Swapping out cookies and trading them in for broccoli will only cost you an extra $1.50 a day, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health.
Researchers claim the "healthiest" diet isn't as expensive as one would think. Though you'd be dishing out extra a year on your groceries, the pay-off later on in life is well worth the money.
"People often say that healthier foods are more expensive, and that such costs strongly limit better diet habits," said lead author Mayuree Rao in a statement, 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."
The study was published online in British Medical Journal Open:
The HSPH researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 27 existing studies from 10 high-income countries that included price data for individual foods and for healthier vs. less healthy diets. They evaluated the differences in prices per serving and per 200 calories for particular types of foods, and prices per day and per 2,000 calories (the U.S. Department of Agriculture's recommended average daily calorie intake for adults) for overall diet patterns. Prices were assessed per serving as well as per calorie because prices can vary depending on the unit of comparison.
According to researchers, unhealthy foods cost less because policies focus on making products "inexpensive" at the highest volume possible.
"This research provides the most complete picture to date on true cost differences of healthy diets," said Dariush Mozaffarian in a statement, the study's senior author and an associate professor at HSPH and Harvard Medical School. "While healthier diets did cost more, the difference was smaller than many people might have expected. 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," Mozaffarian added.
