Does eating healthy cost more?

Last week we got a membership to Sam’s Club.  We had one before, and now that we again live within a reasonable distance from one, we decided to get another membership.

I like Sam’s as much as the next person.   It has a pretty good offering of things that you can’t get elsewhere, and the produce is great.  I also like their selection of meat.  I’m not necessarily seeing better food prices, though, so I’ve come to a dilemma.  As you know, I want to eat better.  I want my family to eat better.  You also know that we are on a tight budget.  All of that being said, do we dig into our budget so we can spend more money on better food?  

To some of you this is a no-brainer.  Of course we should spend money on food that’s better for us.  For me, though, dealing with a tight budget… what do I do?  In my experience fresh food is less costly than processed, preservative-laden food, but I’ve found contradictory articles on this.  This article states that calorie for calorie, healthy food costs more.  It also states that people with lower incomes are likely to be overweight for this reason.  However, THIS article in Shape Magazine says that you can avoid higher costs by simply following a few guidelines.  It also says there are no “bad” foods.  Hmmm… I think I need to chew on that a bit.  As you can guess, most of what I read fell into either of these two categories.  Didn’t help me much.  And I didn’t really see anything different coming from nutritionists or doctors.  I found that odd.    

Certified Organic food is more expensive.  Period.  I’ll leave that one alone, even though I’m going to try to move in that direction.  That’ll be fodder for another article.  

After all of that soul-searching, I’m hungry.  So I’m munching on some grapes.  And I’ve decided that I’m just going to go for it like I’ve wanted to all along.  I’ll let you know what my experiment produces.  In the meantime, let me know what YOU think.  Are healthy foods more costly?