Health

Why Healthy Food Doesn’t Cost as Much as You Think!

Perception is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Take this picture for example. It looks for all the world like water is spilling into thru the wall and into a hole doesn’t it? Yet it is just the angle of the camera. If the photographer walked around to the other side of the drawing and took a picture we’d see something that would look pretty much like what it actually is: colored chalk carefully drawn onto a street. We probably would have trouble making out what it was intended to be a drawing of!

Our perception of everyday things can be just a skewed. Sometimes things can seem like simple common sense but still be wrong, dead wrong. Take the common belief that eating healthy is very expensive. That it is something beyond the reach of the average joe. Take this quote from USA Today for example:

“Almost 15 percent of households in America say they don’t have enough money to eat the way they want to eat,” Seligman said. Recent estimates show 49 million Americans make food decisions based on cost, she added.

When people hear this they think “There are many people who simple cannot afford to eat in a healthy way.” No, there are many people telling us that they believe that they cannot eat in a healthy way … huge difference! This belief affects their reality by making it less likely that they will buy and eat the healthy choices that they in fact could afford.

Does this mean they are dead wrong and if they’d get their act together they could actually be eating sushi everyday, or the kind of salads sold at upscale restaurants, or even steak and lobster? Absolutely not! Few can afford to eat in this fashion regularly. What it does mean is that there are many different ways to create a healthy real food diet. This isn’t an either steak and lobster or Kraft mac-n-cheese kinda choice. That is a false dichotomy. We don’t have to afford baby lettuce produced by virgins in the finest soils … produce common and organic is fine! Plain ground grassfed beef is fine … no need for steak if the budget does not allow for it.

A Little More for Some Things, A Lot Less for Many Others

Experienced real foodies know that while you pay much more for some items you end up paying way less for others. Say you spend twice as much per pound for meat. That isn’t at all uncommon. But at the same time you give up buying deli chicken from the grocery store, or boxed cereals, or frozen dinners. Or say you were in the habit of ordering pizza every Friday for movie night. Now you make a fun buffet mexican meal instead. The takeout pizzas cost about $16 each and the grassfed beef taco dinner costs around $10 for a family of four. That’s a savings of $6 right there, but hardly anyone just orders a pizza. Instead they order dippin’ breads with sauce, and big bottles of soda bringing the bill to about $30 with tax. Then you need to tip the driver. You could save $20 just by buying that grassfed beef and making a nutritious and fun dinner at home!

Lots of things are like this. When I shop at a grocery store I route around all the Betty Crocker boxes, and packaged wing-dings, and frozen ready-to-heat pot roasts all of which costs substantially more than their nutritional value would support. Buying them will take a bite out of your food budget. Buying plain potatoes, or bags of plain rice and spices in quantities larger than the tiny rip-off jars they usually have on the spice aisle instead of these convenience foods makes all the difference. These plain foods are dirt cheap let me tell ya, even in their organic versions. Pound per pound, calorie per calorie, nutrient by nutrient they are cheaper dollarwise than the cheap processed foods so commonly eaten by those trying to eat within a budget.

Average Food Budgets for Real Food LESS than Average USDA Food Plans

In my post Real Food Economics 101: Real Food vs Average Food Budgets I give details about what several real food bloggers are spending for food, person by person. This makes it easy to compare. My findings were that virtually all of the real food bloggers were spending less per day per person than the USDA’s moderate food plan costs. I give more detail on how that is achieved in Real Food Economics 101: Strategies to Reduce Food Costs. I hear from people every week who have even lower food costs than the ones cited in my post. This is real people … this is doable!

Dealing With the Perception of Added Expense

While the belief that eating the real foods way costs double or triple what a conventional food budget does is totally false the fact the many perceive it that way is not. The perception of expense alone can cause grave difficulties in transitioning a family to real food. And these problems are interpersonal in nature. Like say your mother-in-law not only thinks you’re endangering the kids with raw milk but you’re wasting tons of money to do so and whispers to your husband about it whenever she has a chance. It’s eating away at his resolve to feed the kids real food since his job isn’t really secure and he’s worried about saving more money as a cushion. Or maybe your spouse never goes to the store and has little idea of food prices but believes everything is cheaper at Walmart. They reason that since you’re on a budget that is really the only place your family should buy food. These problems of perception are very real obstacles to transitioning to real food. In fact I’d venture to say they are about the biggest problems in transitioning to real food with a desire for the comfort of familiar foods coming in a close second.

