words. Until then, le bullshit, as my French brethren say.
Knock yourself out taking vitamins. I’ll eat (some) fruits and (nearly all) vegetables.
They aren’t high GI, but they aren’t “very low.” And GI isn’t the whole story. GL is important as well. Some diabetics have more leeway in their diets than others.
I’m not diabetic, and I don’t. What has frozen pizza to do with the cost of healthy foods? Your “healthy foods” list includes things that I and my husband do not eat because we do not consider them “healthy” for us.
So, if people limit themselves to a half dozen choices, none of which are fruits or vegetables, they can eat cheaply? Well, woo-fucking-hoo.
It’s the first time I’ve ever been lectured about my desire to eat produce. I suppose there’s a first time for everything!
Sandwiches are cheaper than salads. Pop is cheaper than juice (though I’m not a fan of juice). Chips are cheaper than crunchy veggies. Candy and cookies are cheaper than fruit. Hamburger and sausage are cheaper than chicken breast or any lean cut of meat. Don’t even consider the more exotic meats, or unbreaded seafood!
Wouldn’t you need a lot more than a multivitamin to get all the vitamins & minerals you need for a day? If so, wouldn’t it become prohibitively expensive to buy so many diet supplements? Also, from what I understand, vitamins & minerals are more easily absorbed by the body when they’re found in food as opposed to in a pill.
Also, I know very few people who would EVER be able to stick to a brown rice, tuna, cottage cheese and oatmeal diet, if only because it’s SO VERY BORING. I’ll bet that even those educated about nutrition would go for the convenience food after a while because such a bland diet would get really gross after a very short time.
I really think that you have to consider where a person lives and what resources are available to them in order to determine whether it’s cheaper for them to eat more healthfully. In some places, it just isn’t.
McDonalds has had nutrition information available in their restaurants for years. I remember reading calorie and fat counts listed on a poster next to the cash register when I was a kid, somewhere around 20 years ago. If you want the info, it’s there. You don’t even have to look very hard for it.
Well, that is, of course, assuming that I used the entire package of dressing. Which I plead guilty to.
Incidentally, the Mandarin Chicken Salad comes in at 150 calories, and 1.5 grams of fat. The real calories/fat come from the dressing, (Roasted Almond has the best numbers, btw.), but then, really you don’t have to use the whole package anyway. There’s usually about twice as much as you really need in those little packets, even for the large salads that Wendy’s serves up. When I go for the high fat dressings (I have a weakness for bleu cheese when I can get it), I usually use a fairly minimal amount. Other salad eaters have this option as well.
Plus, 700 calories and 30 grams of fat is still 180 calories and 8 grams of fat less than the Classic Single with Everything and Biggie Fries, and has very minimal saturated fat.
Then there’s the whole soda vs. iced tea issue. I didn’t run the numbers, but IIRC, your average 12oz of soda has something around 200 calories, all from sugar.
Try again.
Not true.
At my local market in NW suburban Chicago, your choice of broccoli, cauliflower, or celery are 68 cents/lb, while chips are $2.50 for a 13 oz bag.
Same thing with fruit vs. cookies. Mangoes are 3/$1, cookies are $2 per 16 oz pkg. Bananas are sometimes as low as 9 cents/lb, even at 19 or 29 cents/lb, they are always cheaper than cookies.
In other words, what are you talking about?