Healthier = expensive

BlitzKrieg

Is it just me?(and some of you will say it is) but if something is marked as healthy for you it tends to be much more expensive then something not healthy. For example was just over at a shop across the street and a 1 litre bottle of *healthy sports drink* is more expensive then a 2 litre bottle of evil Coke cola.


now its not just products but also if you take certain diets for example like the atkins diet they stress you cannot eat the cheap version of stuff like pasta or mince but must go for the more expensive healthier option. Not from my personal experiance but from my housemate who is currently on the diet and he tells me it says he cant buy cheap asda brand mince or pasta or chicken but has to be a more expensive helthier option...



It just irks me because there is so much complaint about the obesity rates in the world yet when people actually try to eat healthier they end up breaking their bank or go for the unhealthy option simple because its cheaper. I know i buy the frozen food simple because i can be on a tight budget on the shopping...

Cake Fiend

Processed food is probably cheaper because it's mass produced, it lasts longer and is often made of or filled out with cheaper ingredients ("minimum 70% beef" and all that).

Add to that the fact that I'm convinced that healthy option-type food makers know they're part of a limited market, and so deliberately try to make the extra bit of cash.

vibe666

hate to be pedantic, but you can't eat the expensive pasta either on atkins, it's still full of carbs.

but yeah, i get what you mean. me and the g/f were discussing it last night, how if we could afford it we'sd be eating all the natural healthy options, but that it's hard to justify when all the processed crap is so much cheaper.

another things is like going to shop for fruit & veg on moore st. it's all gone off within a couple of days, whereas the same items from a supermarket will stay fresh for over a week because of all the crap pumped into them.

The Sweeper

Hmm - I think you'll find that the produce from the supermarket stays fresher for longer because the supermarket supply chain is a lot shorter than the Moore Street Barrow supply chain. Some supermarkets work on a 'field to fork' time of 48 hours for certain produce, as opposed to "two weeks rattling across Europe on the back of a lorry".

It is possible to eat healthy and eat cheap. A good deal of the cost of food is linked to the time the store spends processing it so that your preparation time is cut. Then there's the manufacturers' own economies of scale - so the more of something they make, the cheaper they can produce it.

So a health drink is €4, while coke is €2, because the health drink manufacturer doesn't make as much health drink as coke makes coke. Then again the easiest way to save money on that is drink water.

The easiest way to eat healthy and cheap is to buy unprocessed and process it yourself - however that takes time.

The biggest hit to my budget in any week is takeaway the nights I just don't feel like cooking.

BlitzKrieg

you wannadrink water from the newyorkwater system? (oh thewonderful colours)and buying water here is still more expensive.

Kambika

I don't think healthy food has to be more expensive. If you buy a bit of meat, veggies and rice for example the bill might be higher but if you cook your own food, you can just cook a larger portion and eat the rest the next day or freeze it in. So in the end you get like 2 or 3 meals out of it

zAbbo

Kambika wrote:

I don't think healthy food has to be more expensive. If you buy a bit of meat, veggies and rice for example the bill might be higher but if you cook your own food, you can just cook a larger portion and eat the rest the next day or freeze it in. So in the end you get like 2 or 3 meals out of it

Some amount of bull**** posted here already, next time your shopping compare the price of the cheapo chicken/mince and that of the healthier lean variety.

In regards to pasta, not all budget supermarkets store the healthy wholegrain option, same with wholegrain rice, as such you can't do all your shopping in aldi/lidl.

The same applies for most healthy food, which is remarkably dearer than the own brand or 'normal' version

Its not a case, of the fatties just 'cook it yourself' the damn ingridients are expensive.

Btw what exactly is a Healthy Sports Drink?

BlitzKrieg

those lucosade energy sports mixture which tastes and looks like coloured water.

The Sweeper

So what? Do you want something for nothing? Fact is, you could buy enough bread at the start of each week to keep you in toast every time you got hungry, throw in a bag of apples for something fresh, and take a multivitamin tablet every day. It wouldn't kill you and your shopping budget would be pretty low. Would it be healthy? Probably not. Would you starve? No. Would you have a cheap shopping bill? Yes.

bazH wrote:

The same applies for most healthy food, which is remarkably dearer than the own brand or 'normal' version

NORMAL?? NORMAL???? Are you f*cking kidding me? I think you should spend a couple of days googling the crap on the end of the ingredients listing on anything packaged that you eat. You'll realise that the amount of crap in the food chain is pretty bloody scary.

