How To Eat Well For Less Money

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Most meals now, 50% or more are eaten outside the home. And my goal really is to help you reconnect with your kitchen and learn how you can cook in a way that's healthy and inexpensive and delicious.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy Without F, a place for conversations that matter. And today we're doing a special version of our Doctors Pharmacy podcast called Health Bites, which are little bites of health information that can help you live a longer, better life because taking small steps makes a big difference over time. Let's talk about an interesting topic today, which I think is an obstacle in people's mind that isn't actually an obstacle to being healthy, which is how to eat well for less. Most of us have been taught, and I would say taught or maybe brainwashed by the food industry, that it's difficult, time consuming and expensive to eat healthy. There may even be elitist, but I'm going to tell you right now, that is just a bunch of baloney. In fact, it's as cheap as baloney. The basic idea here is that we can eat well for less if we know what we're doing, if we have a little guidance and a little planning. And I think we, you know, we see Some of the challenges we face around eating health in this country because we're flooded with easy to eat, seemingly inexpensive, highly processed, quote, convenience foods, which are not that convenient when you get sick. And it's hard because our lives are full. We're working hard. We have less time than we did. We're struggling to make enough money. Inflation's going up. And what happens is, that this is all taken advantage of by the food industry who, you know, I mean, that whole thing with McDonald's, right? You deserve a break today, right? That message that convenience is king was a deliberate strategy by the food industry to get us to eat more of their junk and processed food. And this happened in the 60s and it really worked. Basically, Americans have been disenfranchised from their kitchens. The food industry has basically intersected themselves in the kitchen. I don't know if you remember Betty Crocker, but she wasn't a real person. constructed the food industry that allowed them to create a recipe book, which my mother had, I remember, where most of the recipes had some type of processed food, you know, add Velveeta cheese, put in a thing of Ritz crackers, a can of cream of mushroom soup, or whatever it was in your casserole. And all of that was a way to insinuate processed food into the American kitchen. And it worked. And now most Americans don't know how to cook. They don't understand how to even chop a vegetable or peel garlic or do anything. And it's a skill thing. So it's education skill. and I think we've got rid of home ec in schools anymore. Kids don't know anything. And it's taking a huge toll on us. We are seeing increasing rates of obesity, diabetes. The processed food is killing us. It's the number one killer on the planet. It's why we basically see six out of 10 Americans with a chronic disease. 93% of us are metabolically unhealthy. So, you know, given our lives being busy and you know, all the temptations of all this food carnival that we're in, it seems easier to, you know, eat all that stuff and just cook ourselves. But, you know, we do, we do have to deal with the reality of what happens to us when we eat that crap. And yes, we have a lot of demands. We have our to-do lists and our demanding jobs and our kids schedule. And maybe we don't know how to cook or maybe we don't know how to chop this or maybe we never were taught anything. And cooking seems to just kind of go to the bottom of the pile when it comes to things that are important to us, but it's essential if if you don't know how to feed yourself, if you don't know how to feed your family, it's gonna cause serious consequences, serious issues around health and mental health and many other things. So we're basically now killing ourselves by not cooking. We've raised many generations now of Americans who don't know how to cook, who don't know their way around a kitchen, and it's literally killing us. And the food industry is really motivated to teach us, wants us to believe that cooking is difficult, time consuming, inconvenient, expensive. But the truth is, and I know this from personal experience, I know this from my patients, I know this from working with all kinds of underserved communities, that you can eat well for a lot less money by making simple whole fresh food. And it doesn't have to be complicated. You know, a simple dinner for a family of four with a roast chicken, some veggies, a salad can cost half of what it costs to go out and eat dinner for the same family of four at a fast food restaurant. In fact, I know I visited a family and it's really changed my thinking a lot. I visited a family as part of this movie Fed Up that I was in.

In the South.