These perceptions won’t disappear overnight that’s for sure. In many cases they may never go away. You may never persuade your mother-in-law that your food bill is less now than it was before. But you can be aware of the issue and provide your husband with the supporting information he needs to be assured that this new way of eating is not only healthy but is in fact saving the family money. Dealing with these problems is mostly a matter of being aware, remaining calm and presenting the facts to those involved in the decision making. Absolutely do not pay much attention to what those that are not directly involved think of your food decisions. And lastly, it’s a matter of persistence. These things can take some real time.

An Important Exception

While most shoppers are buying convenience foods and eating fast food there are a sizable minority of families that have cut out all processed foods and eating meals out and are still having issues making ends meet when it comes to food. I do hear from them and I get it. Just wanted to give them a shout-out in this post that the problems addressed here are not the issues they are directly dealing with. I hope to write something soon that will more directly deal with their situation.

What Makes a Diet Good? The Final Five Principles

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

Your grandparents or great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents knew what a good diet was. They knew it through and through without even the slightest shade of a doubt. A good diet was what people always ate. A good diet was about plenty of wholesome food. Good health was about more than just a good diet though. It was also about healthy living. Over the past few weeks posts we’ve talked at length about the details that made up the diet our grandparents recognized as healthy and how that diet differs from a modern diet, whether it’s average or perceived as healthy. Today’s guidelines are mostly about that part of health that granny would have called clean living.

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What Makes a Diet Good? The Third Five Principles

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

When we were little kids at school we were taught whatever USDA food group system that was being promoted at the time. It might have been the The Basic Seven, or the The Basic Four, or the The Food Guide Pyramid, MyPyramid or now “MyPlate” The USDA’s food recommendations are ever changing. But does our body’s needs change? Not at all! We need the exact same macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients our forebearers lived on. Nothing has changed at all … it’s absurd to think it would!

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What Makes a Diet Good? The Second Five Principles

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

Interesting chart, huh? Foods are viewed as “body building” or for “energy” or as “protective”. This suggests people should eat plenty of milk, cheese, eggs, fish, and meat along with lots of lard, suet, tallow, butter, bacon and ham and plenty of starchy foods too. Wonder where this chart came from? It was issued by the British Ministry of Food during the Second World War. The chart shown in last weeks post on the first 5 principles of what makes a diet good is a very similar chart produced by the USDA during the wartime years.

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What Makes a Diet Good? The First Five Principles

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

Do you feel confused about what to include in a good diet? How about what to leave out? Do nutrition facts labels make your head spin round and round with all the different and contradictory things you’ve read and heard about a healthy diet? Do you feel a little sick with confusion when you read the ingredients labels on foods in the grocery store?

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Healthy Fats First!

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

When you have a limited food budget deciding where to put your money first can be daunting. Do you make organic vegetables and fruits highest priority? or supplements? How about free-range, grassfed meat? What comes first? If I know that I can’t afford to buy all quality ingredients right now, which items are most important? Of all the foods to buy in the highest quality possible, it’s most important that fats be of the highest quality you can afford. Why? Much of the fat available in our modern food supply are toxic fats. Avoiding these toxic fats and providing wholesome fat is first priority in maintaining health.

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Why Traditional Diets are Better for You

by Granny Filed Under: Straight Talk

There is much talk these days about diet. What to eat, how to prepare it, how much to eat, so on and so forth. In fact there is so much nervous hand wringing talk about food these days that it begins to sound like the whole country is suffering from an eating disorder. No one seems very confident about their choices. Everyone seems defensive and a bit guilty about what they are eating. It’s not to hard to understand how we’ve ended up in such a fix. With a steady stream of conflicting information from the media on the subject it’s no wonder we’re confused. Scientific studies are published that conflict with prior published findings. We are awash in information. So much so that we can’t put it to use.

So what is a reliable guidepost for making decisions about food? I believe the most reliable guide for deciding all things dietary to be the observation of traditional foodways or food cultures. These traditional diets stand the test of time proving their ability to support and sustain many varied happy and healthy cultures. This is real proof in my book. We are disconnected from our traditional food cultures. This is the root of our anxious relationship with food. It is also the root of our worsening health.

Are people healthier on traditional diets?

