We need to address the high and rising prices of healthier foods, which is likely to be influenced by a number of factors including agricultural policy and production, food distribution, and retail pricing strategies
— Pablo Monsivais
A new study, published in the journal PLOS One, tracked the price of 94 key food and beverage items from 2002 to 2012. Its findings show that more healthy foods were consistently more expensive than less healthy foods, and have risen more sharply in price over time.
Food prices in the UK have risen faster than the price of other goods in recent years, and this new research shows that the increase has been greater for more healthy foods, making them progressively more expensive over time.
While less healthy foods had a slightly greater price rise relative to 2002, the absolute increase was significantly more for more healthy foods - a total average increase of £1.84 per 1000kcal for more healthy food across the decade, compared to £0.73 for less healthy food.
In 2002, 1000 kcal of more healthy foods – as defined by criteria devised for the UK government – cost an average of £5.65, compared to purchasing the same quantity of energy from less healthy food at £1.77. By 2012 this cost had changed to £7.49 for more healthy and £2.50 for less healthy foods.
Researchers from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge who conducted the study say that this trend could result in people increasingly turning to less healthy food.
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Image: Doughnut
Credit: JMiu
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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