As the economy flags, and the Canadian dollar affords shoppers less and less, the price of groceries has gone through the roof but maintaining a healthy diet doesn’t need to break the bank.
Ian McKay is a nutritionist and owner of Reflexion Studio in Fort Frances, he says processed foods are attractive to people because they are cheap and don’t take a lot of effort to prepare a meal. Being able to cook for yourself is one of the first steps to eating better on the cheap.
“It also comes down to a lot of people don’t think about skill, if you’re not raised in an environment that teaches you how to cook, and you’ve developed those skill sets which just take time and patience and practice, processed foods become, yeah, a lot more readily available to us,” McKay said.
Because fresh ingredients are more expensive, especially when they have to be transported north to the area, McKay says that frozen fruits and veggies can be just as useful and nutritious.
“Just living in northwestern Ontario, it’s always been more prohibitively expensive, right,” McKay said. “So I’ve always turned more to frozen, canned, not so much. I just don’t find I can use it as readily within my cooking, depending on the recipe you have. So I normally go, [for example] frozen green beans in a microwave for, you know, six to eight minutes, still just as nutritious as anything else, but you haven’t had to do a lot of prep, you haven’t had to trim them, you haven’t had to do anything. So I normally find frozen foods are more convenient.”
Another advantage to using frozen produce, McKay said, is that frozen products often get harvested later so they spend more time on the vine than fresh sold produce, giving the fruit of the plant more opportunity to absorb nutrients making them more nutrient dense.
It’s not only produce that can be frozen and still have just as much nutritional value and be a bit cheaper than fresh. Meat, fish and poultry products are largely just as nutritious frozen but a bit cheaper than their fresh counterparts.
“Sometimes we have frozen salmon we put in the air fryer, we put frozen green beans in the microwave with a little bit of water. Both are done in about seven minutes,” he said. Then another starch on the side. That meal took me 10 minutes, technically, and it didn’t come from fresh but I’m also not Gordon Ramsay, I’m not a Michelin chef. I just need to nourish my body and make sure that I can budget my finances.”
Knowing what your body needs is also key to keeping your finances in check. McKay says a lot of people overeat when they don’t know how many calories they actually need to keep up their lifestyle.
“Most of the health consequences we’re having is we have too many calories,” McKay said “It’s too much energy in a system, and that actually leads to, it’s not so much that we have to blame sugar or additives or those types of things. We have an over consumption, and that bogs down the system.”
There are websites that can tell you what the accurate number of calories you should be consuming if you want to lose, maintain or increase your weight. Then there are apps which you can use to find out how many calories a meal or food might have if it’s not something that’s labelled, one app McKay mentioned is called MyFitnessPal but there are lots of calorie counting apps.
Overall, McKay says there are three things that you should consider when creating your menus.
“I normally tell people if we can get calories, protein and fibre, we’re probably going to be in a ballpark that feels really achievable, but at the same time that’s perfect if your a machine, you also need to use spices and plate your food and eat in an environment that’s conducive to feeling like you’re not rushed.”
McKay added that we often neglect some of the key things our bodies need.
“We live in a society where the backburners are drinking water, sleeping and eating food,” he said. “But the most important things for our survival are drinking water, sleeping and eating food.”
To get to a point of genuinely taking care of yourself, McKay says that a lot of people need to work on their self-worth but it also takes time to get on a good path.
“It’s about developing that relationship also with yourself to be like, ‘I’m worthy of taking this time.’” McKay said. “We’re always here to help people in terms of at least figuring out the building blocks, but it’s also a year of process to really develop nutrition that you feel is wholesome, and wholesome, not just from the foods you eat, but wholesome in the sense that you don’t feel that it’s bogged you down. Learning to cook takes a while, and that’s the other fear of buying fresh food. It’s so cost prohibitive that using it in a recipe, if you mess it up, that’s a big loss for your finances, right?”
If you struggle with being able to cook there are still ways to eat healthier. Cooking a whole chicken can be useful because depending on how many mouths you have to feed, it can supply meat for a week depending on how you use it, and if you’re not comfortable cooking a chicken yourself, a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store may be an option if you can add the healthy aspects like vegetables which might be easier to cook on your own. One meal maybe simply chicken and rice with veggies while another while later in the week you might use some chicken to make quesadillas with additional veggies. You might use some of the chicken to make chicken salad sandwiches or other lunch options. There are lots of recipes available online to make with chicken that you have already cooked. And if you’re feeling up to the task you can save some of the meat and make bone broth with the bones, add some seasoning and vegetables and you’ve got a great homemade chicken soup.
Another suggestion McKay had was getting together and buying in bulk. While we don’t have a local Costco, many people know someone going to Winnipeg somewhat regularly and offering to buy a few items can be a big help. Splitting big purchases can also be beneficial.
“The other thing we have is buying in bulk, if a person has the financial capacity to do so, we can split that bulk purchase with another family,” McKay said. “We live in an area that has wonderful local beef, people really care for their animals. Maybe, if you say, ‘Hey, I have three families that are going to split a cow or half a cow,’ or whatever it is, and get the beef you want. You can do the same thing with chicken or a box of chicken breast or anything that’s frozen. We all need to eat healthier no matter who we are, but we sometimes feel like it’s a barrier for our budget. You can probably find someone that you feel that trust with, that you can build out relationships with. We go to Costco, and every time we go, we’re like, ‘hey, do you need anything from Costco? Do you need anything from that place? Anything from this place?’ We pair up with our family and buy beef because it would just be so cost and space prohibitive, we can share. It’s gonna be a communal effort to get out of this in every fashion, let alone nutrition for our economy currently, right? So we really need to support each other.”
