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