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For Those Interested in the Research of Dr. Weston A. Price |
Pingy!
Posted on 07/05/2007 6:00:55 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For students living on ramen noodles or people in low-wage, time-consuming jobs, folks who are down on their luck or living on fixed incomes, healthy eating may seem too expensive.
Nutritionists say, however, that's a false perception. Healthy eating, in fact, is cheaper. The cost of expensive eating often isn't the food, it's the bells and whistles of trendy packaging.
"You pay for convenience," says Amy Moore, a dietitian at St. Louis University. "What it takes is planning and sometimes a little investment."
That means eating more fresh food from low-cost stores and farmers markets, watching store sales and using store coupons. The nutrition gurus, from the United States Department of Agriculture to the American Dietetic Association, say healthy diets should be built around vegetables, grains and fruits, not meat and prepared foods — the biggest expense on grocery bills.
Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, lived on $3 a day (to prove a point about food stamps) for a week and ended up eating mostly salads and lentil soup. She repeated that planning was the key.
"I learned how to shop. It gives you great insight on what it is to live on a fixed budget for your food," she said. "Most people who get food stamps are working poor."
She spent 2 1/2 hours planning and shopping at one store for the food for a week, which included reading grocery store ads for bargains.
"As one who doesn't eat a lot of carbs, I found it difficult to live on $3 a day," she said. "You can buy fresh fruits and vegetables, but you have to know how to cook."
PUBLIC ASSISTANCE
Dorian Jones, dietitian and counselor for People's Health Centers, says low-income families must learn to use money wisely.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
When I wrote that foodstamp users should buy “raw sugar” it did not occur to me what real “raw sugar” was. Yes, I meant processed white sugar — to make cheap homemade drinks, candy, and even wine rather than buying prepared stuff.
French fries from raw potatoes I’ve made a lot of in fifty years — practice (and clean oil) makes them better. Some mainstays of my diet when in Pennsylvania was fried fish (those cheap frozen one pound blocks), and french fries from raw potatoes. I even got fairly good at making potato chips — but that takes a lot of work.
Pre-packaged, pre-processed foods are very expensive and rarely healthy. Buy wheat and other grains/dry goods in bulk. Grind your own wheat, prepare your own breads, etc. from that flour, eat fresh veggies, and eat meat sparingly. Drink water, some juices, and occasionally milk. That’s the cheapest and most healthy diet. It isn’t convenient, and it isn’t the rich foods to which Americans have become accustomed, but it is healthy and economical. My family and I have done this a few times and keep it as our goal to return to such a diet (kinda hard with teenagers though).
Pasteurised milk is actually germier than raw milk, only pasteurised milk has dead germs in it.
I have also found that many people who are otherwise lactose intolerant can drink raw milk and eat cheese from raw milk without the typical gastro-intestional symptoms that lactose intolerance sets off. Pasteurisation kills a lot more than germs, it also damages some of the enzymes that would make the milk easier for people to digest.
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For Those Interested in the Research of Dr. Weston A. Price |
Pingy!
YUCK!
LOL!!!..Hell’s BITCHES ping....
Excellent point...and one other reason for making your own soups..the vast majority of prepared soups are sooooooooo over salted that it’s unhealthy, especially for anyone with any type of heart condition...even the so called low-sodium soups have far too much...
Ramen + fish sauce + crushed red pepper + a little canned tuna = Thai food. Not the best of Thai cuisine, of course, but not all that different from a quick, cheap lunch a working guy would grab in Bangkok.
Time is money. You can have a nutritious, balanced diet for very little, if you have someone with the time and skill to cook it. That's been the norm for most of human history. But if you're working two jobs to make rent, you don't have a couple of hours when you get home to get dinner ready.
Not to mention that poor neighborhoods usually don't have a big Kroger or Publix or Safeway. They have a crappy little grocery that makes more money from cheap beer and lottery tickets than from food, where the "produce" section is a few squishy tomatoes and a couple of wilted heads of iceberg lettuce.
