Stolen from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ftmkwt/comment/lpugu5p/?context=3
But I loved it.
My banana diet starts tomorrow.
I’m calling BS on tuna being more expensive than chix wings…depends on grade of tuna. Wings are expensive AF!
That depends on where you are what time of year it is. I can get wings on sale for $1.99/lb fairly regular. The only fish I can get that cheap is tilapia.
Yeah canned tuna is almost always a dollar for a dinky little can of 100 calories. A pound of wings has many times that, with the online one I found being $3/lb.
So I guess this chart is doing a pretty good job at breaking up some preconceived notions!
Idk what their source was but I think you should look for cheapest “possible” to do a fair comparison (cause obviously a certain shop can have super expensive wings). Near me lowest for wings will be 3-5€/kg, canned tuna starts from 8/kg when on discount, but also has like 30% of seed or olive oil in it (so actual tuna cost to the consumer is more like 12€/kg minimum) Chicken is definitely cheaper everywhere IME.
BTW I’m talking raw chicken wings…everything pre-cooked costs more
Well we can easily check! It says they used Walmart.
Here’s the cheapest per ounce I see for tuna:
It’s 3.22 for 400 calories, so one dollar gets you 124 calories of tuna.
Then cheapest wings I see at $3 a pound, and have 4,840 calories for 24 dollars, coming out to 200 calories per dollar:
So for me doing the math JUST off packaging (he appears to use a nutritional calculator) it’s coming up chicken wings is cheaper source of calories.
So it’s possible in this persons state their chicken was slightly cheaper, and they didn’t have the generic tuna. But even in my state where chicken costs a little bit more than what is listed, and my tuna costs a little less, chicken wings are still close to 50% cheaper for calories.
I wonder if it’s just a “Feeling” thing, because a little can of tuna is just a dollar! That must be cheap, right?.. but a can of tuna is 100 calories, which isn’t a great deal.
nice graph, what is the “calories per gram of food” or “caloric density” dimension/axis good for?
only use-case i can think of is something like packing food for hiking? other than that calories per gram of food is quite irrelevant, or am i missing something?
Some people walk to get groceries.
I think it’s good to point out how dense they are when shopping. Cause you might be like “walnuts are so expensive per pound, no way they’re worth it!” when really they are, they are just crazy dense.
Also if you are caring about “bulk” eating, where you want to make sure your stomach feels full all day, you want more things on the left side cause you’ll feel like you are eating more food.
so it is interesting I felt!
yes, interesting, i just wondered if i’m missing something, maybe my statement was a bit too negative :-/
People who live in poverty could use this graph to plan the cheapest way to get their calories to avoid starving with very little money.
Is that what you’re missing?
Really superb and informational graphic. I’d sure love to see one done by protein per gram/cost. Any chance someone could reach out to the Reddit OP to ask, cause my privileges have been revoked? Pretty please?
I remember seeing a youtube vid from someone who had analyzed all products from one supermarket (after scraping their website), cheapest protein ended up being flour 😄
After all people can survive on bread, on average if I remember correctly we need just 11-13% of the calories to be protein according to WHO (or less if we are eating with a caloric surplus)… protein needs are vastly exaggerated thanks to health gurus and humans’ unhealthy love of meat.
Btw flour and bread are not all the same, especially refined has very little fiber and a little less protein (protein content is used also to determine quality of wheat)
He already has!
Things are as you expect, Our beans are in the bottom right absolutely chilling as kings.
Grains are “better” than I would have expected.
I so wish we could get actual wheat grains at the supermarket, possibly bio. Instead whole cereals are mostly sold as animal feed (so with fewer safety standards). It’s bs. Same goes for soy beans! They give 'em out to farmers for a lot less than a 1€/kg as animal feed, but I have to order them online? While every corner shop has tofu, soy milk, etc… come on 😅
Being a budget minded shopper these last few years, this all checks out
Yeah shouldn’t a real shocker for anyone who compares prices and calories!
Only thing that caught me off guard is pork belly is chilling down by potatoes in cost per calorie! But given how fatty pork belly is, I guess it makes sense!
So where is “bag of sugar” on this chart?
Let’s find out!
Cheapest per ounce sugar on walmart.com
6,810 calories, or 2k calories per dollar. So it’d be hanging around brown rice as one of the cheapest options.