If you are 40 or older, think back to your youth. Remember the old-timers you knew as a kid. Grandma and Grandpa were generally in pretty good health for their age. Sure, not everyone was but I bet the number of active, happy elderly people from your childhood outnumber the ones battling chronic ailments. They had large gardens and active social lives, usually at church. They went dancing, square dancing in particular was popular here in Texas. In my memory there are many who were more physically active than most young people are now. Let’s think about now. Do you know very many over the age of 55 or so that are so very active as the elderly people from your childhood? Not from tv, but from your daily life. You probably know quite a few people over 55 now and most are on multiple medications for chronic ailments. Not many would consider the labor of gardening, yet this was a common pastime for old folks in years past. Dancing is now something done for a few brief minutes at your daughter’s wedding, not like the large numbers of square dancing clubs that used to be filled with elderly folks that held contests and frequent exhibitions, with all kinds of fancy homemade Roy Rogers and Dale Evans costuming.

Now think about how they grew up, what they ate. Many grew up on farms, or in small towns close to farms. They ate the produce from local farms or their own family gardens. They had raw milk and cream. They ate eggs and bacon on a daily basis. Now think of how we grew up, what we eat. We grew up on pop-tarts and pasteurized milk. On canned vegetables and twinkies. As both generations grew older their diets have come to include even more processed food but the older generation who ate traditionally as children have proved to be more resilient. I don’t know about you but these people at age 65 ran rings around me at age 16. So who ate the healthier diet?

Cancer, heart disease and allergies were rare ailments prior to 1900. Today, one of every two Americans will suffer from some form of heart disease, one of every three Americans will die of cancer, and 90 million people suffer from allergies. This of course is not iron-clad proof that the diets of 100 years ago were better, but I’d say it’s extremely compelling circumstantial evidence, especially when you consider that all these illnesses are considered to be diet related.

What is a traditional diet?

You can think of a traditional diet as what a typical person from a particular culture ate around 100 or so years ago. This oversimplifies a bit, since some processed food was available even then. But I think it helps to visualize what a traditional diet might look like for you personally.

When we think of a cultures food we typically think about flavors. The spicy cuisines of India and Mexico, for instance. But food culture isn’t just about flavor, culture informed people of what was healthy to eat, and in what proportions. It was about preparing food together, eating it together, about eating at a sane pace in rhythm with the rest of life. It was about the way foods were prepared, what is eaten with what and the seasonality of eating. All of this makes up a foodway or traditional diet.

So to help simplify creating a traditional diet for yourself and your family, think of the diet of your grandparents. What would a typical meal look like? What did they eat in Winter or Summer? How were foods combined? Was there any particular foods that they regarded as vital for health? To help the Weston Price Foundation has provided the following points that all traditional diets have in common. You can use it as a yardstick to see if your idea of a traditional diet measures up.

What all traditional diets have in common *

The diets of healthy primitive and nonindustrialized peoples contain no refined or denatured foods such as refined sugar or corn syrup; white flour; canned foods; pasteurized, homogenized, skim or low-fat milk; refined or hydrogenated vegetable oils; protein powders; artificial vitamins or toxic additives and colorings.
All traditional cultures consume some sort of animal protein and fat from fish and other seafood; water and land fowl; land animals; eggs; milk and milk products; reptiles; and insects.
In all traditional cultures, some animal products are eaten raw.
Primitive and traditional diets have a high food-enzyme content from raw dairy products, raw meat and fish; raw honey; tropical fruits; cold-pressed oils; wine and unpasteurized beer; and naturally preserved, lacto-fermented vegetables, fruits, beverages, meats and condiments. Seeds, grains and nuts are soaked, sprouted, fermented or naturally leavened in order to neutralize naturally occurring anti-nutrients in these foods, such as phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, tannins and complex carbohydrates.
Total fat content of traditional diets varies from 30% to 80% but only about 4% of calories come from polyunsaturated oils naturally occurring in grains, pulses, nuts, fish, animal fats and vegetables.
All primitive diets contain some salt.
Traditional cultures consume animal bones, usually in the form of gelatin-rich bone broths.

* Excerpted from Nourished Magazine.

Traditional diets are better for all of us

The best and most reliable predictor of the future is the past. This is what historians mean by “history repeats itself”. Looking at diet from a historical point of view provides the most reliable way to predict the outcome of a given diet. History, within the memory of each of us can inform us of the outcome of our grandparent’s generations diet. With this in mind I choose my ancestors diet as best for me.