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This is an expensive diet. Fish and berries are very expensive and I don't think a person trying to save money would eat much of them.
I have a spreadsheet I've been working on to find the cheapest possible diet given various constraints. My current diet costs $5.95 a day. That's CAD, so it's only $4.29 USD a day. All subsequent numbers are in CAD.
As part of a challenge, I got it down to about $2 a day by relaxing some of the nutritional requirements that would take a very long time to cause any problems. However, this was a diet where almost all of the calories came from potatoes, so it would be pretty boring.
The cheapest possible nutritionally complete diet according to my spreadsheet (which doesn't yet have all food types) would cost only $4.29 a day. But I used a minimum protein intake of only 60 g a day, and allowed the saturated fat intake to be as high as 30 g (it ended up being 28.4 g) a day.
The diet is:
Note that milk is twice as expensive in Canada as it is in the US.
yeah as mentioned that was just "random diet I had lying around" but it's actually cheaper than the US governments "thrifty food plan"
It's relatively easy to make cheaper by cutting fruits/vegetables
when putting that on Chronometer you were obviously really high on saturated fat, but also missing out on magnesium and vitamin C and on Omega 3s (the main one I'm pretty oof on)
Did you know that Canned Salmon per gram of protein is actually cheaper than soybeans? Canned salmon is actually really cheap. it's about $3.15 a can and 1 can has about 330 grams of actual salmon in there, so it's literally 2-3x cheaper to buy canned salmon compared to fresh salmon.
Frozen blueberries are similarly much cheaper We're talking literally under half the cost of fresh blueberries. (still about $30 for 2k calories but much much cheaper than fresh)
Anyway salmon ends up mostly being clutch for the Omega 3 DHA, EPA and having some Selenium/Vitamin D as an added bonus. It's hard to beat.
After trying hard to reduce costs without going overboard in cutting fruits/vegetables I ended up at $6.73 a day with most of that (4.13) coming from fruits/vegetables
What doing math really shows is that most of the price of eating comes from fruits and Vegetables and other food groups are a distraction. Oats/Beans are basically free per calorie
According to my spreadsheet, this diet has 414 g of magnesium, most of it from the potatoes (you probably have to eat the skins). There's also a good amount in the milk.
It also has 99 mg of vitamin C, also mostly from the potatoes, but a little bit also comes from the kale.
The milk and eggs have a lot of saturated fat, but it's under the 30 g limit I put for saturated fat.
I don't have a omega-3 requirement in my spreadsheet, because it wasn't included in the nutrition dataset I'm working with. I plan to add that later.
That's surprising. I don't have all types of food added to my spreadsheet yet, but so far, the cheapest source of protein is actually flour.
The cheapest my grocery store sells is a 418 g can for $6 ($4.33 USD) which would be equivalent to $3.42 for a 330 g can. That works out to 16.5 g of protein per CAD. Lentils, split peas, potatoes, and pork are all much cheaper sources of protein.
However, canned tuna is cheaper than canned salmon at 19.0 g of protein per CAD (I used the drained weight, not sure if that's correct). Fresh salmon would be 5.1 g of protein per CAD. Flour is 68.9 g.
Flour is an extremely cheap source of calories. If all you cared about was getting enough calories, you could live on less than a dollar a day. I find that that starchy foods are very cheap sources of nutrients in general, but you would have to eat huge quantities of them to meet your requirements and you'd consume too many calories. Consuming foods that are nutrient dense is what makes things expensive, as that means eating vegetables.
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