I have a theory that there is a impossible trinity (like in economics), where a food cannot be delicious, cheap and healthy at the same time. At maximum 2 of the 3 can be achieved.
Is there any food that breaks this theory?
Edit: I was thinking more about dishes (or something you put in your mouth) than the raw substances
Some popular suggestions include
- fruits (in season) and vegetables
- lentils, beans, rice
- mushrooms
- chicken
- just eat in moderation
Edit 2: Thanks for the various answers. Now there are a lot of (mostly bean-based) recipes for everyone to try out!
Also someone made a community for cheap healthy food after seeing this topic!
Chick pea curry.
Thank you so much for the share! I love chickpeas so I’ll definitely be adding this to my recipes :)
Today I learned that I absolutely despise every single food that is healthy and cheap. You would think at 50+ years old a person wouldn’t be a fussy eater, but here I am. Despise rice, despise most vegetables, hate tomatoes with a passion, and coffee and tea is absolutely disgusting, to just name a few. And then there are the foods that massively upset my stomach, like bananas and eggs, not to mention anything with artificial sugar or Yellow Dye.
I’m not fun trying to find food to eat. And people wonder why I’m not healthy.
What do you like?
Unhealthy trash food. Also, somehow, broccoli and absolutely nothing else even slightly related even though other things are basically the same food. I dunno either. But I’m not going to eat broccoli for every single meal because how in the living heck can anyone eat the same thing every single day without getting absolutely sick of it?
I feel you, eating one thing over and over again is not fun. How did you end up disliking everything? Was it gradual or were you always like that?
Oh, I was always like that. I figured I’d grow out of it because kids are always picky/fussy eaters and as an adult I’d suddenly like all these foods I hated as a kid. Tried so many variations on all these things I despised over the years thinking certainly there has to be some way it’s prepared that I like. Haha, nope.
My body and brain is weird.
Popcorn is very low calorie per volume, especially the types without a lot of fat.
Well-seasoned, air-fried chicken is super healthy and cheap.
Chicken has been heavily, heavily marketed as a health food, and while it’s not the worst thing you could eat, if you actually look at its nutritional profile it’s not particularly nutritious or “healthy”. That’s just Tyson Foods & co working their magic. It’s more like the ultimate neutral food - nothing terrifying, nothing great, a bit like its taste.
Are you kidding? Name a cleaner protein source than chicken lol
Chicken breast lean protein. What do you mean by “nutritional profile”?
Lean protein =/= healthy. Like, at all. This is a myth from the freaking 1980s. Nutritional profile is a breakdown of the micronutrients that a food has, and it determines whether a food is “nutritious” and therefore, in general terms, “healthy”.
Please, oh please, don’t go around telling people that food is healthy if it is a lean protein. I’m sure it’s well intended, but it’s also misinformed. If you want to learn about how to assess whether a food is healthy, go make an appointment with a dietitian - your insurance will often cover the first appointment.
You sure typed a lot without explaining what the nutritional profile of chicken is or why it’s not healthy.
Sorry, unfortunately nutrition is more complex than what you can sum up in a few sentences. To answer that though:
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Chicken isn’t categorically “unhealthy” in the same way double stuf oreos cooked in lard are - I said in another comment that it’s the ultimate neutral food, and if you look at its profile I think that’s a fair statement. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients, it has a couple of things in significant quantities - phosphorus, selenium, and B3 for example - but overall it’s not very nutrient dense. It doesn’t have a ton of huge negatives either - a bit of saturated fat, but nothing to write home about. If you’re looking at a “Hitler-Hanks” spectrum where the lard oreos are on one end and a spinach chia seed broccoli whatever salad on the other, then chicken is probably right in the middle somewhere. Its D&D alignment is True Neutral. The point I was making in my earlier comment was that “protein” doesn’t make a food healthy, and that there’s a lot more to it than that, and if people use that mental shortcut they might end up making misinformed decisions.
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The nutritional profile of chicken would be a lot to type out, but you can look at the NCCDB or Cronometer Gold (which uses NCCDB among others) for an elaborate breakdown. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t capture everything - it’s an amazing tool, but it won’t cover the catechins in your tea, for example.
Ultimately though, if you’re reading this, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to GO SEE A REGISTERED DIETITIAN. Your insurance will often cover 80+% of your first appointment, but even if they don’t it’s an amazing investment. You’ll live longer, probably spend less on food, and spend a lot less on hospital bills after your first heart attack.
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Today I learned that what I consider healthy is very different from what others consider healthy. Fried chicken would not be in my top 10 healthy choices for example. Not criticizing the other guy, but just noting that what is considered to be healthy is sooo wildly distorted by corporate indoctrination that there are likely people who think KFC has some healthy food.
8oz of skinless breast has 250 calories, 0 carbs, and >50g of protein. That’s really nutritious and healthy in my book.
That’s very similar to something like lentils, and a lot better than something like rice which other people are saying but is essentially empty calories with barely any nutritional value.
Macronutrients are not what makes a food healthy. In particular, high-protein does not make a food healthy. By that reasoning a lot of fast food could be considered insanely healthy, but it’s not. That’s just our downright shitty levels of education surrounding nutrition.
