The cost of eating 168 servings of fruit every 4 weeks

168 servings of fruit every 4 weeks is 6 servings per day. Yikes.

The USDA recommends 5 to 7 fruit servings... by the way, a serving according to them is 6 ounces - about the size of a small piece of fruit. At one point I tried juicing and bought an expensive juicer. I found it cost me a ton to buy a variety of fruits, and I'd invariably let some of it spoil by not getting to it in time. Eventually the sheer headache of the mess and clean up was too much and I gave up on my juicing fad. But however you attempt to consume 5 to 7 servings of fruit per day, I thought it would be interesting to take a second look into the cost.

I visited Safeway.com and shopped their Produce section online for a wide variety of fruits, and for the cheapest option for each fruit. For example, I chose Apples in bulk at $0.80 per pound, and then assumed I'd only eat 6 ounces or 30 cents worth of apples when I had a serving. I found 23 fruits, and just averaged the cost of all of them to insure a variety if I were to do this for real. Despite apples being 30 cents per serving, oranges at 24 cents and grapefruit at 23 cents, the average cost of a serving was $1.16. The most nutrient-dense fruits were the most expensive, including blueberries at $4.08 per serving, pomegranate at $2.99 and blackberries at $2.16 per serving. Finally, I took these 3 expensive ones out, and the average of the remaining 20 fruits was $0.87 per serving.

By averaging the 5 to 7 servings per day recommendation to 6, I calculated the more expensive daily cost at $6.95 per day, and the less expensive version at $5.23 per day. Now you shouldn't stop eating the fruit you already do just because you're adding a nutrient-dense fruit juice. But since the USDA says we Americans eat less than 1 serving per day, I'll be kind and calculate that you'd only need to add 5 more servings of the cheaper fruits, and that's $4.36 per day to reach the recommended amount of fruits.

So.... my choices are... spend an additional $4.36 on fruit... and either juice them, or always have a piece of fruit in my mouth. Or drink a premium grade Acai based nutrient-dense fruit juice with no mess or fuss. I never ate fruit before (other than my juicing experiment a few years ago) - so I'm worse than the 1 per day, so my choice was an easy one. For me to get fruit in my diet.... and extremely nutrient-dense fruits with significant variety at that, multi-fruit juice blends are an easy choice for me.