We all want to eat healthy foods — plant-based, organic, non-GMO, and whole, whenever possible.<\/p>\n
Whenever possible.<\/em><\/p>\n For me and many others, that translates as “when we can afford to do so.” After all, a healthy diet can cost three times more<\/a> than an unhealthy one, and my family (and I bet yours) has got the grocery bills to prove it.<\/p>\n But are we supposed to just settle? That’s a hard choice to make, especially when it’s not just your health, but your kids’ health that’s at stake.<\/p>\n Today, I hope to make that choice just a little bit easier for you. Not by answering the “Is it worth it to buy healthy foods?” question — that’s up to you — but instead providing some objective guidance as to which healthy foods are the most worth your hard-earned money.<\/p>\n If you’ve ever shopped at Whole Foods, particularly at the salad bar, you’ve probably seen signs advertising the ANDI scores of certain foods.<\/p>\n It’s a little weird to think about boiling the nutritional value of a food down to a single number, but I like it. Nobody’s arguing that you should eat only a few high-scoring foods and ignore all others, but within the context of a healthy and varied diet, I like being able to “power rank” my foods and make choices accordingly.<\/p>\n ANDI stands for Aggregate Nutrient Density Index, and basically, it reports “nutrients divided by calories,” Fuhrman’s formula for healthy eating. This means the index rewards foods that are nutrient-dense (those high in micronutrients per calorie), and penalizes that are high in calories without packing much in the way of nutrition. Then the scores are scaled so that the highest score 1000 and the lowest score 1. (More details about the methods at the bottom of this page<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The results are interesting, but not all that surprising: leafy greens top the chart because they pack lots of nutrition in very few calories, followed by other vegetables, then fruits (as the calories start to increase), then nuts and seeds, then beans, then animal products, then junk food.<\/p>\n To get anything from the charts that follow in this post, check out the sampling of ANDI scores for common foods here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is the question I found myself asking the other day as I reached for a bunch of kale from the Whole Foods produce section.<\/p>\n Actually, it was a more specific one: Are all these greens worth the cost?<\/em><\/p>\n I mean, I know kale is healthy — ANDI says so, giving it the highest score of 1000. But are there perhaps cheaper vegetables that, while not quite as nutrient-dense as kale, might be a much better value for the price?<\/p>\n And thus, this post (and a day of gathering data and fiddling with numbers) was born.<\/p>\n This turned out to be squirmier than I had anticipated, and the issue comes down to caloric density<\/a>.<\/p>\nA Start: Dr. Fuhrman’s ANDI Index<\/h3>\n
But which healthy foods are the most affordable?<\/h3>\n
Two Ways to Eat<\/h3>\n