I do think, trying to prepare more of your own food at home is something that stretches food dollars.

Again, I know it can feel that.

It's not that way where you can go to McDonald's and order something off the dollar menu.

I know that feels cheap and inexpensive, but again, when you compare kind of per calorie, what we're paying preparing food at home is, is the absolute first step.

Using a lot of those foods that that we already mentioned that can be cost effective.

If it's the grocery store.

I think one of the biggest things I find, too, is that there's a lot of food waste for people.

Right on that.

They're just not using everything they're preparing.

And so it might require a little extra kind of creativity or research to figure out how can I use some leftover chicken or how can I freeze things, that that I'm not going to use immediately?

A lot of people don't don't think about that option.

A lot of foods can be frozen.

So and, you know, trying to also shop sales at the grocery store, I think that if people are pretty open to a wide variety of food options, just trying to to kind of go with the sales week to week in terms of what proteins are on sale or types of produce and things like that.

But one of the things we know about food budgets, is that most food, the majority of food budgets, are eaten up by discretionary foods and drinks, meaning we're spending a lot of our food budget on snacks, on eating out and soda and alcohol, all the things that have nothing to do with nutrient density in our diets.

So if people are looking to to kind of trim back the grocery budget, that would also be a really good place to start.

This program is part of Katie's multi-platform initiative on aging called Next Chapter, that focuses on the rewards and challenges of growing older.

We hope you'll check out our website at Katie Dawgs Next chapter.