It was in Easley, South Carolina, one of the worst food deserts in America, where this family of five lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. They didn't know how to cook. Everything in their kitchen, their fridge, their cupboards was all in a box, packaged can, Frozen, highly processed, full of millions of ingredients that were driving them to be really sick. The father already had diabetes, was on the transplant list and on dialysis for kidney failure. The mother was easily over 100 pounds, had high blood pressure and all kinds of health issues. The son, 16, was about diabetic and 50 body fat should be like 10 for a kid that age and, and was just on his way to really a bad situation. And I, and I showed him how to cook one simple meal from a guide called good food in a tight budget from the environmental working group, which is how to eat good well, well for you, for your planet and your wallet. And essentially, I showed him how to chop vegetables. They didn't have a cutting board. They didn't have knives. I showed him how to peel garlic, how to chop an onion, how to roast a sweet potato, how to stir fry vegetables, how to make simple turkey chili, how to make salad dressing from olive oil and vinegar, just simple, simple stuff. And they loved the food. They thought it was amazing. And I said, look, you guys, you know, can do this. Here's a guide on how to eat well for less. Here's my cookbook and try it. And I was like, okay, I don't know what's gonna happen. I sent him a knife and cutting boards and a set of knives. And, and they did it. And the first week, the mother texted me back and she said, well, we lost 18 pounds of a family. They collectively lost 200 pounds as a family in the first year. And the kid you know, lost 50 pounds, went to work at Bojangles, which is the only place they can work down there, gained it all back, but then ended up, you know, losing 132 pounds over time when I worked with him and actually went to medical school because he learned about how to cook and eat real food. The father was able to lose 45 pounds, get a new kidney. And so, you know, we see this for me, it was a really profound experience because I realized that we're basically just one cooking lesson away from actually having health in America again. And we need to take back our kitchens. We need to get the food industry out of our kitchens. Most meals now, 50 or more eat outside the home. And, and my goal really is to help you reconnect with your kitchen, to discover what you can create in there that's magical and delicious, and learn how you can cook in a way that's healthy and inexpensive and delicious. So why why is cheap food so expensive? What do I mean by that? Well, it actually can be quite harmful because you're eating all this food that's making you sick and eventually you're going to be spending lots of money on doctors visits and medications and not really eating in a way that's going to cause you to thrive.

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To drhyman.com/protein and use the code PROTEIN10. That's drhyman.com/protein forward slash protein and use the co-protein 10, that's a one and a zero. Now people say, oh, I can't afford, you know, to eat healthy, organic's expensive, where I can't have, you know, healthy cuts of meat. And, you know, I think, I think, you know, we, you know, we can find cheaper sources of all these. There's all sorts of ways we're gonna talk about how to do that. But when you look at what's actually going on with processed food, they take basically really cheap ingredients, they process them and they mark them up like crazy, which creates these value-priced jumbo size containers, you know, three liter bottles of soda and all these giant bags of chips and huge super size everything. And it seems like you're getting a good deal, but actually you're getting a lot of sickness and in health. So when you look at also what you spend your money on, how do people spend money? You know, in Europe they spend 20% of their income on food. In America, it's about 9%. We don't value good food. So, you know, we do a lot of things with our money. We buy fancy coffees, we eat a lot of convenience foods, we go out and we don't actually learn how to manage our food budget in a way that creates health for us. So relying on inexpensive, overly processed foods seems easy given our demanding lives and schedules, but the cost actually is quite high to our health and to the planet and to so many things I've written about in my book, Food Fix. So we tend to sort of eat these horrible food bombs of sugar, salt, fat, bad fats that basically create all sorts of diseases, costs us all sorts of money in doctor visits and prescription drugs. I mean, you basically have to pay now or pay later, right? And they make us also feel bad. What is the price of the loss of our health, the feeling sick and sluggish and, and not being able to do what we want in life and not having energy and not being hike a mountain if we wanted. When we feel crummy in our lives, it goes to everything. We get depressed, our relationships suffer, our work suffers. We have less energy to do what we want. So basically the value meal is anything but a value meal. So here's the deal. You don't have to spend all your money to eat well. You can actually eat very well on a budget. I've worked in, again, many underserved communities in Cleveland and in Idaho