Mythbusting: The Cost of Healthy Eating

Let’s face it, checking out with a real or virtual cart full of fresh, organic produce, gluten-free and organic snacks, wild-caught fish, and grass-fed beef can lead to an eye-popping cash register receipt. We all want to make the best dietary decisions for our health, but foods like these—with their aura of healthfulness—can cost so much!

Parke Wilde, PhD, a professor at Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, has conducted research for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Thrifty Food Plan, an outline of how a nutritious diet may be achieved with limited resources. “If you are looking for fresh cleaned and bagged leafy green vegetables, grass-fed beef, and imported fresh tropical fruits (other than bananas), the cost will certainly be higher,” says Wilde. “But our research has found buying the foods you need to get adequate nutrients for health can be quite inexpensive.” On the USDA plan, one adult will spend between $167 and $177 per month on groceries. A family of four will spend $588 to $675 per month. While you may not need or want to cut your grocery expenses to this extreme, busting these three common myths may make it easier to shift your food intake to healthier choices without breaking the bank.

Myth 1: Healthy eating is expensive.

“Eating healthy can be expensive,” says Jeffrey Blumberg, PhD, professor emeritus at the Friedman School, “but it doesn’t have to be—if you know how to shop and cook.”

Plan. Planning ahead can make a big difference in your food budget (and cut food waste dramatically). Deciding what you want to have on hand for the week’s meals allows you to buy only what you need, take advantage of deals, and avoid using fast food for lunches or as a last-minute answer to the “what’s for dinner tonight” question. Be sure to check your pantry, fridge, and freezer so you can build meals around things you have and avoid paying for ingredients you already own. If it works for you, cook extra and reheat, repurpose, or freeze leftovers for another meal (or two). An estimated 30 to 40 percent of the U.S. food supply is wasted every year, and food is the single largest component of U.S. landfills. Besides the environmental impact, wasted food is wasted money.

Shop Smart. There are many ways to keep costs down when shopping.

• Look for sales and store brands: These are often the less expensive option and are generally good quality.
• Reduce food waste: Most of us throw away up to a third of all the food we buy. When buying perishable foods, have a plan to freeze what you can’t use within a few days of purchase. Look for different stages of ripeness when buying fresh produce (those unripe bananas or avocados will be ready to eat when you’ve finished the ripe ones).
• Bulk up: Buying in bulk is a great money saver, as long as it doesn’t lead to waste. Focus on minimally processed and unprocessed items with a long shelf life (like dried beans, or reduced-sodium canned tomatoes, beans, or seafood) along with frozen vegetables, fruits, seafood, poultry, and unprocessed meats.
• Favor frozen produce: Frozen vegetables and fruits are at least as nutritious as fresh and can last for up to a year. They are also a great time-saver because they are already washed and cut. Many can be thrown into dishes like stir-fries, soups, and smoothies without even thawing first.
• Limit specialty foods: You don’t need fancy foods to eat healthy (see the sections below on organics and gluten free foods).
• Make meats the side: Animal proteins (including beef, pork, poultry, and seafood) are often among the more expensive items we buy. When planning meals, think of these as a side dish, and make foods like veggies, beans, fruits, and whole grains (along with healthy oils and dairy) the main event.
• Avoid prepared meals: Meals that are already prepared for you, whether in the freezer case or at the deli counter, are often much more expensive than buying the individual ingredients. Prepared meals can be more convenient, but also more costly (and salty).

Cook. Some people are not comfortable cooking from scratch, and some do not feel they have the time, but learning some basic skills and planning ways to fit some simple, home-cooked meals into your schedule is great for your health and your wallet. Meals from restaurants, cafeterias, or food trucks, as good a deal as they can seem, are almost always much more expensive (and less healthful) than buying and preparing food.

Myth 2: Organically grown plants are more nutritious than conventionally grown.

Organic produce is grown without use of most chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides and may use more sustainable farming methods, but organically grown plants themselves are not necessarily more nutritious than conventionally grown produce. A wide variety of factors impact the nutrient content of fruits and vegetables. If some organic produce does have a nutritional edge, research suggests any differences are small and unlikely to be very consequential in the context of a healthy dietary pattern. “All fruits and vegetables (fresh or frozen, cooked or raw, organic or conventional) are health-promoting choices from a nutrition standpoint,” says Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, senior scientist and director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging and executive editor of Tufts Health and Nutrition Letter.

“We have seen again and again that people who eat more fruits and vegetables have lower risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, and many other chronic diseases,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, dean of the Friedman School and editor-in-chief of Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter. “The vast majority of the produce consumed by the people in these studies has been conventionally grown. Organic produce is better for the environment, but if the choice is between conventionally grown fruits and veggies or none at all, choose the fruits and veggies.”

The same holds true for packaged (processed) foods marked “organic.” The ingredients in these foods were grown according to organic standards, but that does not turn an unhealthy processed food into a healthy choice.

Myth 3: Gluten-free foods are better for health than those that contain gluten.

The “gluten-free” label claim lends foods an aura of healthfulness that is often undeserved. “Simply replacing refined wheat products with refined rice and corn products will lead to few, if any, health gains—and possibly harms,” says Mozaffarian.

The fact is, for most people, there is actually no data that gluten-free diets are healthier than gluten-containing diets (nor that they are good for weight loss). In fact, gluten-free diets may be lower in some important nutrients and higher in calories. In a 2018 study by Tufts researchers that compared the nutrient composition of gluten-free eating patterns versus gluten-containing diets, a gluten-free menu was, on average, significantly lower in protein, magnesium, potassium, vitamin E, and folate then a similar gluten-containing menu.

“Gluten-free cookies, crackers, or snack foods may be made from refined, unfortified rice, tapioca, corn, or potato flours,” says Nicola McKeown, PhD, associate professor at the Friedman School and a whole grains expert. “This means they often lack certain nutrients (like iron, folic acid, and other B vitamins) that are required to be added to all refined wheat products. Dietary fiber intake may also be lower on a gluten-free diet because foods made with whole wheat are a major contributor to dietary fiber intake in the U.S.”

If you are among the one percent of people worldwide known to have celiac disease or the estimated six percent thought to have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, be sure to replace gluten-containing foods with gluten-free whole grains and other minimally processed choices. “If avoiding gluten helps you eat less refined starch and sugar and more minimally processed fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, oats, and buckwheat, that’s a good thing and will lead to important health benefits,” says Mozaffarian.

A study on the cost of healthier food choices pointed out that foods like carrots and pinto beans are much less expensive per portion than unhealthy choices like ice cream and cakes. In 2013, a study by Tufts researchers indicated it cost, on average, only about $1.50 a day more to choose healthy foods when shopping in the supermarket. You could
save that much by forgoing that daily sweet coffee beverage or dessert—and think of the money you’ll save in healthcare down the road!