Beans could be the answer to your diet nightmares

So you're a healthy eating convert, and you want to start making sure all your meals are perfectly balanced. If you're on a limited budget, though, you might have a problem. There is a reason why most people get too much carbohydrate and fat and too little protein: most kinds of protein are expensive. Meat and cheese, two of the best sources of protein, are also two of the priciest ingredients you can buy.

So, if you want to eat healthily on the cheap, what's the answer? Well, it might surprise you. What you need is beans.

Beans are a cheap crop, readily available in large tins for not very much money at all, and yet they are an excellent source of protein, and taste good too. There's no shortage of variety, either: you can get everything from baked beans to kidney beans to butter beans, all lined up there in the same section for you.

Beans are also strongly associated with longevity. In the areas known as they Blue zones (the areas of the world where people live the longest - Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy, the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica, and Icaria, Greece) the common feature in people's diets was lots of beans.

If you're not sure of what to do with them, find some vegetarian recipes, which tend to be very bean-heavy, and give them a try.

It can even be nice to mix together a few different kinds of beans and have a bean salad with a sauce: a simple side dish, but an easy way to add protein to your meal. Pasta with a sauce containing beans is an example of an ideally balanced meal, or a rice with bean curry.

Replace meat and cheese with beans and lentils and you'll save a lot of money without affecting the balance of your meal.