This is the middle of three conversations on Lessons from the Ketoverse about eating well without draining your wallet. Part 1 [link] covered the spending nobody counts, cheap cuts turned gourmet, and buying in bulk. There is no particular order to these, so start wherever you like.
Here are five more, and this batch has the best return on a small amount of effort.
1. Make it yourself
The single biggest markup in the health food world sits on things you can make at home for close to nothing.
Bone broth is the clearest example. Bought by the carton, it gets expensive quickly, especially if you drink it regularly. Yet your butcher usually has bones out the back, and will often hand them over free or nearly free with a decent meat order, because otherwise it costs them money to get rid of them. Take their problem, put it in a slow cooker, and you have turned waste into one of the most nourishing things in your fridge. Zero waste, real nose-to-tail eating, and a rounding error on the grocery bill.
Yogurt is the second. One of us makes L. reuteri yogurt at home, and the reason is worth understanding. Many of us have taken oral antibiotics at some point, and there is good reason to think that knocks back some of the good bacteria along with the bad; doctors have become noticeably more careful about prescribing them for exactly this reason. You cannot really buy L. reuteri yogurt, so you make it: you need a starter from a probiotic tablet, plus milk or cream, and about 36 hours at a low temperature. It comes out like a custard.
A few things we have learned. Use good dairy, the kind with a short expiry date rather than the sort that survives three weeks at the back of the fridge. Table cream provides better consistency than 2 percent or half-and-half. half-and-halfontainer. And once you have made the first batch, you can start the next one from a spoonful of the last, so the tablets last a very long time. One of us folds it into good Greek yogurt with flax and chia, left a few minutes to swell, plus a squeeze of lemon and some low glycemic berries. Small surprise from his glucose monitor: strawberries actually run a lower glycemic index than blueberries, despite tasting sweeter.
We will be careful here about what we claim. The idea behind this particular strain is that it can reach parts of the small intestine most bacteria cannot, and that is why it interests us. What we can tell you honestly is what we observed in ourselves: when we fixed our guts, our energy improved and so did our mood, noticeably. That is not a small thing, and it cost almost nothing. Dr. Georgia Ede's book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is the deeper read on that connection. If you are dealing with something serious, please work with your doctor rather than a yogurt.
Sauerkraut is the easiest of the lot. Good organic cabbage, chopped and weighed, then about 2 percent of that weight in genuinely good salt, sea salt or Redmond rather than the cheap box. Let it ferment. It costs pennies, it is wonderful for your gut, and it goes on everything, especially steak.
Tallow is the one that surprised us. It is difficult to render well yourself, particularly to a quality you would put on your skin, and the jars sold online are eye-watering. So one of us simply asked his butcher whether they had any. The answer was to follow him out the back, where there was a whole world of natural cooking fats. Roughly a gallon of tallow, twenty-seven dollars. He cooks with it, and puts a little on his face while he does. That sounds odd until you try it. A friend with a stubborn skin problem on his scalp, who had tried everything, put tallow on it daily and reported most of it gone within a week. It is not sun protection, and it is not a medicine, but as something to feed and protect skin, it is remarkable, and at that price it is nearly free.
Both of us also use castor oil topically. One tip if you do: buy it in dark glass rather than the cheap plastic bottle.
2. Eggs, the budget power food
If you are eating this way, eggs are probably the best value in the entire store. They are enormously satiating, and they carry a genuine spread of nutrients. Yes, eggs have got more expensive. Measured against how full they keep you, they are still far cheaper than a strip loin, and you can do far more with them.
(On the cholesterol question that always follows: it is a bigger topic than this post, and worth its own conversation.)
Source matters more than most people realize. The gold standard is someone you know: one of us eats his daughter's eggs when he visits, from twelve chickens fed through a local co-op. The rest of the time, his butcher only sells eggs from small non-industrial farms. One of us found an Amish farm through Facebook Marketplace after moving away from his old source. You can tell the difference the moment you crack one: the yolk is a deep orange. That is the thing to look for.
Now, a correction worth making, because we got this backwards ourselves on the podcast and someone kindly pointed it out. In Canada, the two labels mean the opposite of what you might assume. Free run means the hens roam the barn floor freely, but there is no outdoor access. Free range means they do have access to the outdoors, weather permitting. Neither guarantees the birds spend much time outside, and neither tells you what the birds were fed, which is arguably what matters most. So the label is a starting point, not an answer. If you can find a real farm, that beats any word on a carton.
When you find a good source, buy properly. One of us buys about a hundred at a time, four flats of twenty-four, and keeps them in a spare fridge downstairs. On the fridge question: supermarket eggs have been washed, which removes the natural coating, so they need refrigerating. Farm eggs with the coating intact can sit on the counter for a couple of weeks. He refrigerates them anyway, because there is room.
3. Track your meals before you buy another vitamin
This one saves real money, and it is less about food than about resisting a sales pitch.
Scroll any feed for ten minutes, and someone will tell you which vitamin fixes which problem, quite often the vitamin they happen to sell. Insert illness here, take this capsule. It is rarely that simple. Look closely at a multivitamin, and you will often find you are nowhere near a dose that would do anything.
