Marty Kendall over at OptimisingNutrition.com put a bunch of data together to show you how to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to shopping for the most nutritious foods!
Cost vs maximum nutrient density
As a starting point, the picture above shows cost vs nutrient density. As a general rule, foods that are more nutritious tend to be more expensive. But if funds are tight, you can get a better nutritional bang for your buck by focusing on foods towards the top by keeping to the left.
Some quick tips for interpreting the charts:
Foods towards the top are more nutritious.
Foods towards the left are cheaper.
Foods towards the right are more expensive (on a calorie for calorie basis). For example, it would cost you more than $100 per day to live on 2000 calories of fresh blueberries or asparagus. However, it might only cost you $1 per day to live on vegetable oil, sugar and oatmeal.
Foods towards the bottom left of the chart (e.g. fats, oils, flour and sugar) are cheap but are nutritionally very poor. While we don’t eat these foods by themselves, they often end up as ingredients for high profit margin processed foods.
The foods towards the bottom right are not a good investment in terms of either nutrient density or cost.
If you want to look at more popular foods check out the Tableau chart here (you’ll need to be on a computer with a screen not a phone for this, sorry).
If you’re super eager and want to check out ALL the data for all the foods that we have collected price and nutrient data you can check it out here.