Why healthy food is NOT expensive

We find recipes with exotic fruits and vegetables but a healthy choice does not mean expensive food and there are some simple ways to reduce costs.

When did the idea of healthy food being expensive appear? Why do people say they can’t afford eating healthy? What does eating healthy mean?

Marketing promotes certain food but greater variety is actually available

In the last couple of years, eating healthy became a trend. And, as any trending topic, it benefits from a lot of marketing. Eating healthy became like a special thing people interested in fitness and well-being do, even if it is nothing special about it. It is just the simplest way of eating well without too much fuzz in the kitchen.

Every time I go to the market to buy vegetables and fruits and condiments of all sorts, a tag line popular these days comes to my mind, ”Healthy food is expensive.” I check my wallet, I check the amount of food I bought and I find the proportion more than reasonable. Usually, at the market, I can buy fruits and vegetables and condiments for a week with little money that barely covers a basket of similar groceries at the supermarket.

Media, among others, started to present healthy diets as costing serious money, even if they really don’t. But, again, marketing did its job and started to make vegetables and fruit superstars and just buying them from the market wasn’t enough anymore, now you had to make sure they are bio or that their source is clean and pure.

Everything happened mostly because the new generations are the ones affected by high calorie, low nutrition foods with high levels of sugar, fat and salt putting children at risk from a very early age. And adults too!

Choose food based on your cooking skills and budget

But these problems are avoidable in a very easy manner, by just consuming vegetables, fruit, condiments, fish and meat, cooked in a simple way. It is just that the simple was made up to look extravagant, extraordinary and hard to achieve. The issue of healthy food was never the cost of it, but the knowledge, the skills and the time to cook a healthy meal.

We believe eating healthy is expensive because of the rise of ”superfoods” and organic produce, but, again, these are just marketing tricks that will make you think that the effort you put into eating healthy and the money that you spend for such foods will make you automatically feel better, be healthier and so on.

Yes, chia seed smoothies might be expensive, but eating an apple is not. Beef fillets might be a little more expensive, but chicken wings are not. A super shake made of 15 vegetables and fruits can be expensive, but enjoying a carrot and a cucumber with a side of home made hummus is not. Do you get the point?

Diet is fundamental for health and well-being, so if you just avoid processed foods and ready to go meals, while cooking simply with ingredients that are not expensive at all, you have easily nailed it!