A study reported in the New York Times showing that the Mediterranean diet produced a dramatic reduction in heart attacks, heart disease and strokes got me wondering how much it would actually cost for a family to adopt a healthy, Mediterranean style diet.

I calculated that a four-member New York City family would have to spend about $180 a week to feed itself. That’s a lot of money – about $9,360 per year. With the minimum wage at $7.25 per hour in New York, two people working full-time would have to spend nearly a third of their gross salary for these nutritious meals.

Meanwhile, the average New York State family of four on food stamps gets about $135 per week in stamps and the entire program costs the federal government $72 billion. Medicaid costs the federal government $340 billion or 10% of the national budget. The old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure comes to mind.

But a nutrition expert I spoke with told me that a family could eat for far less than the figure I noted. In fact, a National Institutes of Health report indicated that the Mediterranean diet does not have to be more expensive. The report cited the possibility of substituting pasta, grains and beans for meat and fresh fish. All the same, I have tried to provide a real world example that more people would be likely to follow if it were affordable.

A study in Massachusetts is looking at the effectiveness of offering incentives to food stamp recipients to purchase healthy foods. But with limited exceptions, it is actually against federal law for grocers to offer extra coupons to leverage food stamps for specific uses, including making nutritious purchases.

For the sake of simplicity, I minimized the variety of daily meals. I incorporated some changes in the menu, mainly to be able to garner the benefits of the diet without overdoing the cost. For dinner, I included chicken breasts for four days and salmon fillets for three days. I did not include wine, which may have some benefit.

Other than that, the family ate the same modest meals day in and day out. To get a price for the units of food that would be needed to feed the family, I relied on the online grocer FreshDirect. The enterprise does not have the cheapest prices going by any means, but their prices are all available on the Internet. Customers may or may not be able to find better prices by shopping on their own depending on where they live and their access to transportation.