Healthy Diet Costs $550 More per Year: Harvard Study

A healthy diet increases food costs by about $550 a year per person, according to a new study by Harvard Medical School.

Eating fruits and vegetables is a good way to stay healthy. However, many people don't follow healthy eating habits because these foods and expensive. A new research has found that a person would have to shell-out $1.50/day more to eat a nutritious meal when compared to sugar and salt filled food.

"Over the course of a year, $1.50/day more for eating a healthy diet would increase food costs for one person by about $550 per year. This would represent a real burden for some families, and we need policies to help offset these costs. On the other hand, 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," Dariush Mozaffarian, the study's senior author and an associate professor at HSPH and Harvard Medical School, according to a press release.

Researchers looked at data from 27 studies on the subject from 10 high-income countries, including the U.S. and Canada. They assessed differences in prices per serving of healthy versus non-healthy food and even compared prices of the food per 200 calories.

Also, to get an estimate of overall cost difference between nutritious and junk diets, they looked at prices per day and per 2000 calories. Researchers converted prices to International dollar and adjusted for inflation, CNN reported.

According to the study team, junk diets cost less because food policies strive towards producing "inexpensive" commodities. This had led to "a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing capabilities that favor sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit." Creating policies aimed at increasing production of healthy foods might reduce cost of nutrition-filled meal in the future.

The study is published in the journal BMJ (British Medical Journal).