I have a theory that there is a impossible trinity (like in economics), where a food cannot be delicious, cheap and healthy at the same time. At maximum 2 of the 3 can be achieved.
Is there any food that breaks this theory?
Edit: I was thinking more about dishes (or something you put in your mouth) than the raw substances
Some popular suggestions include
fruits (in season) and vegetables
lentils, beans, rice
mushrooms
chicken
just eat in moderation
Edit 2: Thanks for the various answers. Now there are a lot of (mostly bean-based) recipes for everyone to try out!
Also someone made a community for cheap healthy food after seeing this topic!
Well chicken maybe as it is the most cheap meat.
And it is subjective, but something like chicken soup (if cooked at home) can be relativly cheap and really delicious.
Also, just thought about it - fruits and berries also easily break this trinity
Chicken has been heavily, heavily marketed as a health food, and while it’s not the worst thing you could eat, if you actually look at its nutritional profile it’s not particularly nutritious or “healthy”. That’s just Tyson Foods & co working their magic. It’s more like the ultimate neutral food - nothing terrifying, nothing great, a bit like its taste.
Lean protein =/= healthy. Like, at all. This is a myth from the freaking 1980s. Nutritional profile is a breakdown of the micronutrients that a food has, and it determines whether a food is “nutritious” and therefore, in general terms, “healthy”.
Please, oh please, don’t go around telling people that food is healthy if it is a lean protein. I’m sure it’s well intended, but it’s also misinformed. If you want to learn about how to assess whether a food is healthy, go make an appointment with a dietitian - your insurance will often cover the first appointment.
Sorry, unfortunately nutrition is more complex than what you can sum up in a few sentences. To answer that though:
Chicken isn’t categorically “unhealthy” in the same way double stuf oreos cooked in lard are - I said in another comment that it’s the ultimate neutral food, and if you look at its profile I think that’s a fair statement. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients, it has a couple of things in significant quantities - phosphorus, selenium, and B3 for example - but overall it’s not very nutrient dense. It doesn’t have a ton of huge negatives either - a bit of saturated fat, but nothing to write home about. If you’re looking at a “Hitler-Hanks” spectrum where the lard oreos are on one end and a spinach chia seed broccoli whatever salad on the other, then chicken is probably right in the middle somewhere. Its D&D alignment is True Neutral. The point I was making in my earlier comment was that “protein” doesn’t make a food healthy, and that there’s a lot more to it than that, and if people use that mental shortcut they might end up making misinformed decisions.
The nutritional profile of chicken would be a lot to type out, but you can look at the NCCDB or Cronometer Gold (which uses NCCDB among others) for an elaborate breakdown. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t capture everything - it’s an amazing tool, but it won’t cover the catechins in your tea, for example.
Ultimately though, if you’re reading this, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to GO SEE A REGISTERED DIETITIAN. Your insurance will often cover 80+% of your first appointment, but even if they don’t it’s an amazing investment. You’ll live longer, probably spend less on food, and spend a lot less on hospital bills after your first heart attack.
When I was in college, I had the rule of not buying anything that is >$1.50 per pound. This is what I was reduced to (prices may be different now due to inflation and geo area):
Apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries when they are on sale
So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.
Yup. Mexican, Indian, a lot of cuisine from poorer countries figured this out long ago. Beans or lentils over rice with the right spices, incredible. The restaurant version will add a lot of fat and heavy cream but if you make it yourself you can adjust that so it’s not unhealthy.
A lot of cuisine that is lauded all around the world embraces all three of those, or at least the original dishes they came from did. A lot of really fancy food today and in the last 50 years is just “peasant food”. Sometimes just with fresher ingredients and more butter
Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.
🥑
I think a ripe avocado can be a good meal by itself, it has healthy fat, vitamins & fiber.
One avocado as a meal is cheaper than alot of other options.
The one thing missing from the trinity is “effort”. For instance, you could make any Dal, which would fit the trinity, but takes a lot of time. There are books with hundreds of Dal recipes that all taste different and work, too. And this is just one example. Less than a dollar a meal if made in bulk with rice.
