I wanted to know what that would buy you in Pittsburgh and whether you could make three squares a day taste good on a budget. Why that number? The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program currently allots $215.10 a week to a four-person household to cover the cost of groceries necessary to provide a “healthy, budget-conscious diet” under its official Thrifty Food Plan. So I decided to make myself this challenge: Prepare a week’s worth of meals for a family of four, completely from scratch, for around $200. Yet I’m also a problem-solver who has penny-pinched at meal time for decades. I can’t imagine doing it today, especially when the cost of everything else we need on a daily basis is rising, too. Having raised five kids, including three always-hungry sons, I know firsthand how expensive three meals a day can be for a family in good economic times. And while I try (really) hard to choose recipes that are as easy for the average cook as they are inspirational and great tasting, it’s gotten considerably tougher in recent months to also make them 100% affordable. Target!)Īs the PG’s food editor, my job is to cook - a lot. The price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs will also leave a shopper reeling from sticker shock, and don’t even get me started on what a bag of Lay’s potato chips will set you back these days. The price of pantry staples such as bread and cereal has jumped nearly 14%, according to the Consumer Price Index, and dairy products are not far behind, costing an average of 13.5% more than a year ago. Thanks to the skyrocketing cost of inflation - which climbed to a 40-year record high of 9.1% in June compared to last year - food has never been more expensive. There’s no getting around this simple and unpalatable fact: It’s pretty stressful to go grocery shopping these days. While it's clear that we still have a lot to learn about how fats behave and contribute to disease, the evidence supporting a moderate level of saturated fat consumption remains strong and consistent.With grocery prices at record highs, we’ve put together a guide for a week’s worth of healthy meals Other recent reviews have found that there in no evidence of a benefit from reducing saturated fat (Chowdhury 2014 Schwingshackl & Hoffmann 2014). Numerous authoritative bodies support the recommendation to limit saturated fat to 10 percent of calories - equivalent to a reasonable limit of 14 slices of bacon's worth of saturated fat a day (WHO 2002 USDA and DHHS 2010).Ī 2012 review by the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent non-profit organization, found that reducing or replacing saturated fat with other healthy fats reduced the risk of cardiovascular events by 14 percent (Hooper 2012). For this reason it has long been known as a "bad" fat that raises the "bad" cholesterol, LDL. Saturated fat is not an essential nutrient and with increasing intakes there is a increased risk of coronary heart disease (IOM 2005a USDA and DHHS 2010). Unfortunately, due to lack of label disclosure and the trans fat labeling loophole, only the food scientists will ever know just how much trans fat these refined oils and emulsifiers are contributing to foods and the American diet. Emulsifiers produced from hydrogenated fats “contain measurable concentrations" of trans fats (Hasenhuettl and Hartel 2008). Textbooks for food scientists reveal that the mono and di-glycerides and other emulsifiers are often made from hydrogenated fats (Hasenhuettl and Hartel 2008) and at temperatures above 220☌ (Sikorski and Kolakowka 2011). The United States Department of Agriculture National Nutrition Database has tested refined, partially hydrogenated and fully hydrogenated oils and found trans fats in all of them (USDA 2013). In the case of fully hydrogenated oils, they should theoretically be free of trans fat, but since no hydrogenation process is 100 percent efficient, trans fats are often found in fully hydrogenated oils at low levels (FDA 2013). The World Health Organization recommends limits on trans fat of less than 1 to 2 grams a day-in this context, it’s easy to see that 0.6 grams is not an insignificant contribution. A 2012 study conducted by FDA scientists estimated that refined oil contributes an average 0.6 grams of trans fat a day (Doell 2012). Artificial trans fats are generated in refined oils when they are processed at high temperatures from the crude oil into a bland, odorless, colorless oil (Greyt 1999). Both refined oils and fully hydrogenated oils contain small amounts of unhealthy artificial trans fats and contribute to the total intake of trans fat in the diet (Biofortis 2014).
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