4 ms·

Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of t

Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. GLP-1 helped me kick my cravings for junk food, but that just meant I was eating more of the "expensive" stuff. Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.

zahlman 9mo ago
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. > Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit. I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios. 50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The generic-brand sandwich cookies that are my personal vice, are cheaper yet. There's so much variation within these vaguely-defined food categories that I can't take the comparison across categories seriously.) $1.50 gets probably a half dozen bananas here, at around a hundred calories per. Never mind the yogurt. (If you're buying fresh cut fruit you're simply doing it wrong.) So if you're purely comparing calorie counts and finding yourself on less-calorie-dense options then yeah there's a ratio but it's still not as bad as people think. But this is still fundamentally committing a fallacy equating "less calorie-dense" with "healthy". The same 360 calories from white rice cost me perhaps 15 or 20 cents (plus the time and energy to cook). I'm not big on brown rice but I'm sure I don't have to pay several times as much for it unless it's some fancy boutique thing. 360 calories from dried split legumes (packed with protein and fibre), similarly, are in the ballpark of 30 cents. Perhaps you don't "snack" on those things, but you get the point.
- vorpalhex 9mo ago
  And this is the issue with these "healthy"/"processed" discussions. If you live off bananas and rice, you are not going to be healthy. You can get just as fat off plantains as you can doritos. Peanut butter (which is at least partially processed) can be a healthy part of your diet. It can also absolutely wreck it.
  - derekperkins 9mo ago
    "let me meet your fat fruit friends" https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp4093Dzt4E https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp4093Dzt4E
    - vorpalhex 9mo ago
      There are millions of people who are obese - not just fat - primarily from fruits. Those people have a history of obesity preceeding modern processed foods, and it's because they have very dense fruits (and starches) available to them in plenty. My mentioning plantains wasn't random.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  One particular thing on items like bananas and yogurt is they are very quickly perishable. You better be around and have a plan to eat them. Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers. This is the thing about most crap foods. They require no commitment. Keep them around for months. Even after opening them they last for days or weeks. Processed foods don't require the further processing you're leaving out of the equation.
  - tzs 9mo ago
    > Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers. You can freeze cooked rice for months with very little loss of quality, and reheating frozen rice is quick and easy. Just put the frozen rice in a bowl, add a little bit of water, cover, and microwave for 3 minutes. I make 12 servings in my rice cooker, then fill 12 one serving containers and freeze them.
  - throwaway173738 9mo ago
    I pressure cook beans. On induction or gas it takes about an hour to make a gallon beans from dry, and then I eat that for one meal a day for a week. You can get a 3 quart pressure cooker and just make less. I’ve also seen people use stainless steel bowls to cook multiple things in the same pressure cooker.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
NoLinkToMe 9mo ago
No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food. More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy. A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins. Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error. Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way. And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes. Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.
- cthalupa 9mo ago
  > More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. [...] rice This is one of those reasons that the term 'processed' food is stupid. White rice is a very processed food - what is the removal of the bran and germ but processing? And many other 'processed' foods undergo processing with the same sort of ramifications for health. Legumes are also not complete proteins in the majority of cases - soy is a significant exception here. Soy has a PDCAAS of 1, the same as whey, but lentils range from .5 to .7, many beans are around .6, etc., and this can end up meaning your 200g of protein ends up being quite different in impact to many of your body's uses for protein than someone else's 200g of protein.
  - themk 9mo ago
kstenerud 9mo ago
Greek yogurt is super easy (and cheap) to make yourself if you have an instant pot: Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h. Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight. You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all. If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.
- kjkjadksj 9mo ago
  Even easier is to do it in quart mason jars imo after heating the milk to 190f for 30 mins in a pot and allowing to cool to 110f before seeding with bacteria. No need to strain with cheesecloth after incubation, just pour out off the top if desired. 12hrs incubation seems to work best for me. Going from frozen definitely needs 12hr as the bacteria will be slower starting than unfrozen source. You can get away with merely some scrapings off a yogurt ice cube as sufficient for seeding. Seems it can keep for a lot longer than 6 months in freezer fwiw; my freezeback is probably over two years old and still just as viable.
kjkjadksj 9mo ago
Are you really only eating $0.50 worth of doritos? Large bags of chips are like $8 now. Imagine 1/16th of that bag which isn’t all that large of course. It would be like four chips.

