Eating Healthy on a Budget with Diabetes: Six Tips

A diet rich in vegetables, fruits and lean protein helps keep blood sugar in range — but for people living with diabetes, already a costly condition, nutritious food can strain the budget. With some planning, you can eat well for less. These six tips can stretch your grocery money further than you might expect.

1. Plan your meals

Plan a weekly menu of balanced meals that help keep your blood sugar steady.

• Adapt recipes. Love pasta but follow a low-carb plan? Try recipes with vegetable noodles — more vegetables, fewer blood sugar spikes.
• Reuse ingredients. Different herbs and spices turn the same ingredients into different meals. Cook a whole chicken and make a chicken and vegetable stir-fry one night and fajitas another.
• Stretch recipes. Make a big batch of budget-friendly soup or casserole — vegetable soup, white bean chicken chili — to eat through the week or freeze. You'll spend less time cooking, too.

2. Shop with a list

A list makes shopping faster, cuts impulse buys and saves extra trips for forgotten items. If it includes nuts, beans or grains, consider buying them in bulk.

3. Buy frozen or canned

Frozen and canned vegetables and fruits can be healthy, cost less and last longer — and resealable bags let you use what you need, even out of season.

• Choose fruit canned in water, not syrup, and check labels for added sugar or salt.
• Skip frozen foods with butter or cream sauces; choose plain or "lightly sauced."

4. Use coupons

More than a billion coupons are offered each year. If there's none for the blueberries on your list but there is one for strawberries, consider switching. Small ones add up: five 50-cents-off coupons a week can save more than $100 a year.

5. Buy store brands

Generic or store brands can cut your food bill by 20 to 30 percent. Canned tomatoes, milk, olive oil, and frozen fruits and vegetables usually come in cheaper store-brand versions.

6. Grow some of your own

Growing fruits and vegetables — especially from inexpensive seeds — saves money and puts fresh produce at hand. No yard? Many fruits, vegetables and herbs grow in pots on a patio or balcony.

Sources

Based on "6 Tips for Eating Healthy on a Budget," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a work of the United States government in the public domain.