So one of us tracked everything he ate for six months, using an app like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer. Not forever, just long enough to know. The point was to be sure he was not quietly running himself into a deficiency. What came back was one gap: calcium. He added a little cheese, and that was that. Everything else his food was already covering.
He does still take three things. Vitamin D3, because Canadian winters are what they are. Vitamin K2 alongside it, which helps direct that D3 into the bones where you want it rather than leaving calcium in circulation. And magnesium. One point of order, since we muddled this in the episode: D3 and K2 are fat soluble and want some fat alongside them to be absorbed properly. Magnesium is a mineral and does not work that way, though magnesium glycinate an hour before bed remains one of the better sleep aids either of us has found.
Now the deeper version of this point, which is the one that actually matters. Before you spend anything, get a baseline. How do you know whether you need magnesium at all, let alone how much?
One of us learned this expensively. He was eating high-quality meat, and his B12 was so low his naturopath sent him for an injection before he left the office. The food was not the problem. Absorption was. Testing eventually found several types of dysbiotic bacteria working against him, and until his gut was repaired, very little of what he ate was actually being retained. As he puts it, it was like trying to keep food in a fridge full of holes.
His point is blunt and worth hearing: if meat was barely getting absorbed, supplements had no chance at all. This is why people say vitamins did nothing for them. They may well be right, and the vitamins may not be the reason. A body in an inflamed, stressed, fight-or-flight state is not going to sit patiently and do the chemistry. It is trying to run from a dinosaur.
So be your own advocate. Ask for the tests. Nutrition training in medical school is famously thin, which is not a criticism of your doctor so much as a reason to come to the appointment with specific questions. And if anyone tells you that feeling weak and not recovering is simply your age, that is worth a second opinion.
4. Shop deliberately, and eat what you freeze
Part 1 made the case for a stand-up freezer and bulk buying. Part 2 is the caution that goes with it: buy in bulk, then actually eat it.
It is easy to fire and forget. You do a big Costco run, feel clever about the savings, and a year later you are excavating something from the back of the freezer that you bought ten months ago. You have not saved anything, because you kept buying in the meantime. The same goes for produce; one of us lives a fair distance from good shops, so a trip to town feels like Christmas, and then three cartons of blueberries quietly go bad because nobody can eat them that fast.
The other half is boring and works: read the flyers, and use the coupons. One of our local grocers has an app where you tap once to add every coupon before you reach the till. It takes about five seconds and costs nothing, and we suspect well under half of shoppers do it. It might only be three or four dollars, but five dollars a week is two hundred and fifty a year, and you would have to earn three or four hundred to keep that two fifty.
When the meat goes on sale, go and get it. Yes, it is probably nearer its date. Vacuum seal it and freeze it, and you have bought yourself the time.
Now, the objection: "I don't have time for any of this." We would gently suggest a rewording. Try saying "it is not a priority for me right now," and notice how that lands. It is a completely legitimate thing to say. But it is worth doing the arithmetic, because the honest version is a trade. How many hours do you have to work to pay a grocery bill you did not plan, versus one you did? If you can take thirty percent off the bill, that is not thirty percent of your grocery money; it is however many hours of your working life that money represents. And most of us, if we checked our screen time this week, would find the forty-five minutes.
There is an old line that a person with good health has a hundred problems, and a person without it has only one. All we are suggesting is moving health up the list before it moves itself.
5. Buy the fattier ground meat
The quickest win in the series. Where one of us used to live, the store only stocked lean and extra lean ground beef. Where he lives now, there is also medium, and medium is always cheaper, because the fat is something the store would otherwise have to dispose of. If they can sell it to you, everyone is happy, and they will take a couple of dollars a pound off to do it.
You want that fat. It is the satiating part, and it is why the meal holds you until the next one. If your butcher does not stock a fattier grind, ask; they will often make it with a little notice.
How much fat is right for you is something your body will tell you. Stools too loose usually means you are running the fat dial a bit high. Consistently hard usually means not enough. It is not a delicate subject when it is this useful, and once you are eating clean it becomes a reliable gauge.
One last thing, and it ties the whole series together. If this were a business, what you would be hunting is revenue leakage: the small, unnoticed outflows. The unplanned lunch. The coupon you did not tap. The blueberries in the bin. The supplement that was never absorbed. None of them feel like much. Together they are most of the gap between an expensive way of eating and an affordable one.
The trail continues
Read Part 3 where we cover packaged keto products, batch prepping, and the cheapest aisle in the grocery store. Or listen to all three episodes on Lessons from the Ketoverse, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
And if you would like a guide who has already bought the wrong supplements and the right tallow, that is what we do at Ascent. You are the climber. We carry the map.
Want a guide for this part of the climb? The Lookout is twelve weeks of one to one low carb and keto coaching, online across Ontario. Or compare the three coaching programs side by side.
This article shares personal experience and general education. It is not medical advice. Please talk with your healthcare provider or a qualified professional before starting supplements, changing your diet, or acting on any concern about deficiency or absorption, and never start, stop or adjust medication without them.