Nowadays, making decisions that help us to have a healthy lifestyle seem more difficult than having an unhealthy life.
Go to the gym or stay home? Cook vegetables or open a bag of chips? Buy expensive healthy food or cheap junk food?
You may have noticed that fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meats are relatively more expensive that their unhealthy versions.
The most popular way to assess if food is really expensive is to compare price/quality, although to know the real value of food, we should compare price against nutritional value.
If you go to a fast food restaurant, you can buy a double hamburger, french fries, and a soda for the same price, or even less, than one kilogram of apples in the supermarket.
If you compare them using a price/amount reasoning, you could think that fast food is “cheaper” because it is a full meal, but is that really a complete meal?
The hamburger has unhealthy red meat, bread made with refined flour, seasoning made mainly with sugar and sodium, French fries that have 6 times more calories than a cooked potato, and soda that has no nutritional value, only sugar.
If we analyze the apples, we’ll see that they are full of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber (which, by the way, gives you a feeling of satiety for longer than “a full meal”). Comparing price vs. nutritional value, it is easy to see that the apples are cheaper.
Still, the cost of each trip to the supermarket usually is higher when you buy healthy food. Fortunately, there are different ways to save and follow a healthy diet at the same time, some examples are:
Buy seasonal fruits and vegetables: Because supply is high, prices go down.
Buy frozen food instead of canned food: Buying frozen fruits and vegetables is so much better than buying canned food, because you avoid preservatives, and, at the same time, you can buy cheaper even if they are out of season.
Buy at markets: In all cities, there are farm markets where you can buy fresh local produce at lower prices than supermarkets.
Junk food has ingredients like: sugar, saturated fats, and sodium that are related to different diseases such as: diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
While fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants found in healthy food fight these diseases.
Your smartphone not only sends messages and allows you to use Snapchat. There are many other apps you can download that will help you to better control what you eat.
Apps like Fooducate and Wholesome help you make better decisions about your diet, rate how healthy each recipe is, and help you know the Nutrition Facts of the foods you eat.
Check your phone app store and download the ones that you like better to help you find healthy food options, and you will discover that healthy food is not as expensive as you thought.
Remember that choosing a healthy lifestyle could seem as an expensive option, but in the long run it benefits your health and helps you save money. Go to the gym or stay home? Cook vegetables or open a bag of chips? Buy expensive healthy food or cheap junk food?
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