Diabetes it is!
Haha I mean brown rice is cheaper! And buying flour then making baked goods is cheaper! Do not embrace the dark side!
Dairy would be helpful.
Pistachios seem awfully cheap from what I know pistachios to cost even considering high caloric density.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PBKZZ51?tag=sacapuntas9-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1
4160 calories for 14.23
Coming out to 292 calories per dollar, or around 30 cents for 100 calories. Looks to be about where it’s at! He might have found an even cheaper source. I think this chart does a great job of pointing out that just because things like almonds are more per pound than chicken, doesn’t mean they aren’t better deals if you are concerned with energy.
Wow, they are incredibly cheap in the US - in Australia they are nearly double the price per kg.
Yeah, the US is one of the big producers. Wikipedia says:
In 2022, world production of pistachios was one million tonnes, with the United States, Iran, and Turkey combined accounting for 88% of the total.
Oh yeah he mentions his source is Walmart in a specific state, but amazon is more consistent here.
Always interesting to hear how different stuff is in different countries!
where would raspberries or kumquat fall on the chart?
Raspberries? Oof I can’t imagine great. But let’s see.
$4 for 200 calories. So raspberries would be off the top at 2 dollars for 100 calories (just looking at nutrition label). Fresh has even worse.
Kumquat I can’t find a solid price on, but given each fruit has about 13 calories, I can’t imagine it’s a good source of them.
So yeah those are for sure flavor and vitamin eats and not calorie eats XD
Where do they get cashews that cheap?
Very good chart thanks for sharing
I bought walnut once in my life. To this day, I regret the waste of money. There are so common, I cannot understand how I manage not to have some foraged freely in the nature…
Have you ever harvested walnuts? It sucks to get any sort of quantity put together.
First you have to hull them, this will leave your fingers stained black for weeks even with gloves.
Then you have to dry them for a season, which involves either keeping the squirrels away constantly or a bucket taking up space in your house for an entire season.
And finally you have to shell them, which is not an easy or repeatable process. Doing it at home by hand will lead to a nice powder of shell and nut that you have to separate before you can eat a single walnut.
Forget all that. If someone wants to do that as a job so that I can buy them for 10 dollars/lb bagged in the store then be my guest.
I do it every year. Maybe, we don’t have the same kind of walnuts but in my area walnut trees are common enough to go to the woods, find a place with a few trees and fill a 50L bag of nuts in an hour. Do it with two or three people, twice or thrice during the season and the whole extended family have enough walnut for regular consomption until the next automn. When dried properly the walnuts last up to 3 years in their shell. A bit less than 2 years shelled in an airtight box. You do a bunch of in fall and you break the rest progressively during the year, while watching TV.
“50L bag of nuts”
Oh you’re European, so you’re likely talking about the english walnut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglans_regia
The harvesting process is very different from the black walnuts that we have in NA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglans_nigra
Your walnuts will be much easier to hull and much easier to shell. Enjoy.
Not including protein powders in the protein chart is pretty stupid. Whey protein is cheaper per gram than anything else on that chart, and vegan protein powders (like soy or pea protein) are even cheaper
Yeah corn syrup be about a couple of cents on this plot.
It would be much more interesting to see this in terms of a combination of protein, unsaturated fats And micronutrients.
Like which combination is the cheapest of all?
I suspect it would be something like:
- Peanut butter (mono)
- Sunflower oil (poly)
- WPC (protein with good amino profile)
- Celery (insoluble fiber)
- Psyllium husk (soluble fiber)
- Rice (carbs, low gi)
Let’s call out complete proteins too. Otherwise you still have to mix and match food sources. Soy would probably win.
It depends on the country for soy. Objectively in the absence of interference, it’s cheaper and still relatively complete.
But for whatever reason, a lot of Western governments like the US and Australia heavily subsidise animal proteins, so I think in those regions WPC still has a slight edge.
Then again a lot of people struggle with lactose And soy is probably cheaper than WPI.
Gainz is work haha.
Locally at least Costco precooked chicken nuggets are 6.99 a kg which is the cheapest meat they have I think
There’s a dock worker strike on the East Coast. That banana price is going to skyrocket for a little while.
Fingers crossed for them! I hope they get the wages they need to not need to live by this chart, and guarantees that even as the docks modernize the workers will have good paying jobs regardless.
