Healthy Eating When You Are On A Budget Part 2
This is the second part of the "healthy eating when you are on a budget" series. Today, we will be focusing on saving money on specific food groups.
Tips for saving money on specific food groups
Fruits and vegetables
- Buy fresh fruits and vegetable when they are in season and freeze your extras. When they are out of season, canned fruits and frozen vegetables would do
- Buy the vegetables and fruits whole, and cut them up at home. You save a bundle when you do the slicing yourself. For example, a 16 ounce bag of lettuce can cost you $1.80 or higher while a head of lettuce can be as low as $1 -- and you get more "green" for your dollar, mind you
- Affordable nutrition: Bananas, apples, cabbage and potatoes
Grains
- Buy them in bulk
- A bag of beans is cheaper than a can of beans
- Look for a day old bread; it's cheaper but still fresh enough
- Hot cereals like, grits, oatmeal, cream of wheat are cheaper than cold cereals like Cheerios
- Popcorn cooked on the stove is cheaper than microwave popcorn, 5 cents per cup compared to 10 cents per cup
- Affordable nutrition: A bag of beans, whole-wheat bread, brown rice, oatmeal, grits, noodles and popcorn
Dairy
- Buy your yogurt in large tubs and portion it into smaller containers
- Block and shredded cheese is cheaper than pre-packaged slices of cheese
- When cooking use reconstituted skim milk
- Skim milk is cheaper that whole milk and you will save your family extra calories and fat
- Affordable nutrition: Skim milk, larger containers of dairy products
Lean Protein
- Choose beans as the main course for dinner more regularly
- Instead of buying chicken pieces, buy a whole chicken and cut it up yourself
- Reduce the portion sizes of your meat; a serving should be the size of a deck of cards
- Put smaller portions of meat in stew, along with beans and/or vegetables
- Extra lean ground beef is healthier and yields more per serving when cooked
- Canned fish is any excellent and cheap way to get lean protein into your diet
- Affordable nutrition (cheapest to most expensive): dried beans, peanut butter, canned beans, canned fish, eggs, walnuts, ground beef
As you can see, healthy eating is affordable but requires a little planning on your part. See part one of eating heathy on a budget. The next segment of the "healthy eating on a budget" series will be on preparing the food at home.
Coupon updated 10/1/14 |
I'm a bean lover...all beans it don't matter. I started eating very little meat several months ago and I notice a dip in my grocery bill. Just like you suggested when I cook with meat now I use only a fraction of what I used to. Great Suggestions...Keep them coming!
ReplyDeleteI have a third and fourth part in this series.
DeleteGreat tips! It definitely takes work and planning to find low cost healthy groceries, but it can be done!
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by Laura.
DeleteThanks for this useful information. I will be ready the next time I go shopping.
ReplyDelete