No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food.

More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed.

Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy.

A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins.

Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error.

Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way.

And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes.

Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.

> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.

> Instead of $0.50 worth of Doritos as a snack, I'm eating $1.50 worth of Greek yogurt and $1.50 worth of fruit.

I won't bother with currency conversion because we're comparing ratios.

50 cents here gets a third of a 200g bag of generic brand potato chips, so 360 calories. Doritos are probably at least twice that expensive but whatever. (The generic-brand sandwich cookies that are my personal vice, are cheaper yet. There's so much variation within these vaguely-defined food categories that I can't take the comparison across categories seriously.)

$1.50 gets probably a half dozen bananas here, at around a hundred calories per. Never mind the yogurt. (If you're buying fresh cut fruit you're simply doing it wrong.)

So if you're purely comparing calorie counts and finding yourself on less-calorie-dense options then yeah there's a ratio but it's still not as bad as people think. But this is still fundamentally committing a fallacy equating "less calorie-dense" with "healthy".

The same 360 calories from white rice cost me perhaps 15 or 20 cents (plus the time and energy to cook). I'm not big on brown rice but I'm sure I don't have to pay several times as much for it unless it's some fancy boutique thing. 360 calories from dried split legumes (packed with protein and fibre), similarly, are in the ballpark of 30 cents. Perhaps you don't "snack" on those things, but you get the point.

Greek yogurt is super easy (and cheap) to make yourself if you have an instant pot:

Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h.

Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight.

You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all.

If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.