Often the healthy versus unhealthy discussion reduces to a home-cooked-from-scratch versus processed/junk food discussion. Having seen how my North American-raised Gen X/Millennial peers shop for groceries, I'm not surprised at the perception that the healthy option is more expensive. The predominant approach to home-cooking I see these cohorts taking is:<p>1) Find recipe
2) Make shopping list
3) Go to preferred grocery store and fulfill shopping list<p>This is a foolproof recipe for "more expensive". To eat healthy and maintain reasonable spending, grocery shopping needs to come _before_ recipe selection. One needs to go to the store, buy what's on sale (which is also frequently what's in season and thus probably more nutrient packed), and then build a recipe around that using non-perishable pantry ingredients. The cost difference between the two approaches will generally be at least 1.5X, and sometimes a lot more.
This rings pretty true to me. I live in Manhattan, and my wife is a personal chef, so she has to be one of the world's foremost collectors of anecdotal grocery price data you'll ever meet.<p>She's noticed a lot of weird dissonances in the way people think about grocery pricing over the years I've known her. For example, despite its reputation, Whole Foods has some of the cheapest prices on staple pantry items in the city. Things like flour, sugar, eggs, butter, olive oil, milk, and rice, as well as many of the "365" branded packaged products are actually much cheaper than "low end" grocery stores like Gristedes or Key Food. Trader Joe's has a reputation as a high end grocery as well, but they have incredibly cheap produce and other perishables. If you go to Gristedes and buy a box of corn flakes you're going to spend $4-6. For that price you can buy 24 eggs! At Key Food you can buy pork chops for $2 / pound. Canned beans and other non-perishables can also be incredibly cheap. With the exception of the corn flakes, which - while delicious - is actually loaded with corn syrup - everything I just listed is perfectly healthy when prepared at home.<p>Anecdotally, my mother spends an absolute fortune on nasty weight watchers meals because she believes they are "healthier" than just cooking herself a piece of chicken and some broccoli. My sister will eat a $3 lara bar that is "made with real fruit!" instead of a 25c banana.<p>It doesn't surprise me that within the universe of packaged foods, people think that the expensive ones are healthier than the cheap ones. But I just wish people would figure out that within the universe of foods, the packaged ones are both more expensive and typically less healthy than cooking your own food.
The headline misrepresents the article completely.<p>Eating healthy food _is_ costlier than not caring about what you eat. However, that does not mean that expensive equals healthy.<p>It's basically the same old "everything that's good is (at least somewhat) expensive, but not everything that's expensive is good" applied to food.<p>BTW: why the heck are both source and journal reference links to some top level domains?
Time/ability is a big factor when it comes to what people eat. Throwing a frozen pizza in the oven is fast, easy and requires no extra dishes. You can even just use the box it came in is a plate, so I've heard.<p>Being comfortable in the kitchen is important too. If you have to go looking up recipes and following them exactly that can make cooking at home a lot slower and tedious.<p>It's easy to point out things like dried beans and cheap root vegetables but those only really compete on the cost perspective, convenience and ease are just as important IMO.
Having lost about 50kg, I feel happy talking about this.<p>It's much more expensive to eat healthily, and in general more expensive food is healthier, so people are just running in reality.<p>To be exact, you can eat cheapily and healthily, but it is very boring. If you want an exciting and healthy diet, that gets expensive. No ready meals, and things like prawns and raspberries (two of my favourites) are great low cal options, but not cheap in quantity.
When people have to judge something, but they have no expertise to actually judge it, then they use price as an indicator for quality. People use price as indicator when buying clothes, jewellery etc. all the time. Isn't this the same effect, but applied to food (where healthy is considered to be correlated with quality)?
To keep myself healthy I need large quantities of protein.<p>And it is ridiculously expensive, at least when compared to corn and mandioca that grows on my yard and potatoes that are very cheap.<p>People tend to think that "healthy" food is just thr opposite of junk food. The problem is that potatoes can be infinitely cheap, but it won't be healthy to eat only potatoes. An actual healthy diet with all nutrients can easily be very expensive, even more so when corporations manage to distort prices (I once lived in a place where the cheapest source of clean water available was soda. When compared to juices or milk even Coca-Cola, that was the most expensive soda, looked like a great deal)
Interestingly, this also holds for cat food. People are often willing to pay a premium price for the food of their pets, while in the end they and their pets get to eat low quality processed stuff.
Isn't the largest expense of eating healthier related to the time to prep the food (and cognitive load to think about food prep) rather than the direct monetary cost?
"There are certainly categories of food where healthy is more expensive, such as some organic and gluten-free products, Reczek said."<p>there's basically zero evidence organic or gluten free are "healthier".
Healthy prepared foods are, of course, more expensive than junk prepared foods. But healthy and less-processed foods can be cheaper than junky prepared foods. With Taco Bell being the notable exception.
Healthy food does cost a lot more. Fruits and vegetables cost much more per calorie than flour, oil and sugar.<p>A $6 bag of apples has less calories in it than a loaf of Wonderbread.<p>$2 of broccoli has less calories than a $0.30 can of soda.
A lot of people, myself included, equate healthy food with perishable goods. Perishable goods do cost more. Frozen or canned veggies are cheaper than fresh veggies.
It doesn't help that people like to project their personal way of life onto what should be a generally mechanical question. Eat x and y and z, don't eat [meat/grains/something else], complete with extra-pompous "most people in the world eat..." (I assure you the speaker doesn't), when look, if you go to Popeye's, the cashier asks if you want French fries or onion rings or coleslaw or green beans, and you'll almost never see anyone get the last two. Coleslaw might have a bit of mayonnaise on it but it's a damn lot healthier than potatoes which have had their nutrients partially removed by soaking and are drenched in partially oxidized peanut oil. This is relevant because <i>the healthy options are the same price and all you have to do is say the word</i>.<p>The culture of dieting is seriously broken. One of the only things worse than being fat is being openly trying to lose weight, because everyone knows how to help you (lol). The typical way a person responds in the above situation is "<i>well</i>, I'm already eating fried chicken" because we're either "being good" or "bad" and as we keep making it harder to be good we get a worse overall balance. People are unable to put one foot in front of the other because we always make it about running the whole race at once. A myopic and frankly wrong obsession with reducing the quantity of meat (irrespective of its preparation and toppings) doesn't help, because it ensures that "approved" diets are guaranteed to be unpleasant.<p>So that's what they pay for: a certificate that says "your food is healthy", because either it's <i>Mark's Daily Apple</i>, or it's Popeye's. And this entire discussion is like that: many ways to 'reinvent' the way you cook food at home (yes, I can make a shitty curry with a can of coconut milk too), little recognition of the many small changes that can be made <i>without</i> reorganizing your entire life.
I think it goes beyond just food. People have it ingrained in their heads that "you get what you pay for." Which naturally leads them to the conclusion that "if something is cheaper, it must be worse." In a perfectly rational and perfectly informed utopia, this might be true, but certainly not in our world. There are plenty of companies that provide worse goods at higher prices, and they get by on the backs of marketing/brand-name/ignorance. I've often found that 10 minutes of googling can get you recommendations that are strictly superior to what the average guy ends up buying without thinking twice about.
I recommend going vegan. Cheap an effective. Thug Kitchen is really good starting cookbook if you can ignore the language. Also you need to be okay with spending time on food preparation.<p>I'm a reformed meat eater.