Eating a healthy diet versus an unhealthy one costs about $1.50 more a day, which might not sound like much, but works out to more than $2,000 a year for the average family of four, research from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) suggests in a study published Thursday.
"People often say that healthier foods are more expensive, and that such costs strongly limit better diet habits," said lead author Mayuree Rao, a junior research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH. "But, until now, the scientific evidence for this idea has not been systematically evaluated, nor have the actual differences in cost been characterized."
Harvard researchers examined 27 existing studies from 10 highincome countries that included price data for individual foods and for healthier versus less healthy diets.
Prices for particular foods, examined in 200-calorie chunks, and per 2,000-calorie samples for whole-day diet statistics, were evaluated and compared. It turns out that healthy diets - those including far more vegetables, nuts, fruit and fish - cost significantly more than unhealthy ones, which consist mostly of refined grains, processed food and meats.
Researchers suggest the industrial processes behind "inexpensive, high-volume" commodities, and the food policies that have led to the creation of "a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing and marketing capabilities that favour sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit" may be why unhealthy diets cost less.
Dariush Mozaffarian, the study's senior author and associate professor at HSPH and Harvard medical school, said the study team sees a real opportunity over the medium and long term to drastically reduce healthcare costs and burdens on private and public providers.
"This price difference is very small in comparison to the economic costs of diet-related chronic diseases, which would be dramatically reduced by healthy diets."
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