Paradoxically, it's awfully expensive to be poor. That's why obesity has replaced malnutrition as the main nutritional problem among poor Americans. It's a relatively new problem that needs new and clever solutions -- like neighborhood food banks, and maybe some sort of volunteer or cooperative arrangement -- say, one person volunteers a few hours one day a week to cook a nutritious dinner for a dozen families. Line up one such person for each day of the week, and that's a big step.
Their diets are much lower in fat. My daughter lived in Korea for a year. In the US she would never go near a McDonalds. Over there, periodically she’d get such a craving for fat she’d go to the only one in the city and get a mig mac and fries.
In one picture she was looking rather thin and I asked if she was eating enough. She said she was eating a lot. But she was having difficulty keeping her weight up on strictly Korean food. It took her a couple of months to get it back when she returned.
Interestingly, she said now that western [fast] food was coming to Korea, she could see the younger kids getting heavier.
A fry-daddy is a great investment. No, I certainly wouldn't recommend deep-frying every meal. But man does not live by health food alone, and fries made at home, if you know what you're doing, are more healthful (or at least less less un-), tastier and far cheaper than anything you'll get from the drive-thru.
Homemade potato chips are also great, because you can tailor the thickness to your taste and conduct your own seasoning experiments.
My mom had a great snack recipe: take your basic inexpensive unflavored oyster crackers. Spritz them with a little olive oil, just enough to make the dry seasonings stick. Then sprinkle taco seasoning, or cup-a-soup, or whatever flavor strikes your fancy. Bake at 350 for about 15-20 minutes and allow to cool.
Viola! you have a batch of snacks for pennies a serving, tastier and lower-calorie than anything from Frito-Lay. My personal favorite is dill. Just spray oil and sprinkle dill on the top. Thinking about it, I might actually heat up the oven and make some, if it weren't so *&^% hot outside.
I saw the same thing in Thailand. There were no fat older people, but quite a few skinny middle-aged people with fat kids.
It was weird. I was 5'4", about 180 lbs., and in some parts of the country I was practically Andre the Giant. My host said he was never worried about losing me in a crowd, because between my size and my (light-brown) hair, I always stood out.
I wish I'd managed a pick-up basketball game while I was there. I could have been a credible center for the first time in my life.
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Yup! Right on. I refuse to buy/serve boxed cereal. Won’t do it. It’s overpriced cardboard infused with crap as far as I’m concerned. Ditto with most other grain products. We eat meat, fish, veggies, fruit, and some dairy. I make all the meals from scratch - and I did this even when I was working 60 hours a week prior to the baby’s arrival. Granted, our grocery bill is around $800-$900 a month for 2 lean adults and a 15 month old...
LOL.
Grains are what food eats!
LOL
So my "breakfast" this morning (after being up all night) is a can of baked beans, some brown sugar and a package of little smokies (which I bought a bunch of at half price several months ago). It made enough to maybe be my "lunch" around noon.
Be sure to add a chopped onion - forgot to mention that.
Actually, the lentils and peas liquify after that much cooking so you don’t notice they’re there. They just add body to the broth.
We were on food stamps for a while when my parents divorced. Mom was a genius at squeezing a dollar until the eagle screamed, but the food stamps didn't help with essentials like diapers, dish soap, shampoo, baby powder and laundry detergent. So Mom went shopping with her friend Elaine, and they swapped a few items in the parking lot.
Is that a technical violation of the rules? Probably. But she wasn't buying beer or lottery tickets. She had a 40-hour job, a full course load, a 5-year-old (me) and a 1-year old. And after a little while on food stamps, she got her degree, then a better job, then a better one than that, and put me and my sister through good schools, and we got good jobs.
Between the three of us, we've paid back the Treasury what we got in food stamps at least hundred-fold. That is why I am not sympathetic to the arguments from some conservatives that programs like food stamps are inherently destructive. They can work, and they do; where they fail, those are flaws to fix, not a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I know it might be a minority position around here, but I believe that a basic social safety net is essential. Done right, it keeps families together and lets fols move ahead a little and get past just scraping by.
Don't apologize for accpeting help when you're in need -- just find some gratitude, the resolve to get out of that condition, and pay it back when you can. And resolve to help others, when you can. enough of that, and we won't need government programs.
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