I mean, hydrogenated vegetable oil. Stabilisers. Colours. Preservatives. Did you ever wonder why this rubbish needs to be in your food?

When's the last time you tried baking your own bread? It's a food staple, you'll rarely go hungry if there's some in the house, you can make enough for three days (the shelf life of stuff you bake yourself, I find, before it goes hard) in one go. How about cooking a pasta sauce without using a jar of slop?

I appreciate that it's not easy to get the convenience and variety you're used to from processed food out of healthy food without going off the scale on the shopping bill. At the same time, how much food do you throw out? Do you ever plan what you're going to eat, or do you just impulse shop? Would you ever make vegetable stew and eat it for lunch and dinner two days in a row? It's dull, but it's healthy, and it's dirt cheap (and it is possible to make it taste good, believe it or not).

That's the main problem, I think. Not the cost of food, but our conditioning to expect variety and satisfaction from everything we eat. We don't just want to be full, we want to be entertained, fascinated and overwhelmed by our food. We don't want to eat the same thing two days in a row. As a result, our consumption of food far exceeds our calorific requirements. We throw away almost as much as we eat. Our production processes are wasteful and extravagent, using refined chemicals to make up the differences.

I've been putting a lot of time, for quite a while now, into the idea of eating healthy. Spending less on food, planning what I eat so that I don't waste food, I don't buy one thing while something else goes off in the fridge, and I buy mostly organic, unprocessed food. It took me a while to realise that I needed to change not just my habits, but my expectations of food as well. Trying to balance that with working a full time job and just wanting to relax in the evenings isn't easy - all you want when you get home is pizza. But you need to make the effort.

The more people who buy unprocessed, organic food, the more stores will stock it. Demand can drive supply.

Then again, if you're not interesting in making your dinner a lifestyle choice, enjoy your chicken nuggets.

BlitzKrieg

mineajackdaniel, i do have a lot of variety in my meals, i try my best to space my week out with a variety of pasta, traditional and cold meals and maybe something special on a sunday. But my complaint is not what i am eating but the detail that if go in a buy the cheap mince the cheap sauce ingediants and the cheap pastan i have friends on diets and dietry experts telling me that this is really unhealthy for me and if i want to eat the same meal but its the healthy version i have the buy specific brands of the mince and sauces which are much more expensive. And when your on a tight budget for shopping you cant do that.


But its not just meals i was referring to. In my OP i was referring more to grabbing a snack or a drink, buying a bottle of water always seems more expensive then a bottle of coke and same in food, health bars versus a snickers (not to mention the availability of many of these health bars). Sure the obvious solution is to as you said plan your eating habits and control. But i am not trying to diet, i just felt its unfair that someone who is going day to day decides to buy something healthy instead of a sugary drink or bar doesnt simply because of price.

fjon

Most "healthy" drinks (let's say Lucozade Sport, or Snapple) are just as bad as a bottle of Diet Coke or Sprite. A Muesli Bar has as much fat and crap as a Mars bar. A Hob Nob is just as bad for you as a Bourbon. A ham and cheese baguette from Centra is just as bad as a Big Mac. Unfortunately there is no easy way out. A healthy drink is water, a healthy snack is an apple. It's dull, yes, but at least you know what you're getting. Except for the apple. You don't know what they put in them nowadays :rolleyes:

bonkey

FFS lads...

this is like the "why are CDs more expensive then tapes" discussion.

THey're more expensive, because people are gullible enough to pay the extra. At the same time, the expense, coupled with the fact that its just plain better, puts it in a less mainstream market, resulting in less competition.

And at the simplest level....you sell the good quality stuff direct for a premium, and the crap to the mass-producers who will turn it into something crap and cheap which doesn't compete against your prestige product.

If that doesn't answer your question...ask yourself this. Are you willing to pay a premium for your health? If so, why shouldn't they charge it.

jc