You know, thinking back, we should never have trusted that stupid infographic. It was a lie from the get go. It was a food triangle. This is a true pyramid.
It’s all the additives to these otherwise quite wholesome ingredients that make them less healthy and not as nutritionally dense as they should be. McDonald’s burgers are not JUST meat, bread, and some veggies unfortunately.
Jimmy Joy. Cheap (under 2 euros per meal), delicious and you can’t really get any more nutritious than that. It has all the recommended nutrients in one go.
Tacos and burritos could absolutely meet this criteria If you’re doing them well at home, with the most unhealthy thing being the tortilla itself (You could argue that those are empty calories). Of course that means no sour cream or cheap cheese abuse among other things
Im not an expert but people argue that bread and esentially most products whose base is just flour aren’t good. The reasoning is that those are carbohydrates that just add calories and nothing else (protein, vitamins etc…). So eating 200kcal of tuna is healthier than 200kcal of bread since those calories come with Proteins, phosphorus, omega 3 a bunch of vitamins etc. Whereas bread/tortillas are (basically) just carbohydrates which arent bad by themselves, but also arent good in excess
That’s true for white bread, not the other kinds. Whole-grain bread is both delicious and healthy.
I remember visiting the UK for the first time and being amazed that all the natives were eating white bread for breakfast and lunch. Here in Northern Europe, white bread is more on par with a dessert item.
Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.
Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).
Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.
Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.
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Well chicken maybe as it is the most cheap meat. And it is subjective, but something like chicken soup (if cooked at home) can be relativly cheap and really delicious.
Also, just thought about it - fruits and berries also easily break this trinity
Meat is an expensive luxury product
Well-seasoned, air-fried chicken is super healthy and cheap.
Chicken has been heavily, heavily marketed as a health food, and while it’s not the worst thing you could eat, if you actually look at its nutritional profile it’s not particularly nutritious or “healthy”. That’s just Tyson Foods & co working their magic. It’s more like the ultimate neutral food - nothing terrifying, nothing great, a bit like its taste.
Chicken breast lean protein. What do you mean by “nutritional profile”?
Lean protein =/= healthy. Like, at all. This is a myth from the freaking 1980s. Nutritional profile is a breakdown of the micronutrients that a food has, and it determines whether a food is “nutritious” and therefore, in general terms, “healthy”.
Please, oh please, don’t go around telling people that food is healthy if it is a lean protein. I’m sure it’s well intended, but it’s also misinformed. If you want to learn about how to assess whether a food is healthy, go make an appointment with a dietitian - your insurance will often cover the first appointment.
You sure typed a lot without explaining what the nutritional profile of chicken is or why it’s not healthy.
Sorry, unfortunately nutrition is more complex than what you can sum up in a few sentences. To answer that though:
Chicken isn’t categorically “unhealthy” in the same way double stuf oreos cooked in lard are - I said in another comment that it’s the ultimate neutral food, and if you look at its profile I think that’s a fair statement. It’s not completely devoid of nutrients, it has a couple of things in significant quantities - phosphorus, selenium, and B3 for example - but overall it’s not very nutrient dense. It doesn’t have a ton of huge negatives either - a bit of saturated fat, but nothing to write home about. If you’re looking at a “Hitler-Hanks” spectrum where the lard oreos are on one end and a spinach chia seed broccoli whatever salad on the other, then chicken is probably right in the middle somewhere. Its D&D alignment is True Neutral. The point I was making in my earlier comment was that “protein” doesn’t make a food healthy, and that there’s a lot more to it than that, and if people use that mental shortcut they might end up making misinformed decisions.
The nutritional profile of chicken would be a lot to type out, but you can look at the NCCDB or Cronometer Gold (which uses NCCDB among others) for an elaborate breakdown. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t capture everything - it’s an amazing tool, but it won’t cover the catechins in your tea, for example.
Ultimately though, if you’re reading this, let me take this opportunity to encourage you to GO SEE A REGISTERED DIETITIAN. Your insurance will often cover 80+% of your first appointment, but even if they don’t it’s an amazing investment. You’ll live longer, probably spend less on food, and spend a lot less on hospital bills after your first heart attack.
