5 Foods worth splurging on

Don’t confuse a candy bar with chocolate. Look at any candy bar wrapper, and you’ll see that the chocolate’s loaded with fillers like inexpensive caramels and sugars. Instead of corn syrup and other chemicals, treat yourself to high-quality chocolate, where the focus is on the cocoa content. Bonus: Dark chocolate boasts flavonoids that are beneficial for heart health by improving blood flow and lowering blood pressure.

Olive oils can vary quite a bit in taste and in price. When cooking with or incorporating olive oil into your foods, you can get away with using an inexpensive olive oil, but for use in your salad dressing, for drizzling on top of dishes or to dip your bread in, keep a higher-end bottle of oil on hand. The flavour can vary greatly from one brand to the next, so buy small bottles to taste-test, decide which one you like best, and then invest in a larger bottle.

Cooking and eating produce that is free of chemical pesticides gives us peace of mind, knowing that what we are putting into our bodies is natural. But “organic” doesn’t mean pesticide free; rather it is free of anything that has been altered synthetically. Since organic produce tends to cost more, we use the Environmental Working Group’s shopper’s guide‘s “dirty dozen” to help us decide which fruits and vegetables are worth spending more on to get organic. The higher a food is on the list for being laden with pesticides, the more likely we are to buy its organic version.

The carnivores amongst us can attest to the fact that organic, free-range chicken simply has better texture and taste, and that’s a big reason to spend more on your meat purchases from a reputable butcher. And while reports that organic is no better for your health than the conventional variety have surfaced, there’s a comfort level in knowing the chicken we are consuming isn’t full of antibiotics and was raised ethically.

Coffee and tea