Interview: Healthy diet becoming 'too costly' for poor[fr][de] 

A conference on 'Challenging obesity through motivation and behavioural change' dedicated, on 29 November 2007, a session to healthy lifestyle and the consumer environment. It considered the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on obesity prevention programmes and whether 'healthy food' is expensive.

"In our wealthy societies, low income will actually lead to poor choice in diet," said nutrition and health professor Jaap C. Seidel in an interview with EurActiv.com. "It has partly to do with the prices of unhealthy food, which are much lower than the prices of healthier foods like fruits and vegetables, wholegrain cereals and lean meat and fish, which are very expensive products," he added, explaining that cheap products are often those with added oils, fats, sugar and salt and thus lower nutritional quality. 

"Even with optimal nutrition knowledge, choosing a healthy diet will be difficult on a low budget," agreed Nicole Darmon from the French National Research Institute of Health and Medicine (INSERM). She concluded her presentation by asking "Is healthy food so expensive?" 

Darmon, who has conducted nutritional surveys in vulnerable populations to study the feasibility and cost of nutritional recommendations, explained that the cost of dietary intake is positively linked to dieatry quality. "The more expensive a food group is, the smaller its energy intensity and the higher its nutrient intensity - and vice versa." She said that low income groups tend to prefer the latter formula: cheap food with a high contribution to energy intake and poor level of nutrients. According to her, fruits and vegetables are the most expensive and added fats the cheapest food group.

Darmon underlined that cereals and starches are an exception to this rule and "constitute the basis of low SES food and nutrition all over the world". However, asked how this will change if the current increase in food prices continues, Professor Seidel said that "biofuels will compromise the healthy food intake for the global poor." Later, he added that "staple foods which are producing healthy habits in traditional ways are becoming much more expensive and will be replaced by packaged foods, which are usually full of added sugar, fats and salt." 

"These products are marketed partly because a lot of the packaged, added salt and fatty foods are heavily subsidised by the EU agricultural ministries and others, as well as by the companies which all make money out of processed food," he argued, adding that "it is very difficult to make money out of fresh foods because of the associated costs of transportation and preservation. So what you could do is either increase the taxation of unhealthy foods and make them more expensive or reduce the cost of healthy foods, like subsidies in fruits and vegetables." 

To read the interview with Jaap C. Seidel in full, please click here.