Cheap Nutrition for Your Budget

The old adage about college students and young professionals living on mac and cheese and ramen noodles is truer than it ought to be. Why? Because it can be expensive to eat healthy food. Look through the aisles. You'll see lots of high-fat, high-sugar processed foods for sale cheap: in the canned food aisle, in the inexpensive frozen foods, even in the boxed foods.

Try to replicate some of these recipes with fresh vegetables and meats, and you'll find very quickly that doing it yourself is more expensive. Why? Most of the processed foods use fillers and lower-grade ingredients than are sold in the stores. There are other economic reasons: corn, for instance, is one of the most common food ingredients, and it's really cheap right now due to subsidies.

The end result, though, is that if you have a tight budget, it's hard to eat food that is good for you all the time. There are, however, a few techniques you can try.

Tips For Cheaper Nutrition

1. Buy food from a local farmer's market. Not only will you be able to find fresh produce (and maybe even other great local products) cheaper than at the store, you'll be supporting local farmers. And the more you shop at farmer's markets, the cheaper they can sell their produce to you.

2. Plan ahead. Know exactly what you want to buy before you walk out the door, and stick with that list except to remove things that turn out to be too expensive. Keep a running list on the refrigerator so you don't forget things, and buy enough milk and bread to last all week.

3. Buy seasonal foods. If it's fall, apples are ripe and cheaper in your area; in the spring, you'll find strawberries. It's even cheaper if you can go to a u-pick farm, where you pick your own produce.

4. Buy generic foods. The truth Dole doesn't want you to hear: most generics are just name-brand foods with a generic label slapped on. In Kroger and other grocery stores, the upscale generics (Private Selection, for instance) are of much higher quality than most name brands. Ask a store manager (not the teen stockboy!) for advice about quality generics.