Do you think if healthier foods cost less people would choose those foods over the unhealthy ones?

No, I don’t. Firstly, there are actually chemicals in the non-healthy foods that make us want to eat them, which I find horrifying, but it’s true. Secondly…you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We already know what junk food tastes like, we’ve been conditioned (or maybe we’ve just grown) to love it…do you really think we’ll stop now?

I do, however, think that people would definitely have more BALANCED diets if healthy food cost less, and that’s the key. There’s no bad food or good food, really, and we shouldn’t think of it that way. There’s just less-healthy and more-healthy and we should learn to balance things out.

I can’t tell if my little metaphor thing made any sense, lol. Oh well. I think I made my point.

I know I would. Things like Subway and Boost are really yummy as well as healthy and if they were cheaper I’d go there every day.

yes deffenatly

I would! :)

Healthy food is not that expensive, actually. Only healthy and easy-to-make food is expensive.

You can always get a cheap, balanced, healthy diet from buying a sack of rice, a sack of beans and fresh veggies from an Asia market, and adding some fresh meat and a couple of other things from the grocery store. In fact the cheapest way to get healthy food is: have your own garden and grow your own food.

Baking your own bread or cake is also cheaper than buying. And you can always make it healthy. You can make home-almost everything healthier and cheaper than industry food.

But then you have to have the time to cook it yourself. And the cooking skill.

The cheap easy-peasy-microwave-open-stuff-in-switch-on-done industry food is mostly unhealthy. Because it is incredibly difficult to make that taste acceptable without using way too much salt, sugar, fat and preservants.

Like Rotten said, you can eat healthy and cheap if you cook from scratch. One of the problems President Nixon faced was high food prices. The economy was in the dumper with high inflation and high unemployment and Americans were paying a lot for food. Corn it turns out is the cheapest source of calories. Nixon started to subsidize corn. This sea of cheap corn had a profound effect on our food landscape. Cattle no longer grazed on grass since they could be fed cheap corn leading to cheap beef; cheap corn made chicken which was once saved for special occasions one of the cheapest foods; cane and beet sugar was replaced by cheap high fructose corn syrup and corn oil became the cheapest fat. Chasing after subsidies farmers planted more corn than ever and less of everything else. Now cheap meat, cheap fried foods and cheap soda and sweets from corn form most of our diet and there is a dearth of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains which are comparatively more expensive. Corn subsidies even lead to our ethanol boondoggle. Gasohol doesn’t actually save any petroleum because it takes about as much petroleum to make the ethanol in the first place (adjusting for the BTU equivalence). Due to corn subsidies what would have been lost money becomes an opportunity for profits. Humans evolved to crave rich and sweet foods. Throughout most of human history food was the limiting factor for survival and procreation. Because of this rich fatty foods were particularly valuable we evolved to crave them. Sweet ripe fruit is also the most nutritious so we also seek out sweet foods. Now that food is plentiful our earlier survival instincts work against us. We can produce rich and/or sweet foods with nutritionally worthless oil and sugar and these artificially rich and sweet foods will always be more appealing to us than healthier foods. We only eat healthy foods if we ignore our instincts and consciously choose healthy foods over junk food.

Obviously. If you can afford healthy foods, you won’t buy unhealthy ones. But thing is most people can’t.

Like Fillet and Rotten said, it’s pretty easy to buy groceries and make from scratch for under $50/week. I buy 2-4lb. of Chicken breasts for ~$7-10, a big 5-8lb. of brown rice for $12, and some broccoli/asparagus for an extra $4-6. That is the bulk of my meals, and the rest comes from buying milk and eggs for my breakfast. Not that expensive to eat healthy.

Problem isn’t the cost, it’s the people. In this day and age, people simply either forgot how to cook or just find it too time consuming to sit for 10-30 minutes cooking one meal. Majority of kids I knew ate out a lot because their parents didn’t know how to cook or they didn’t have time. It’s not the price, it’s the people.