First published by Spectator Health in March 2017
It is a common belief in some circles that a healthy diet is
unaffordable. Last year, the chair of the Royal College of GPs said
fruit and vegetables were so expensive that it was unrealistic to expect people on low incomes to eat their five-a-day. As five-a-day morphs into ten-a-day, the Food Foundation said at the weekend
that people on low incomes would find it ‘impossible’ to eat 10
portions of fruit and vegetables. Meanwhile, fast food chains like
McDonald’s are blamed for filling our stomachs with ‘cheap junk food’
and there are growing calls for taxes on ‘unhealthy’ food to address
the supposed imbalance between expensive good food and inexpensive bad
food.
These beliefs have never been supported by much evidence, however. The Food Foundation says
that ‘healthy foods are three times more expensive calorie for calorie
than unhealthy foods’, but measuring the cost of food by the calorie —
as some studies do — tells us nothing about the price of a healthy diet.
By this measure, a low-calorie yoghurt would appear more expensive than
a high-calorie yoghurt despite both products costing 50p each. You’d
obviously need to buy more of the low-calorie yoghurts if you wanted to
consume 1,000 calories, but that is not a useful measure in modern
Britain where consuming enough calories to survive is not the problem.
For most people, the challenge is to consume fewer of them.
The real question, therefore, is whether it is cheaper to live off
processed food and takeaways than to eat a nutritious, balanced diet.
The government’s Eatwell Guide
recommends a diet that is heavy on fruit, vegetables, starchy
carbohydrates and white meat. All of these can be bought from
supermarkets at prices that would have amazed your grandparents. As I
show in a new report
from the Institute of Economic Affairs, rice, potatoes and pasta can be
bought for less than 5p per serving. Grapes, oranges and bananas cost
less than 30p per serving and apples and pears can be bought for less
than 10p. An 80 gram serving of carrots, tinned tomatoes, peas or
cabbage costs less than 8p.
All told, it is possible to have your five-a-day for less than 30p
and a nutritious, if plain, diet can be bought for less than £1 a day.
Add some muesli, bread, chicken fillets, fish and jam, and you can have a
tastier and more varied diet for less than £2 a day.
Compare that to the cost of ‘junk food’. Chocolate breakfast cereals
are twice as expensive as bran flakes or muesli. The cheapest own-brand
ready-meals cost at least £1 each. Sugary snacks are almost invariably
more expensive than apples or pears. An 80 gram serving of crisps is
four times more expensive than an 80 gram portion of banana or broccoli,
and sugary drinks are not only more expensive than water but are often
more expensive than low-calorie soft drinks such as diet lemonade and
sugar-free orange squash.
Furthermore, if you compare the diet version of products to their
originals, they are usually the same price or less. Brown bread costs
the same as white bread, light baked beans cost the same as standard
baked beans, light mayonnaise costs the same as full-fat mayonnaise,
skimmed milk costs the same as whole milk, and so on. You cannot blame
financial constraints on people’s reluctance to buy them.
And it should go without saying that buying the ingredients for a
healthy meal costs less than going to a fast food chain. The cheapest
adult meal in McDonald’s costs around £4.50. A single meal for a family
of four costs the best part of twenty quid.
This is not to say that a bad diet has to be expensive. If you want
to live off frozen pizzas, chips and sausages you can do so for a
relative pittance. Food, in general, has never been cheaper. But a diet
of stereotypical ‘junk food’ is not cheaper than a healthy diet and is
usually more expensive.
Unless you have servants to do your shopping, this probably seems
obvious. The theory that Britain has high rates of obesity because
healthy food is unaffordable is flawed on every level. It does not
explain why obesity has increased while food prices have fallen to
historic lows, nor does it explain why obesity rates are higher in rich
countries than in poor countries. It does not explain why people fail to
buy more fruit and vegetables when they become richer and it does not
explain the high rate of obesity among people on middle and high
incomes.
Why, then, do so many take the lazy assumption that healthy food is
expensive at face value? In part, it is because some health campaigners
want to portray obesity as an economically driven phenomenon in order to
justify taxes and subsidies on food, but there are other reasons.
According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research,
people assume that expensive food products are healthier even when they
are not. The mere existence of a price premium seems to imply health
benefits to some consumers. Organic and gluten-free food, in particular,
are assumed to be healthier as a result of their price and because of
the exaggerated claims made on their behalf.
The chef Anthony Warner argues
that fad diets and wellness gurus ‘focus almost solely on exclusive,
exotic ingredients’ such as quinoa and chia seeds at the expense of
‘cheap, easily consumed sources of valuable nutrition like carrots,
potatoes, bread and cheese’. If you assume that ‘healthy’ means organic,
imported or gluten-free then you will end up spending more money but
there are plenty of unpretentious, nutritious fruits and vegetables
available on supermarket shelves for next-to-nothing.
Meanwhile, ‘cheap junk food’ is not so cheap, in relative terms. The
appeal of Big Macs, ready meals, frozen pizzas and chocolate fudge cake
is not that they are cheap but that they are tasty, convenient and
require no cooking skills. These are things that people are prepared to
pay a premium for — and they do. Price is not unimportant, but if it was
the main determinant of dietary choices, we would all be eating
ten-a-day.
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