Eating healthy is harder than it sounds

More and more today, it seems as though the price of living continues to rise. Rent rates always go up. Gas prices fluctuate, but tend to stay at a relatively high cost. Education, while always having been a bank-breaker, is even more so today than any time before. These affect us monthly or weekly, but one group of prices that affect us every day is the costs of food and drinks. Food, from tuna cans to ground beef, continues to rise at a steady rate. Due to factors such as a soda tax, soft drinks are on the uphill slope, and milk is no exception. What stays constant is the fact that food and drinks that are known to be good for you are always more expensive than those that are unhealthy. It's hard to even imagine the words "healthy" and "cheap" in the same sentence anymore.

Not to point any fingers, but just walk into Dollar General and take a look at the food. We all are aware of Ramen noodles and their exceptionally high amount of sodium at a dirt cheap price, but it extends farther than that. Almost everything from rice and beans to even canned fruits and vegetables contain copious amounts of sodium. Wanting to be healthy, I looked through each kind and checked the nutrition facts. All I saw was sodium and fat that I never knew were in these foods. To me, it just seems unnecessary. I can add salt and pepper myself, so why do they need to be included? It's not like salt is expensive. It would still be the same price to offer two options, with or without sodium.

Although it seems easy to point this out, Easy Mac is also notorious for this. I never knew as a kid that when I put in the packet of ‘cheese sauce' that I was saturating plain food with something much more. Anything instant, such as Banquet meals and Compleats, are also full of saturated fat and sodium. It seems that being a college student with a tight budget is harder than ever before. Being health conscious takes a huge chunk out of your budget. Unless you want to eat plain pasta (any sauce you get is going to be full of salt) or white rice, you're going to be faced with choosing between two evils. Well, I guess you could eat plain toast. Forget about jelly and jam, though. Same situation there, but I guess that's to be assumed. Peanut butter is even worse, but again that's already common knowledge.

Now on to the expensive foods. Organic foods are usually the first to be pointed out. These aren't the only ones, though. Fresh vegetables are now pricier than often expected. Even bags of spinach and lettuce are about three times their counterpart in the can. Meat also extends this trend. Ground beef that is 80/20 (80 percent pure beef and 20 percent fat) is more expensive than its 93/7 counterpart. Even at restaurants, a rib-eye steak, which contains a decent amount of fat, is considerably cheaper than getting a New York strip which contains a lot less fat. Chicken is now fed with food filled with steroids, pesticides and other ingredients in order to bring it to consumers quickly at a cheaper price. Chickens fed straight feed are going to be a lot more money.

Money is tight all around. The economy continues to be in a downturn and living day to day continues to be a struggle no matter who you are. Those of us that would like to be more health conscious are discouraged due to the ever-rising prices of healthy foods that used to be staples. Even when you find something seemingly healthy, it contains either fat (mainly saturated) or unrealistic amounts of sodium. It's said this is due to Americans adjusting to the taste of salt and the preservation of food, but I don't know how much truth there is to this. I wouldn't mind readjusting and I'm sure the American public would agree. We don't need as much of these things as companies assume. We can handle adding these ingredients on our own.