Harvard: Eating Healthy Costs $1.50 More Per Dayselfnews Post The study will be published online December 5, 2013 in BMJ (British Medical Journal) Open. People often say that healthier foods are more expensive, and that such costs strongly limit better diet habits, said lead author Mayuree Rao, 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 researchers suggested that unhealthy diets may cost less because food policies have focused on the production of inexpensive, high volume commodities, which has led to a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing capabilities that favor sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit. Given this reality, they said that creating a similar infrastructure to support production of healthier foods might help increase availabilityand reduce the pricesof more healthful diets. This research provides the most complete picture to-date on true cost differences of healthy diets, said Dariush Mozaffarian, the studys senior author and 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. Visit Harvard School of Public Health for more info. 