Seven Food Swaps That Cost Less

Stand in front of the health aisle and look at the prices.

A box of four protein bars. A loaf of speciality low-carb bread. Little pots of flavoured yoghurt, sold in sixes. All of it is marked as the sensible choice, and all of it costs two or three times what the ordinary version costs.

Then look at what is in them. The bars are mostly sugar with a protein claim on the front. The yoghurt has more sugar in one pot than you would put in a cup of tea. The bread has the same amount of starch as the white loaf next to it at half the price.

The expensive shelf is not the useful shelf. Here are seven swaps that go the other way. Each one steadies how the food behaves once it is inside you, and each one takes money off the shop rather than adding it.

1. Snack bars, for hard-boiled eggs

The bars are the single biggest saving on this page, and the easiest sell once you have read one label.

An egg gives you protein and fat together, which is the combination that actually holds you. A bar gives you a small amount of protein wrapped around a lot of added sugar, and the price of a box would buy you two dozen eggs.

The trick is doing them in advance. Boil a dozen on Sunday and put them in the fridge. This swap lives or dies on whether they are already done at four o’clock, because nobody boils an egg in the middle of an energy slump.

2. Protein bars, for a tin of fish

Same problem, different aisle. A tin of tuna or sardines carries several times the protein of a bar with none of the added sugar, and costs a fraction of the price.

Sardines are the better buy and the harder sell. Try them on toast with lemon and plenty of black pepper before you decide. It is also sensible to vary which fish you eat rather than having the same tin every day of the week.

3. Fruit juice, for frozen berries

Juice is the fruit with the fibre taken out, and the fibre was the part slowing the sugar down. Without it you are drinking something that behaves much like a soft drink with a better reputation.

Frozen berries cost less than fresh, keep for months, and are picked riper than the ones flown in. Put them in yoghurt, or in oatmeal, or in a glass of water with ice if what you actually want is something cold and interesting to drink.

4. Flavoured yoghurt, for plain

A flavoured pot can carry as much added sugar as a small chocolate bar. Plain Greek yoghurt has none, and roughly three times the protein.

Buy the big tub instead of the little pots. It is much cheaper per spoonful, and you decide the sweetness rather than a factory deciding it for you. A spoon of berries and a shake of cinnamon gets you there.

5. White rice, for cauliflower rice

This is the swap people try, hate, and abandon, and it is almost always because of how it was cooked.

Steamed plain, it is wet and it tastes of very little. Cooked properly it is a different food.

Get a pan hot. Add oil, then the cauliflower rice, and leave it alone for a minute so it colours. Garlic and salt next, and a squeeze of lime at the end. Frozen is cheaper than fresh and works better here, because it is drier to start with.

6. Pasta, for spaghetti squash or courgette

The carbohydrate difference here is the largest of any swap on this list, which is why it appears on every version of this advice.

It is also the one most likely to start an argument at the dinner table. So do not replace the pasta. Mix them.

Start with three quarters pasta to one quarter courgette. Move the ratio a little every couple of weeks. Nobody announces anything, nobody has a strong opinion about it, and by the end you are somewhere quite different from where you started. This is the best idea on the page, and it is the one that survives cooking for other people.

For spaghetti squash: halve it, scoop out the seeds, roast it cut side down at 400F for about forty minutes, then scrape it into strands with a fork. Courgette noodles need three or four minutes in a hot pan and no more, or they collapse.

7. Speciality low-carb bread, for sprouted grain

The low-carb loaf at eight to twelve pounds a go usually has about the same starch as ordinary bread. You are paying for the packaging.

Sprouted grain bread costs about half as much and brings three or four times the fibre. Sprouting breaks down some of the starch before the grain is ever milled, and the fibre left behind is the part doing the work.

One more thing, and it matters as much as the swap: one slice, not two. Portion is doing half the job here.

How to read the label on the thing you are replacing

You do not need to learn nutrition to do this. You need to look at two lines and compare them.

Find the protein. Find the added sugar. If the added sugar is the bigger number, the front of the packet is telling you a different story from the back of it. That is the whole method, and it takes four seconds in an aisle.

Try it on three things in your own cupboard tonight. Not the obvious ones. The three you think of as the healthy options, because those are where the surprise is. Then replace one of them this week.

One. Not the cupboard.

The Sunday hour

Six of the seven above assume, without saying so, that something is already prepared.

An hour on a Sunday covers it. Boil the eggs. Roast the squash. Move the frozen berries from the back of the freezer to the front. Decant the big tub of yoghurt into something you will actually open.

None of this works as a decision made at four o’clock on a Wednesday when you are tired and the bars are right there. It works as a decision made once, on a quiet afternoon, about what will be in the fridge.

Store brands are the same food

Frozen vegetables, frozen berries, tinned fish, plain yoghurt. These are commodities.

The supermarket’s own version is very often the same product in a plainer wrapper, sometimes from the same factory, and the price gap is large. Nothing on this page depends on buying a particular brand, and anything that did would be worth suspecting.

This is where the savings on this page actually come from, and it is the least interesting advice anyone will ever give you.

Pick two, not seven

Doing all seven this week is how this ends up abandoned by the twentieth.

Pick two. Ideally the eggs, because it saves the most and is the easiest, and one other that fits a meal you already eat. Give them a fortnight. Then add a third if you feel like it.

The whole point of a swap is that nothing left your plate and nothing left your budget. Seven changes at once is not a swap. It is a diet with extra steps, and you have already done one of those.

If a printed version would be more use than a page you have to remember, the free food swap chart in the sidebar has twenty-eight of these. One line each, made to go on a fridge door.