Tasty proof low-carb can also be low-cost

As we have shown you all this week, low- carb eating can be both filling and delicious — you won’t feel you’re missing out, with its emphasis on vegetables, avocados, summer berries, almonds, good quality dairy (butter, yoghurt, cream), fish, meat and olive oil.

some people say that it’s expensive — but as chef Katie Caldesi’s recipes today show, you can eat appetising low- carb food for as little as £1 per person.

Indeed, when I put this complaint to my own patients, they disagreed, pointing out that there is a ‘hidden’ cost to snacks and fizzy drinks that we don’t tend to factor in to our budgets.

They said it is so easy to forget to include their costs because, often, these items are bought on impulse, for example at the newsagents (and in a similar way, I suspect we often discount the calories they contain!).

Many of us can identify with spending perhaps £1.50 a day on a couple of cans of fizzy drink and the snacks to go with them — for a family of four that would be £24 over a week.

That’s enough to buy four litres of milk (£2.50); 30 eggs (£5); a kilo of chicken thighs (£2.50); two kilos of frozen beans (£2); a kilo of frozen summer berries (£3); and 200g of Greek yoghurt (£1.50).

so that ‘invisible’ £24 would buy the ingredients for quite a few healthy meals!

Another point my patients made is about preparing simple meals from scratch. In my pizza-eating days I would have easily eaten that cheesy ham and bacon pizza all by myself, as would my wife Jen and my two teenage boys, at a total cost of £12.

Yet for the same cost, we would now have roasted pork leg with cauliflower cheese and green beans, followed by frozen berries and cream.

Many patients said they had previously felt they were too busy to prepare nutritious meals from scratch. As a direct result, we started adding simple cookery sessions to our regular low-carb meetings at my GP practice in southport, Merseyside.

A recent example of a quick recipe is simply whisking a few frozen berries into double cream and topping it off with grated dark chocolate. All done in less than two minutes!

A cheese omelette is a similarly quick thing, perhaps with microwaved broccoli in a teaspoon of butter.

Another idea is to ‘mix and match’ between the protein, veg and sauce of your choice — for example, chicken thighs perhaps baked with bacon for 20 to 30 minutes in the oven, served with frozen beans as well as a few fried mushrooms.

Top the veg with a sauce made of cheddar grated into cream that is nearly boiling with a little mustard, salt and pepper. even I can do something like this!

Other sauces could be full-fat mayo, pesto or just butter. All speedy recipes — and based on very affordable ingredients! see Monday’s pullout in the Mail for more examples of ‘fast’ recipes you can prepare in 30 minutes or less.

Note: If you are taking medication or are worried about your health, consult your GP before embarking on a change in diet.