How to Eat Cheap or Eat Healthy-Can You Do Both?

Women's Health Mag Touts Eggs not Cereal as Best Breakfast

Jan 26, 2009 Larry Ervin

Eat This, Not That names the best bets at the supermarket to eat healthy.

Eggs For Breakfast Better Than Cereal?

Women's Health's online magazine, Eat This, Not That named as their Best Breakfast Food:

Eggs @ $1.84/dozen instead of cereal @ $4.50/box.

This may be one of the more controversial of the magazine's recommendations. Ignoring cholesterol issues, they argue: “The best breakfasts for all-day productivity are high in protein and low in refined carbohydrates, so even if there were no price difference, eggs would be a much better choice over a bowl of cereal (especially if it’s one of the sickly sweet varieties).”

Eating Healthy Getting More Expensive

The magazine reports that the cost of high nutrition, low-calorie foods have increased by 19.5% over the last two years. At the same time, junk foods have surprisingly decreased by 1.8%.

The editors came up with a list of “smart swaps” in a dozen categories that you can buy for less than equally healthy, but more expensive equivalents. It must be noted that supermarket prices the magazine quotes will vary by region and season as well as retailer incentives. Here are the magazine's picks along with selected comments from the article.

On the Meat Aisle

Best Fish: Farmed Catfish @ $2.52/lb instead of Pacific Halibut @ $4.00/lb. Both, the magazine reports, “are rich in omega-3s; relatively low in mercury, PCBs, and dioxins; have decently high protein content; and are ecologically sustainable.”
Best Poultry: Chicken leg @ $1.48/lb instead of Chicken breast @ $2.37/lb. The dark meat “scored higher in nutritional value than all cuts of beef except for kidney and liver.” Another way to save? They also note that frozen chicken breasts are about half the price of fresh.
Best Beef: Top sirloin @ $5.86/lb instead of T-bone @ $7.38/lb.
Best Pork: Pork loin chops @$3.28/lb instead of ham @ $3.42/lb. Not a big savings, but “ham is one of the least nutritious types of pork you can eat.”

Produce Section

Best Vegetable Snack: Carrots @ $0.80/lb instead of Celery @ $0.78/lb. Almost the same cost, but carrots have twice as much fiber as celery and a whopping 43 times as much Vitamin A.
Best Salad Base: Cabbage @ $0.62/lb instead of Romaine @ $1.91/lb. “1 cup of cabbage gives you more than half of your daily vitamin K requirement.”
Best Side Vegetable: Broccoli @ $1.76/lb instead of Cauliflower @ $0.33/lb. The magazine states, “When it comes to health benefits alone, broccoli beats cauliflower—half a cup of cooked broccoli delivers 24 percent of your Vitamin A, 84% of your Vitamin C, and 3 grams of fiber. But at a significantly reduced price, half a cup of cooked cauliflower is also good for you—it has a gram of fiber and 46 percent of your recommended daily intake of Vitamin C. If you’re really looking to cut corners, cauliflower is a much cheaper option that still packs a nutritional punch.”
Best Berry: Frozen blueberries @$1.75/lb instead of fresh blueberries @ $1.90/lb. “1 cup of frozen blueberries gives you just as much fiber as the raw variety, and a handful fewer calories. While fresh blueberries offer 18 percent more Vitamin C, that difference isn’t worth the extra cost.”
Best Fruit for Brown-Baggers: Bananas @ $0.63/lb instead of Red delicious apples at $1.26/lb. “A banana, at half the price per pound, offers more Vitamin C and just 1 less gram of fiber.” Depending on where you live, there may be a quibble with this result. For many, bananas need to be transported many hundreds of miles further than apples or other fruits and so the environmental cost should be factored.

Staples

Best Grain: Dried lentils @ $1.18/lb instead of brown rice @ $1.59/lb. One serving of lentils has 11 grams of fiber and 10 grams of protein. “It’s also one of the world’s richest sources of folate, a B vitamin that helps form oxygen-carrying red blood cells and promotes communication between nerves cells.”
Best Cooking Oil: Canola oil @ $0.31/lb instead of Extra virgin olive oil @ $2.42/lb. The magazine suggests that you “Save the pricey olive oil for dressing salads or drizzling lightly over grilled vegetables. Canola’s neutral flavor is great for cooking, and it happens to have an even better ratio of monounsaturated to saturated fat than the vaunted extra virgin.”

Canola is a cultivar of rapeseed, developed in Canada in the early 1970s. They named the resulting cooking oil Canola for Canadian Oil Low Acid. Since its popularization, Canola Oil has stirred up considerable controversy, with detractors criticizing the fact that it is a genetically modified food, and blaming it for everything from blindness, certain cancers and even mad cow disease. Apparently the editors of Women's Health magazine are unconvinced.

Reference: Women's Health - The Healthiest Cheap Food in the Supermarket

The copyright of the article How to Eat Cheap or Eat Healthy-Can You Do Both? in Food Trends is owned by Larry Ervin. Permission to republish How to Eat Cheap or Eat Healthy-Can You Do Both? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.