What actually makes a food healthy depends on a lot of different factors, but a common one and relatively reliable standard bearer is whether it is “nutritious”. When a food is nutritious or nutrient dense, it is micronutrient dense. This includes things like spinach and beans and seeds and broccoli and all of the other foods that your parents made you eat. Micronutrient poor foods are ones that have relatively few micronutrients, but usually are relatively calorie rich. This includes things like mozzarella sticks, wonderbread, fruit gushers, heavy cream, twinkies, and so on. We do need macronutrients, but virtually anyone who gets enough energy (calories) from food also gets enough of them, except in specific cases like being a professional athlete. The athlete wouldn’t die of protein deprivation if they didn’t pay attention to their intake, but it would make it harder for them to perform well.
So no, chicken is not, by any standard, “really nutritious and healthy”. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients - it’s relatively rich in phosphorus and selenium if you eat it on its own, for example, but it’s far from what anyone would consider nutritious. It’s somewhere in between fried mars bars and spinach.
It depends where you live (I’m in Bangkok, so grocery choices are quite limited).
I love Oats. I got massively back into them again this year… now I buy around 3kg every month (instant oats).
It’s only this year, really, that I discovered that oats are still really good and creamy when not made with milk… and it’s really easy to boil a single cup of water to dump on a cup of oats for a perfect breakfast (left standing for a minute - done… no need to ‘microwave’ oats).
Also, cheap staples include: carrots, potato, broccoli, spinach…
Frozen strawberries are dirt cheap here too.
Breakfast 1:
- Instant Oats (1 cup, 1/4 tsp salt, 3tsp sugar, 3 tsp creamer)
- pulsed to powder in the blender with a cup of boiling water poured over.
- Blend 100ml milk with 3 strawberries and mix that in. The beauty of this is (as my son does NOT like stodgy/thick porridge) I can add an extra 100ml of milk to his breakfast, and it becomes a liquid smoothie.
Breakfast 2:
- Weetbix are not too cheap, but ONE biscuit mixed with ONE cup of oats is a massive breakfast - and tastes of Weetbix… and is ridiculously cheap in comparison.
Breakfast 3
- Oats work great with eggs…
- 1 cup oats, some salt, some cumin (maybe a teaspoon)
- 2/3 cup boiling water (soak a minute)
- 2 duck eggs mixed in
- butter up the frying pan and dump it in there, cover and cook gently for 3 minutes, flip and give them another 3 minutes.
DIsgusting poopy one
- 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder mixed with 4 teaspoons of non-dairy creamer + 1 cup oats
- pulse to powder, add a cup of hot water.
That’s choccie heaven right there.
Beans! Especially stew with them, you can throw in pretty much anything (veggies, meat, adjust your spice levels…) and once you learn the correct balance it’s very tasty and filling.
I’d say sandwiches, depending on what you want to put in them. A loaf of healthy (low sugar) bread isn’t going to be the cheapest option on the shelf, but if you’re dividing the cost by the number of sandwiches you can make out of it, it still ends up amounting to a large number of really inexpensive meals. I normally just add some meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it’s very nutritional and also delicious.
If you make the bread yourself (i.e. with a breadmaker) it’s dirt cheap. I buy flour and yeast in bulk and it costs bugger all per loaf.
You could maybe argue bread isn’t healthy because it’s technically a processed food (flour, carbs, etc.), but as others have pointed out moderation is key.
My reply to the the whole thread would be bread/sourdough. Healthy might be pushing it, but a whole grain, hard wheat (bread flour) at least has a bit more protein. Plus I usually add eithe a bit of olive oil to the dough (good fat) and brush the top with butter (extra taste).
I’d put steel cut oats in this boat too, with a bit of honey to sweeten.
the three sisters are very nutritious. corn, beans, squash. add any spices you like, and a good oil (my faves are la tourangelle olive oil and their toasted seasame oil, sold on amazon and not expensive). salt and spices make all the difference.
How is rice healthy? It’s just something to keep me full.
Fyi rice is high in calories so you should have a small amount of it with food
Brown rice is a great source of complex carbs
humus
Only truly cheap if you make it yourself. That’s why I commented below on the missing item of “effort”.
granted
Well chicken maybe as it is the most cheap meat. And it is subjective, but something like chicken soup (if cooked at home) can be relativly cheap and really delicious.
Also, just thought about it - fruits and berries also easily break this trinity
Meat is an expensive luxury product
Scrambled eggs.
Jimmy Joy. Cheap (under 2 euros per meal), delicious and you can’t really get any more nutritious than that. It has all the recommended nutrients in one go.
+1, jimmy joy is great
Rice and beans, just be a little creative with preparation. Also you can make lots of soups that are cheap and healthy and its super easy to make too.
My vote too.
If you expand the format to rice + dried bean/legume/grain (e.g. lentils, quinoa), you can really expand your possibilities without breaking the bank.
When I was in college, I had the rule of not buying anything that is >$1.50 per pound. This is what I was reduced to (prices may be different now due to inflation and geo area):
- Apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries when they are on sale
- Milk, yogurt
- Pork shoulder, chicken quarters, thighs, drumsticks
- ground pork, ground beef
- Carrots, broccoli, potatoes, cabbage (you’ll be surprised at how good thinly sliced cabbages taste in a sandwich)