zahlman 9mo ago

> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options. > Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit. I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios. 50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The generic-brand sandwich cookies that are my personal vice, are cheaper yet. There's so much variation within these vaguely-defined food categories that I can't take the comparison across categories seriously.) $1.50 gets probably a half dozen bananas here, at around a hundred calories per. Never mind the yogurt. (If you're buying fresh cut fruit you're simply doing it wrong.) So if you're purely comparing calorie counts and finding yourself on less-calorie-dense options then yeah there's a ratio but it's still not as bad as people think. But this is still fundamentally committing a fallacy equating "less calorie-dense" with "healthy". The same 360 calories from white rice cost me perhaps 15 or 20 cents (plus the time and energy to cook). I'm not big on brown rice but I'm sure I don't have to pay several times as much for it unless it's some fancy boutique thing. 360 calories from dried split legumes (packed with protein and fibre), similarly, are in the ballpark of 30 cents. Perhaps you don't "snack" on those things, but you get the point.

vorpalhex 9mo ago
And this is the issue with these "healthy"/"processed" discussions. If you live off bananas and rice, you are not going to be healthy. You can get just as fat off plantains as you can doritos. Peanut butter (which is at least partially processed) can be a healthy part of your diet. It can also absolutely wreck it.
- derekperkins 9mo ago
  "let me meet your fat fruit friends" https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp4093Dzt4E https://youtube.com/shorts/Cp4093Dzt4E
  - vorpalhex 9mo ago
    There are millions of people who are obese - not just fat - primarily from fruits. Those people have a history of obesity preceeding modern processed foods, and it's because they have very dense fruits (and starches) available to them in plenty. My mentioning plantains wasn't random.
pixl97 9mo ago
One particular thing on items like bananas and yogurt is they are very quickly perishable. You better be around and have a plan to eat them. Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers. This is the thing about most crap foods. They require no commitment. Keep them around for months. Even after opening them they last for days or weeks. Processed foods don't require the further processing you're leaving out of the equation.
- tzs 9mo ago
  > Same with rice and beans, unless you're buying instant packs you have to plan and cook them, and be around to eat the leftovers. You can freeze cooked rice for months with very little loss of quality, and reheating frozen rice is quick and easy. Just put the frozen rice in a bowl, add a little bit of water, cover, and microwave for 3 minutes. I make 12 servings in my rice cooker, then fill 12 one serving containers and freeze them.
- throwaway173738 9mo ago
  I pressure cook beans. On induction or gas it takes about an hour to make a gallon beans from dry, and then I eat that for one meal a day for a week. You can get a 3 quart pressure cooker and just make less. I’ve also seen people use stainless steel bowls to cook multiple things in the same pressure cooker.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

NoLinkToMe 9mo ago

No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food. More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy. A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins. Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error. Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way. And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes. Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.

cthalupa 9mo ago
> More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. [...] rice This is one of those reasons that the term 'processed' food is stupid. White rice is a very processed food - what is the removal of the bran and germ but processing? And many other 'processed' foods undergo processing with the same sort of ramifications for health. Legumes are also not complete proteins in the majority of cases - soy is a significant exception here. Soy has a PDCAAS of 1, the same as whey, but lentils range from .5 to .7, many beans are around .6, etc., and this can end up meaning your 200g of protein ends up being quite different in impact to many of your body's uses for protein than someone else's 200g of protein.
- themk 9mo ago

kstenerud 9mo ago

Greek yogurt is super easy (and cheap) to make yourself if you have an instant pot: Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h. Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight. You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all. If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.

kjkjadksj 9mo ago
Even easier is to do it in quart mason jars imo after heating the milk to 190f for 30 mins in a pot and allowing to cool to 110f before seeding with bacteria. No need to strain with cheesecloth after incubation, just pour out off the top if desired. 12hrs incubation seems to work best for me. Going from frozen definitely needs 12hr as the bacteria will be slower starting than unfrozen source. You can get away with merely some scrapings off a yogurt ice cube as sufficient for seeding. Seems it can keep for a lot longer than 6 months in freezer fwiw; my freezeback is probably over two years old and still just as viable.

kjkjadksj 9mo ago

Are you really only eating $0.50 worth of doritos? Large bags of chips are like $8 now. Imagine 1/16th of that bag which isn’t all that large of course. It would be like four chips.