Off White Living

tomorrow I must present a paper in my Obesity class that discusses the ‘economics of food’ as a cause of obesity, rather than any one food itself.  I’m in agreement with the author (Andrew Drewnowski), as there is evidence that calorie dense food simply costs less, if you examine things on a calorie/dollar basis.

However, it would then stand to reason that if you are choosing lots of calorie dense foods, such as refined grains/fast foods/soda, you would need to spend less TOTAL money to get the same calories a health meal.

So I put my little theory to the test and  created a day’s worth of food based on a whole food plan and a refined food plan, which included one trip to a fast food joint.  I even think I was underestimating the cost of the fast food, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that you can find a meal for $3.50 (based on about 2 minutes of web researching I did).

The caveat is that one must be willing to do two things:

1. change their palate for healthier food.  Truthfully some people eat refined foods because they are accustomed, like the flavor, and healthy food doesn’t taste good to them.

2. Be willing to spend about 15-20 min/day preparing food. I’m talking about opening a can of beans and mixing together a salad, not even turning on the oven to cook anything elaborate.  Doesn’t it take about 15 min to go to a drive thru from start to finish?  And that is just for 1 meal…….

I’ve included a JPEG of my PPT file so you can see the comparison, but basically I have the healthy day totalling $6/day for 3 meals and 2 snacks while the refined meal day costs $7.65 for 3 meals and 2 snacks.