Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 4 is all about the best ways to source produce — veggies and fruit — with budget in mind. This is a deep dive into all things produce sourcing! We cover our personal sourcing tips and how we personally save money, and we chat with our guest, Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms, about the benefits of CSAs and how to source your fruits and veggies if you can’t afford organic. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

How to listen:

If you’d like to have our podcasts sent directly to your device, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher!

If you’d like to download the .mp3, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to play the episode right now in your browser, use the player below!

Full Transcript:

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Budget friendly sourcing of produce [2:14 ]

2. Personal sourcing tips from Mickey and Angie [8:40 ]

3. Guest interview with Tyler Boggs of Heart2Heart Farms [14:22 ]

4. Personal approach to budgeting for produce [18:54 ]

5. Produce scoring stories [24:24 ]

6. Sourcing when you can’t afford organic [29:45 ]

7. Benefits of a CSA [34:01 ]

Angie Alt: Hi everyone! Angie here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast season 3. How are you doing, Mickey?

Mickey Trescott: I’m doing great, how about you Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’ve been flying around to the West Coast a bunch, but I am home today and ready to chat about our next topic.

Mickey Trescott: I know, Angie’s been like a little ping-pong ball, back and forth.

Angie Alt: It’s been kind of crazy. I just traveled out to the West three times in three weeks, you guys. But I’m ready to do it. Anything for the cause. {laughs}

Mickey Trescott: {laughs}

1. Budget friendly sourcing of produce [2:14 ]

Angie Alt: Ok, so today we’re continuing our discussion related to the topic this season, real food on a budget. This episode is going to be about how to source produce. From veggies to fruit with a budget in mind.

Mickey Trescott: Yeah, so we really wanted to take a deep dive into all things produce sourcing. Because there’s kind of a lot of nuance here. So if you guys have the Autoimmune Wellness Handbook, you will be familiar with the concept of good, better, and best that we talk about when it comes to food sourcing in general. But we kind of wanted to go over it in terms of produce.

So what this means is that you have a few different layers of quality that you can choose to buy your produce. So instead of saying everybody needs to buy the highest level, and this is the only way to heal. We’re kind of presenting a variety of ways that you guys can plan your sourcing. So that you can make the most use of the resources that you have.

So first category is good. This is for those of you who can’t get all organic fruits and vegetables. What we recommend doing is to start with the Environmental Working Groups list of dirtiest and cleanest produce. If you guys do a quick Google, type in EWG dirty dozen, and clean 15, you’ll come up with a cute little chart where the Environmental Working Group has tested all the fruits and vegetables in production in the US, and they’ve identified the ones that have the highest chemical residue of pesticides and stuff.

So, this is a really great way to kind of prioritize your fruit and veggie choices, right Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah. Well, this is a way for you to kind of get the max out of the foods that you can afford to buy organic, and kind of be really strategic about those purchases, so you’re not having to spend so much money on totally organic and utilizing the research to do th