Contribution of food prices and diet cost to socioeconomic disparities in diet quality and health: a systematic review and analysis

By N. Darmon, Adam Drewnowski. Nutrition reviews, 2015

1,129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context: It is well established in the literature that healthier diets cost more than unhealthy diets. Objective: The aim of this review was to examine the contribution of food prices and diet cost to socioeconomic inequalities in diet quality. Data Sources: A systematic literature search of the PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science databases was performed. Study Selection: Publications linking food prices, dietary quality, and socioeconomic status were selected. Data Extraction: Where possible, review conclusions were illustrated using a French national database of commonly consumed foods and their mean retail prices. Data Synthesis: Foods of lower nutritional value and lower-quality diets generally cost less per calorie and tended to be selected by groups of lower socioeconomic status. A number of nutrient-dense foods were available at low cost but were not always palatable or culturally acceptable to the low-income consumer. Acceptable healthier diets were uniformly associated with higher costs. Food budgets in poverty were insufficient to ensure optimum diets. Conclusions: Socioeconomic disparities in diet quality may be explained by the higher cost of healthy diets. Identifying food patterns that are nutrient rich, affordable, and appealing should be a priority to fight social inequalities in nutrition and health.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77d07157273cd6144838b250f2a99b7754c0c4b3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

1. Maigeng Zhou
2. Oscar H. Franco
3. A. Palloni
4. V. Kovacs
5. T. Gill
6. Roya Kelishadi

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

1. B. Horta
2. H. Boeing
3. Ulf Ekelund
4. M. Ezzati
5. Rahman Shiri
6. E. Riboli
7. Oscar H. Franco
8. Louise A. Baur

Citations in the corpus

• Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: a pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and adults (2017, positive): “50 Unaffordability of healthy food options not only leads to social inequalities in overweight and obesity, 51,52 but might also limit the effect of policies that target unhealthy foods.”
• Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: a pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults (2024, neutral): “58,59,62,63 New pharmacological treatment of obesity, although promising, is likely to have a low impact globally in the short-term, due to high cost and the absence of generalisable clinical guidelines.”