Quote:
Low-carbohydrate diets have a reputation for being expensive because people often start eating pricier foods, like meat and cheese, to replace cheaper starchy foods such as pasta and rice. Eggs and ground beef are less expensive low-carb meal options, and meat, unlike fruits and vegetables, is easy to freeze and doesn't spoil quickly. These advantages can add up.
A 2019 cost analysis published in Nutrition Journal compared a low-carbohydrate dietary pattern with the New Zealand government's recommended guidelines (which are almost identical to those in the United States) and found that it cost only an extra $1.27 in US dollars per person per day. One explanation is that protein and fat are more satiating than carbohydrates, so people who mostly consume these macronutrients often cut back on snacks like packaged chips, crackers, and even fruits. Also, those on a ketogenic diet usually cut down on medications, so the additional $1.27 daily is likely offset by reduced spending at the pharmacy.
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I'm so glad to see that someone acknowledges that it isn't necessarily expensive to do LC. In fact it's often
less expensive, because of all the stuff you're NOT eating any more, such as cookies and chips and bagels and cereal and on and on and on - all those things that used to fill up your shopping cart.
But so many people have this idea that doing LC properly requires that you eat a lot of steak - and I'm afraid that the Atkins revival back in the early 2000's has something to do with that, since I very clearly recall walking into grocery stores and seeing a poster that said "There's nothing to eat on Atkins, except..." and then pictures of all the things you can eat on Atkins. I googled to find images of those posters, and they're just as I remembered - they included several Atkins products (unfortunately), although most of it was meats, eggs, fish and seafood, fruit and several vegetables. The problem is that most of the foods pictured were some of the most expensive LC options available: about 3 different versions of steak, including thick slices of fish steak (probably the most expensive cut of any fish), lobster, shrimp, and oysters on the half shell. The only cheese I noticed on those signs was fresh mozzarella (about twice the price of regular low moisture mozz, or 4 times the price of almost any store brand chunk cheese). Even most of the vegetables and fruits on those signs were often the more expensive or exclusive items in the produce aisles: raspberries (a half-pint container for about the same price as a quart of strawberries), savoy cabbage (more expensive than regular cabbage), leeks, asparagus, artichokes, honeydew melon (cantaloupe is far less expensive). I understand the purpose of the ads was to get people to understand that Atkins didn't need to be boring, but it also left people with the impression that you needed to eat high priced LC foods in order to do it right. It's no wonder that so many people think it's prohibitively expensive for low income people to eat LC.
And yet it's not prohibitively expensive if you choose lower priced meats such as ground beef, and family packs of chicken thighs or breasts, stick to store brand chunk cheeses, eggs, and less expensive LC friendly veggies and fruits. In fact it'll probably cost a lot less than what you were spending on a bunch of "filler" foods (breads, pasta), and snacks of all kinds.
The other reason so many people find LC to be prohibitively expensive is that while it is helpful to have something to substitute for some of your favorite treats (especially when you first start LC), those products can be very expensive, especially if you're doing a lot of different treat recipes, and each one requires a different type of sweetener to achieve the proper result for the candy, cake, or cookies you're making.
But it's also very possible to get through "induction flu" without all those sweeteners, or with very minimal use of artificial sweeteners and LC treats. Those of us who did LC back in the 70's had very, VERY little to choose from as far as sweeteners were concerned, and of course there was no internet to help us find recipes or products if we couldn't find them locally, and yet we got along just fine without them.