Onion. It’s cheap, nutritious, acts as a low-key anti bacterial solution, can be served in a multitude of ways, or eaten raw.
Subscribe for more onion facts. 🧅
You, sir, are a monster.
Hmm time for a snack
Takes a bite from a raw onion like an apple
Tony abbott is that you?
When I was in college, I had the rule of not buying anything that is >$1.50 per pound. This is what I was reduced to (prices may be different now due to inflation and geo area):
So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.
Yup. Mexican, Indian, a lot of cuisine from poorer countries figured this out long ago. Beans or lentils over rice with the right spices, incredible. The restaurant version will add a lot of fat and heavy cream but if you make it yourself you can adjust that so it’s not unhealthy.
Mac n cheese.
Ratatouille.
A lot of cuisine that is lauded all around the world embraces all three of those, or at least the original dishes they came from did. A lot of really fancy food today and in the last 50 years is just “peasant food”. Sometimes just with fresher ingredients and more butter
mac n cheese is not healthy
humus
Only truly cheap if you make it yourself. That’s why I commented below on the missing item of “effort”.
granted
Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study
Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets “reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]”, which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn’t seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.
The prices of animal products are kept artificially low by subsidies and don’t reflex the real world cost.
Thanks but I’ll pass on food advice from the UK /s
Always remember - the flavor of their food and the beauty of their women led Britain to be the greatest seafaring nation in the world.
🥑
I think a ripe avocado can be a good meal by itself, it has healthy fat, vitamins & fiber.
One avocado as a meal is cheaper than alot of other options.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/avocados/
It’s so awesome with a bit of kala namak on it. Mjam!
The one thing missing from the trinity is “effort”. For instance, you could make any Dal, which would fit the trinity, but takes a lot of time. There are books with hundreds of Dal recipes that all taste different and work, too. And this is just one example. Less than a dollar a meal if made in bulk with rice.
so something like this?
You just made a food pyramid that isn’t stupid.
You know, thinking back, we should never have trusted that stupid infographic. It was a lie from the get go. It was a food triangle. This is a true pyramid.
And then there is mc Donald’s and similar chains. They managed to avoid all three of those things
I wonder if they are actually that unhealthy. After all a burger is just meat, bread, and some veggies. Doesn’t seem that unbalanced.
I assume the most unhealthy part there is the gallon of sugar soda that people also drink there ._.
undefined> Kebab
It’s all the additives to these otherwise quite wholesome ingredients that make them less healthy and not as nutritionally dense as they should be. McDonald’s burgers are not JUST meat, bread, and some veggies unfortunately.
Jimmy Joy. Cheap (under 2 euros per meal), delicious and you can’t really get any more nutritious than that. It has all the recommended nutrients in one go.
+1, jimmy joy is great
Ah yes, a food that you can eat for three days without pooping while you stay in a tent?
Tacos and burritos could absolutely meet this criteria If you’re doing them well at home, with the most unhealthy thing being the tortilla itself (You could argue that those are empty calories). Of course that means no sour cream or cheap cheese abuse among other things
Sorry for my ignorance but what’s an “empty calorie”?
Im not an expert but people argue that bread and esentially most products whose base is just flour aren’t good. The reasoning is that those are carbohydrates that just add calories and nothing else (protein, vitamins etc…). So eating 200kcal of tuna is healthier than 200kcal of bread since those calories come with Proteins, phosphorus, omega 3 a bunch of vitamins etc. Whereas bread/tortillas are (basically) just carbohydrates which arent bad by themselves, but also arent good in excess
That’s true for white bread, not the other kinds. Whole-grain bread is both delicious and healthy. I remember visiting the UK for the first time and being amazed that all the natives were eating white bread for breakfast and lunch. Here in Northern Europe, white bread is more on par with a dessert item.
Carters’ peanuts :)
Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.
Cheap means the industry hasn’t been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,…).
Delicious … only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what “delicious” really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn’t for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.
Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.