15 budget friendly health tips
One of the biggest misconceptions about food is that it is impossible to eat healthy on a budget. Here are 15 tips to help you lower your grocery bill while maintaining a healthy diet.
- Check out your grocery flyer for weekly specials, and organize your meals around key ingredients, especially more expensive ingredients higher in protein like meat or fish.
- Don’t go to the grocery store hungry, you will have a tendancy to buy more sweet or salty items
- Take a smaller cart. This will keep the unhealthy items you do not really need on the shelf!
- Spend the least amount of time in the grocery store: the more time you spend the higher the bill will be.
- Buy house brands or no name brands, cheaper and just as healthy
- Individual packaging is more expensive, cheese or yogurt for example. Use it to control your portions or for convenience only.
- Take advantage of the deals on healthy food that have a long storage life (grains, pasta and canned food).
- Don’t buy an item just because it’s on sale; so much food ends up perishing in our home.
- Avoid empty calorie foods; such a waste of money for no nutritional value.
- Stay away from processed, pre-packaged or precooked food as much as you can; you are paying for the extra labour and substantial amount of undesirable added ingredients.
- Eat less meat and include other forms of cheaper proteins: tofu, beans, nuts, eggs and peanut butter
- Look at the products that aren’t at eye level, they are often cheaper and healthier.
- Aim for frozen or canned vegetables and fruits when they are not in season; the nutritional values are relatively equal.
- Choose the lower unit price per g/ml on the price display (ex : $0.25/100g vs $0.15/100g). Unsweetened cereals are usually cheaper than sweetened ones.
- Resist the sugary snacks near the checkout area.
My 10 budget friendly foods
- Oatmeal
- Brown rice
- Banana
- Frozen mixed berries
- Frozen Asian vegetables
- Sweet potatoes
- Canned salmon/tuna
- Chickpeas/kidney beans
- Crunchy all natural peanut butter
- Low fat plain yoghurt
What are your favourite low cost healthy items?
By Alyssa Fontaine
