Fancy Organic Diets Too Expensive?
When I speak to patients and lecture about the vital importance of whole food based, organic diets, resistance often takes the form of budgetary concerns. We discuss farm to consumer coops, growing sprouts, greens, and veggies, and prioritizing the dirty dozen, and animal products.
- The Harvard School of Public Health evaluated 27 existing studies from 10 high-income countries that included price data for individual foods and for healthier vs. less healthy diets.
- Researchers identified a $1.50 price difference between unhealthy processed food diets and whole food diets.
- They rightfully speculate that government subsidy and infrastructure supportive of access to these foods may account for the difference.
“Yet, this daily price difference is trivial in comparison with the lifetime personal and societal financial burdens of diet-related chronic diseases. For example, suboptimal diet quality was recently estimated to account for 14% of all disability-adjusted life years in 2010 in the USA; if translated to a proportion of national health expenditures in 2012, this corresponds to diet-related health-care costs of $393 billion/year or more than $1200/year for every American. Our findings highlight the nuanced challenges and the opportunities for reducing financial barriers to healthy eating.”
Read the original source here.
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