where I was a family doctor and and I, I personally have learned how to, how to manage this because I, you know, went through periods of time where I didn't have much money at all. So I understand the challenges of, of, of having a limited budget and limited resources and limited time or both. So the key is you don't have to be rich or retired to eat well and take care of yourself. You can do it on a budget. Now, I, I was in medical school. I lived on, you know, 300 a month for rent and food. I lived in a group house, and, you know, we, we each pitched in and we bought real food. We, we bought grains and beans. We had, you know, cheaper cuts of food. We ate vegetables. We got community support, agriculture. We shopped at farmers markets and we were able to actually eat food for quite an expensive price for, for most of us in residency. When I ended up being in residency, I made like 27, 000 a year. That was a few years ago, but it still wasn't that much money. And I had the family of four, me and my wife and two kids. And, you know, we cooked real food and we were able to do it. And I shopped at Costco and I went to, you know, Trader Joe's and I had, you know, discounted foods, but I was able to do that and cook. And, you know, these days I'm still pretty busy running around a lot, and I actually spend, you know, not that much time cooking, but I've learned how to cook simple, delicious food. So I have the ingredients in my house, I have things prepared, and so it's not onerous to make a meal. I, you know, can throw a sweet potato in the oven, I can chop up some asparagus, stir fry it with some ginger or garlic, you know, kind of quickly pan cook a piece of fish or chicken or meat and just have a meal in a very short amount of time. I can, you know, make a smoothie for breakfast. I can have a salad for lunch with some simple ingredients. And it really, I can make, you know, I'm quick, but I can make three meals in 30 minutes total. So it's possible to do. And I think you just need to learn what, you know, a few good, simple core things that you can make on a regular basis that aren't that complicated, that are simple to make and that, you know, are also delicious. So you really can do it. And it's not that hard. You don't have to eat all these crazy fancy foods. You can eat simple food and have real value in your life by creating health for you and some real simple strategies that are gonna make it work. So what are the myths around eating healthy on a budget? What are the things that we are told that we need to kind of get over? First is, as a food industry literally spends billions of dollars and is incredibly good at convincing us that we should buy their convenience foods, which are anything but convenient. They buy us to, they encourage us to buy a lot of processed food, sugary foods. But it's really not true. In fact, actually, it's not true that you have to, you know, buy these Foods to be able to manage your food budget. You can actually eat healthy for Less. Healthy food does not necessarily have to cost more. In fact, there's been a lot of research looking at healthy, real food, whole foods that you have to make yourself isn't more expensive if you cook from scratch. For example, eat junk food, fast food, processed food, convenience foods, all those things can actually end up leading to so it's a increased cost for you in many, many ways. So, one of the things purchased in supermarkets, well, the top four things purchased in supermarkets are sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. So, if you give up those things, you're gonna save a lot of money on your grocery bill and those are all drugs, right? Caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and nicotine. Also, you know, you don't have to go to some fancy store that's super marked up to find good food. You don't have to go to our gourmet shop or health food store or eat organic. There's lots of healthy foods right in your local supermarket. You should shop around the outside of the aisles. You can also buy healthy food online. Thrivemarket.com has, you know, really delicious, yummy foods that are, you know, things that would be more packaged, but that are, are really good ingredients that are at about 30 to 50 off retail price. You just go to www.thrivemarket.com, it's an amazing resource. You can buy also, you know, for online foods that are, you know, direct, you know, cutting out the middleman like regenerative meat and so forth. And, and it doesn't have to be that much money. So also it doesn't take a lot of time to prepare if you know what you're doing. You just have to, you know, get these basic skills in the kitchens like anything else. If you don't know how to do anything, it takes a long time. But if you learn basic skills, it doesn't take that long. And, and it can be really delicious and simple to repair. So what are, what are my strategies for eating well on a budget? Well, you kind of have to first decide you want to take control of your health and your life and we have to kind of get the food industry out of our kitchen. You know, we have to basically not be beholden to what they're doing to us and we have to start preparing our own meals. We have to learn how to shop within our budget and how to reclaim our health. It's really important. It doesn't mean you're gonna have to clip coupons and, you know, make a, you know, a career out of bargain food shopping. we