Eating healthy does not always come at a high price.
College students may have limited funds, but there are ways to eat healthier at a lower cost.
Graduate assistant Lauren Kinser showed some Lipscomb students how to pick the right items to eat at a lower cost.
In a cooking demonstration, Kinser used reasonably inexpensive ingredients to make healthy snacks, like a peanut butter and jelly smoothie and energy bites, which are made with oats.
“There’s no reason you need to pay two dollars extra to go to Whole Foods and feel better about it,” Kinser said. “You can feel better about saving two bucks and putting that towards buying something else.”
Even at more affordable stores like Kroger, students may still be faced with expensive options. In the case of honey, Mountain Ridge is $9.29, Aunt Sue’s is $10.49 and the Kroger brand is $8.55.
While it may not seem like a huge price difference, every penny counts when you are a broke college student.
“Right now, I don’t have a lot to spend on healthy food,” senior Angela Moore said. “So it’s often easy to give the excuse that ‘oh that’s gonna be spendy so I’m just gonna go the fast way.’ I don’t wanna do that if there’s a better way.”
Kinser encourages students to look at the labels of ingredients. She explained that many of the ingredients may be the same.
“The name can sometimes be misleading,” Kinser said. “And also, what’s even more funny is sometimes they’re actually made in the same processing plants, but they just have a different label on them.”
Yet Whole Foods continues to draw in customers who are brand-loyal and organic driven. According to their website, Whole Foods brought in $14.2 billion sales in 2014.
Nevertheless, students who are on a tight budget will need another option.
Kinser reassures them the taste of something less expensive is not much different.
“Peanut butter, as long as it has the same ingredients in it, is peanut butter. It all has like peanuts in it. It all is gonna have a little bit of oil, a little bit of salt, and it’s all gonna be blended together and it’s all gonna make a paste that tastes like peanut butter.”
For more information on how to eat cheap and healthy, contact Lauren Kinser at lauren.kinser@lipscomb.edu.