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Most advice on this is useless. "Shop the perimeter" is actually wrong, since frozen and canned are in the middle aisles and that's where the best value in the store is. Here's what's actually cheap. Protein Per dollar This is really important since protein is more expensive than carbs, and what matters is the price of it per dollar more than just the price: Dried beans, around $2 a pound, which is roughly 45 grams of protein Canned beans, $1.20 to $1.80 a can, about 20 grams

Some snacks keep you full and some don't, and it's not really about calories. Here's which ones do: Plain Greek yogurt with your own toppings. The best one here. You get 17 to 20 grams of protein, and buying plain instead of flavored means you decide how much sugar goes in instead of getting 15 grams decided for you. Fruit and a spoon of honey takes ten seconds. Peanut butter toast. Around 10 grams of protein plus fat and fiber. It's calorie dense enough that it eats more lik

You are paying fourteen dollars for a smoothie you eat with a spoon. It's still good. It's just not what the price and the photos are selling. The base is fine. Acai is a real fruit and it does have a lot of antioxidants. But unsweetened acai tastes bitter, so the frozen packs shops use are usually sweetened, and then blended with banana and apple juice to get the texture right. What ends up in the bowl is sweetened fruit puree, which is good, but that's what it is. Then the

Every one of these has a version that's sort of true, which is why they stick around. 1. Spot reduction You cannot burn fat off a specific body part by training it. Ab exercises build the muscle underneath, they don't remove what's on top. Fat comes off in a pattern set largely by genetics, and you don't get a vote on the order. This one matters because it's the business model behind a huge amount of fitness content. "Ten minutes for a flat stomach" only sells if people belie

Blend cottage cheese with honey and frozen fruit, freeze it, and the internet says you've made ice cream with 20 grams of protein. There's also cottage cheese cheesecake, cottage cheese cookie dough, cottage cheese brownie batter. The whole category exists now. The protein claim mostly checks out, which is more than I can say for most trends. A cup of cottage cheese has around 24 grams, comparable to a chicken breast, and unlike a lot of protein swaps you're not paying for it

This isn't a list of things to never eat. Just a list of foods that are less healthy than you think: 1. Granola: Often 400 calories a cup. It's oats held together by oil and sugar, which is also the recipe for a cookie. Fine as a topping. Not a cereal you fill a bowl with. 2. Flavored Greek yogurt: You do get the protein. You also get 15 grams of added sugar, which is most of a candy bar. Buy plain and put something on it. 3. Bottled green juice: The color is doing all the wo

A bowl of lettuce with ranch on it is not a meal. It gets ordered like one constantly, usually by someone trying to make the responsible choice, and then they're hungry by third period or halfway through the afternoon. I'm not saying that salads are secretly unhealthy. I'm saying that a lot of them are a bad deal. Protein is what makes food filling. Gram for gram it does more for fullness than fat or carbs, and fiber and sheer volume help too. A plain salad has the volume cov

Chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, a burger, grilled cheese. Maybe cheese pizza if the place is feeling generous. You can walk into a diner, a Mexican restaurant, and a Thai place in the same afternoon and get handed the same menu three times. The usual explanation is that kids are picky. That's part of it, but it's not the main thing. The real reason is the kitchen. Every item on that list is already in the building for other purposes. The fryer is running, the flattop is hot,

Most of what's in the snack aisle is a potato. The question is which ones admit it. Veggie Straws are the whole reason I wanted to write this. They look like vegetables. They're colored like vegetables. The name says vegetables. Check the ingredient list and the top of it is potato starch and potato flour, with vegetable powders showing up further down as color. A serving runs around 130 calories and 7 grams of fat, which is in the same neighborhood as regular chips. The fibe

Juice, smoothies, and whole fruit all get counted as a fruit serving. Only one of them earns it. Whole fruit is the baseline. A medium orange has around 12 grams of sugar and 3 grams of fiber, and it takes you a couple minutes to eat. That last part matters more than it sounds. Chewing takes time, the fiber is still wrapped around the sugar, and your body processes the whole thing slowly. Juice is what's left after you remove everything but the sugar and some vitamins. Eight

Three cans on a table. One is honest, one is arguing with the internet, and one wants you to think about your gut bacteria. Regular soda is not claiming to help you, which is the nicest thing I can say about it. A 12 ounce can of Coke has about 39 grams of sugar, roughly ten teaspoons. Measure that out once. The number on the label does not land the same way as a pile of sugar on a plate. But nobody is pretending it is a wellness product, and in an aisle where chips advertise

Walk into any grocery store, and you’ll find a wall of protein bars promising to fix your life. Granola bars saying they give your day a healthy start, or protein bars saying they’re great workout fuel. And we can’t forget the wrappers covered in all the buzzwords: natural, wholesome, clean, high protein, etc. The more you read the labels, the more you realize that they’re either desserts disguised as breakfast, or straight up concoctions of chemicals. Are these bars actually

Social media is pretty bad for your health. Yeah, nothing new. That news has been going around for years. But there's a side of this we don't talk about as much that is just as important. Social media, in addition to affecting you emotionally, also has measurable effects on your physical body. And for teenagers spending an average of five or more hours a day on their phones, whether it's doomscrolling on the toilet or checking your stories right when you wake up, those effect

Most of us don't really think about what we ate as a kid until we're older and dealing with the consequences of it. The food you eat during those early years of development is more than just your source of energy. It builds your body, your brain, and most importantly, the habits you will continue for the rest of your life. But what should kids actually be eating? As a child, your nutrient needs are not just a scaled down version of what you're supposed to eat as an adult. For

I just got back from vacation and let me tell you, I ate some horrible food on that flight. Here’s an example, I got a Thai green curry and the ingredients were as listed: Water, white rice, modified food starch, coconut oil, maltodextrin, salt, less than 2% of the following... We all know plane food is terrible, especially when you fly economy like me. But this was one of the first times I actually stopped to read the ingredients, and I'm not even sure if I was surprised. Nu

As a teenager, it’s pretty common to feel motivated to start a diet, whether if it’s to look great for prom, or just to feel better about yourself. It's also pretty common to give up on that diet. If you've experienced this, you’re not alone. I’m going to be talking about why diets fail and what you can do that works instead. If someone told you that their diet didn’t work and you had to guess why, chances are that you would think “they just didn’t try hard enough!” Most of t

Nutrition labels are everywhere. But what's the point if you don't know how to read them? I used to just glance at the calories, and think something is healthy just because it's low in calories, but there's a lot more to look at then just that! Serving Size - Easy to read, but easier to overlook Not all snacks come with exactly one serving per package. Failing to realize this might cause you eat more calories than you really want! For example, last week I got a pack of Cheeto