If you want to eat a more healthful diet, you’re going to have to shell out more cash, right? (After all, Whole Foods didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.)
But until recently, that widely held bit of conventional wisdom hadn’t really been assessed in a rigorous, systematic way, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
So he and his colleagues decided to pore over 27 studies from 10 different developed countries that looked at the retail prices of food grouped by healthfulness. Across these countries, it turns out, the cost difference between eating a healthful and unhealthful diet was pretty much the same: about $1.50 per day. And that price gap held true when they focused their research just on U.S. food prices, the researchers found in their meta-analysis of these studies.
As this is NPR, the discussion immediately gets around to finding ways for policymakers to get that extra $1.50 a day to low income people. It’s one of those classic liberal logic-free leaps: presuming that the money will be spent on healthy food.
Maybe it’s just a lack of budgeting that’s the problem, as this has been the recent trend in what supplemental food money is allowed to be spent on:
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