have to deal with, with, with really the basic simple skills to do what we need to do. So what, what should you do first is figure out what you're actually doing now. Most people don't even know what they're doing when they, when they look at how they're shopping. So keeping a journal is important. Maybe write down what you're eating, how you spend your money, how you spend your money on everything, what you spend your time on, where you spend your resources on, and you'll learn, gosh, maybe, you know, I'm buying like you know, three or four dollar Starbucks coffee every day. You add that up and it's like thousands of dollars plus a year. So you can actually find simple ways to actually increase your food budget by getting rid of things that you don't really need that actually are, are, what may be luxuries, but that actually take away from your core health. Just, just for a week, write down everything you spend on how you spend your hour, how you spend your time, how you spend your life energy, how do you want to spend it? Because when you change what you want to do with your life, you can actually make a big, big difference and actually start to incorporate habits that allow you to start doing the things that are good for you and not harming you. Also, you know, you can do things like buying in season. You know, getting things that are in season are a lot cheaper. Right. If you want to buy a strawberry in the middle of winter, it's more expensive than if you go, you know, when strawberry season is there. Also, you don't have to buy everything organic. If you want to get rid of pesticides and chemicals is a great Environmental Working Group guide is called the Dirty Dozen. You go to ewg.org and you can find the foods that are the most contaminated, for example, with pesticides like strawberries or at least contaminated, maybe like avocado or banana. And you can just focus on buying the ones that are most contaminated or avoiding them if they're not organic. And then you can buy the cheaper ones that are not organic, that don't have chemical pesticides at the level the other ones do. Also, you can find, you know, source of really good food, like Walmart is the biggest organic grocer, Trader Joe's, Costco, Sam's Club. You can get staples there, canned stuff at much, much lower prices that you can get at supermarkets. So that's a great way. That's what I used to do when I, when I, you know, had a family of four and I couldn't afford regular groceries, I would do that. Also, join your food Co-op they often are a community-based organizations. They support local farmers markets. They you can, you can order in bulk, you can get stuff over a little bit over wholesale. Get a CSA, which is community supported agriculture. You can join your local agriculture, community supported agriculture organization, and you can actually get your produce delivered to you every week at a great discount. Organic food, it's amazing. You'll get what's fresh and in season, and you may not be always pretty looking, but it's yummy and delicious. Also keep staples in your house that are your basic staples for cooking quickly and easily. And I always have all the staples there that are dried goods, all the condiments, all the things I want. So I can just boom cook really easy. Also do something fun, like maybe create a supper club with a group of friends rather than, you know, going out to dinner once a week or once a month, rotate dinner parties at each other's homes, build community, and you build your health at the same time. Also, like I said, you can get stuff online, which is really cheap and get healthy kitchen items like turmeric, coconut oil, almond butter. My favorite online store I said was Thrive Market. They have everything you need at discount prices. They have a great reputation and basically dramatically less than you'd pay. And you can just become a member and you have direct access to over 3000 healthy organic foods and products at 30 or 50 below retail. And it goes shipped right to your door. It's pretty awesome. So it's just important to understand that eating healthy does not have to be expensive, that it's a myth promulgated by the food industry, that it doesn't take tons of time, doesn't have to be super expensive or inconvenient, and it's a life skill like anything else. And if you want to take back your health, you have to take back your kitchen and you have to learn basically how to cook. So if you're not so sure about it, watch some videos online, take some cooking classes, but up level your skills and take back your kitchen and take back your health. So that's it for today's health bite. Be sure to share this with your friends and family. We'll sort of love to hear how you've learned how to eat well, for less. What are the habits and hacks that you've used to, to make sure you can stay healthy and not kill your budget? And subscribe to every year podcast, and we'll see you next week on the doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. and I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter, and in it I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go Dr. Hyman.com/picks to sign up. That's Dr. Hyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Hi, everyone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. this podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

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