As Drewnowski has shown repeatedly, healthier foods cost more, and sometimes a lot more, when you look at them on a per-calorie basis. Here's an excerpt from his report:
Studies on the social and economic determinants of health have shown that persons and groups of higher socioeconomic status (SES) have lower rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (1). The literature suggests that some of the observed disparities in health may be related to disparities in diet quality (2-5). More affluent people are not only healthier and thinner but also consume higher-quality diets (6). It is not clear whether the more favorable health outcomes can be attributed to better diets, higher SES, or some combination of both (7).Read the full report here.
The energy density of a diet (ie, available energy per unit weight) (8) is one indicator of diet quality. Lean meats, fish, low-fat dairy products, and fresh vegetables foods, sweets, candy, and desserts (9,10). Whereas energy-dense foods tend to be nutrient-poor, foods of low energy density provide more nutrients relative to kilocalories (11). An inverse relation between energy density and nutrient density has now been demonstrated both for individual foods (11) and for total diets (12).
[...] The important question is whether higher-quality but more costly diets are more likely to be consumed by more affluent persons. A key challenge in nutritional epidemiology is to make sure that persons or groups characterized by a given eating pattern do not differ in some fundamental yet unobserved way from persons with another type of eating pattern. Given that higher SES groups often have both higher quality diets and lower disease risk, epidemiologic studies tend to treat SES as a potential confounder. To reveal associations between dietary exposures and chronic disease risk, studies have adjusted for SES (38) whenever such variables were available. Our study had a different purpose, focusing on indicators of SES as exposure variables, and exploring the association between SES measures and dietary energy density and energy-adjusted diet cost.
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I think this methodology is flawed.
The last time I went to Food Lion dried beans were 1.10 for a one pound package - after cooking this is two pounds. White and sweet potatoes were 0.60 a pound. Ground beef and potato chips were 3.00 a pound.
The healthier food cost was one fifth of the price of a typical meal bought at a grocery store. If the beans and potatoes were compared to burgers and fries purchased at a fast food outlet the cost savings would be even greater.
These kinds of posts make people think that healthy food is expensive fare like organic produce or free range meat instead of cheaper items like beans, potatoes, oats and squash. I think that nutrition experts should make it clear that that the average American's diet can be improved without spending any more on food than they currently do.
We need good information, not excuses. And, eating well is not expensive! Good nutrition is about informed choices which you make ahead of time. It's a rational process, looking at physiological needs vs. calorie expenditure. There are many online sources where you can find unbiased nutritional information. My fave is Sparkpeople.com
I am puzzled by this statement in the report:
"More highly educated respondents reported higher quality and therefore more costly diets, independent of household income level. The 2004
Consumer Expenditure Survey (42) reported that total expenditures on food in the United States for persons in the highest four income quintiles ranged from $5.04 to $7.70 per person per day."
Am I reading this right? Persons in the highest four income quintiles
are only spending between $150 and $250 per month on food (and I assume
that "total expenditures on food" includes restaurant meals)? I maintain
a fairly modest vegetarian diet with occasional seafood and poultry,
affordable (read "sale") organics, which includes regular stocking up on "loss leader" organic items (so that I end up not paying *that* much more to eat mainly organically), and little variety or extravagance (and no lunch or restaurant meals), and *my* monthly food bill comes to about $400/month. And I do not fall into anything anywhere near the highest four income quintiles.
Is there something I'm missing here? Judging from the food baskets and shopping carts of other shoppers at Whole Paycheck (where I only purchase a couple of things regularly because almost everything there is overpriced [in keeping with the CEO/Founder's philosophy of "There is no such thing as a fair price"]), most people in the upper and even middle income brackets are spending far, far more than $8/day on food.
Being vegetarian and cooking for oneself is enough to solve this dilemma. Making things like rice, couscous, bean or potato based dishes is both cheap and healthy.
The real issue is then not the availability of healthy foods, but foods that people find appealing and are able to prepare easily or obtain on the run.
What do we see in old movies that cowboys eat around the camp fire? I mean - they are "cow-boys but eat what? BBQ? No. Beans. More like beanboys? Today the world looks different. Today - our cows eat all the beans and we eat all the cows. This would be a good time to calculate the true cost of food.
Obviously - there is no such thing as a low fat, lean meat. There are parts of a cow or a pig that are low fat - but overall you will not find another food with more saturated fats. Even chickens and other "white" meats are full of saturated fats. Or is the new idea to use only 10-15% of the animals and throw the others parts away (aka reprocessing them as animal feed so that the vegetarian animals that we enslave are forced to eat their own kind? Just like us?)?
At the end of the day - when you compare the costs of food - you really have to look at costs and economics. That means - why do we feed 80% of beans to animals instead of eating them oursevles? Why do we subsidize only the most unhealthy foods we know off aka saturated fat and sugar? How much would healthy foods cost here and now if we stopped corrupting the food chain and if we introduced transparent market pricing rather than the socialist-five-year plans we have right now?
PS: Dairy, apart from being the environmentally and ethically most damaging product on the planet - it is also one of the economically most inefficient foods on the planet.
When milk-drinking beyond babyhood was first introduced in human history - it must have been an emergency. Like people cooking and eating shoes during war times. 4-6,000 years ago, somewhere in the middle east, where drinks where more precious than food or gold - people must have started stealing the baby-milk of other animals in order to survive. Just like nomads have and still are drinking the blood of camels in the desert in order to survive. But what an insane practice for expanding rain-forest apes to drag into modern times?
We have to feed a cow so that she grows old enough to bear children. Then we impregnate her in order to start producing mother milk. After her child is born - we separate mother and child in order to reach some drops of white liquid. Then - milk is the only food that has to be pasteurized four times before the bacterial count is save enough for retail stores. Even then it has a short shelf-life in freezers. Don't get me started on skimmed and lactose-free cow milk. By now - you can also imagine what I think of letting the milk rot so that... Compare all this effort, economically, to a freshly squeezed fruit juice?
I fear this discussion is secretly more about accustomed taste habits and not economics and nutrition per se? What if it were cheaper and healthier to milk human mothers than cow mothers?
Given that the poor in the US are overweight (2/3s) or obese (1/3) - one could make the argument that buying less but at higher prices would easily be possible here and now. Even without an end to saturated fat subsidies. It has nothing to do with disposable income of the poor and budget percentages. It has to do with preference, habits, social conditioning, incentives and hence education (aka marketing). Until recently we have spend most money on educating people that protein is important for live and can only be obtained from flesh and mother's milk. Got it? Until now we have only subsidized, given incentives, for only the most unhealthy foods. Whatever we do in the future - the good news are that it cannot get worse.