Can healthy and sustainable diets be affordable to all ?
Editorial
Despite existing food-based dietary guidelines, current dietary patterns contribute not only to health challenges but also to environmental degradation and greenhouse-gas emissions. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urges a shift toward healthy and sustainable diets. However, transitioning to such diets requires strong policy action and must account for cultural acceptability, cost and affordability. The United Nations has turned close attention to this issue in recent years, reporting global statistics on the Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet, updated annually in the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World reports (FAO, 2026). The global standard for assessing cost and affordability is based on food-based dietary guidelines published by many countries, calling for a change in food systems to align more closely with the advice given by governments on how to eat a healthy diet (Herforth et al., 2025). Academic studies on the cost of healthy and sustainable diets contribute to the evidence base on this topic, using varied methodologies and dietary standards.
In this issue, the Global Fruit & Veg Newsletter explores three recent studies examining the affordability of dietary guidelines and recommended eating patterns across different countries.
The first article (Kaur, 2025) reviews the affordability of diets aligned with the United Kingdom’s Eatwell Guide. The analysis shows that diets consistent with national recommendations currently cost more than the average diet consumed in the UK, raising concerns about the financial accessibility of healthy eating for lower-income households. The study suggests that targeted subsidies for healthy foods could help bridge this affordability gap and encourage healthier consumption patterns. It also highlights the importance of regularly monitoring the cost of healthy diets to better inform public policy, while acknowledging the limitations of existing data when integrating price considerations into dietary guidance.
The second study (Camara et al., 2025) investigates the cost and affordability of transitioning from current dietary habits in Argentina to diets aligned with national dietary guidelines or with the Planetary Health Diet. Using modelling approaches, the authors compare the current diet with four alternatives. On average, the diet based on Argentina’s national dietary guidelines proved to be the most expensive, followed by the current diet. Diets inspired by the EAT-Lancet framework—particularly flexitarian models with reduced animal protein—were less costly. Overall, households would need between 53% and 59% of average income to cover these diets. Notably, the results suggest that certain dietary patterns with lower animal-protein content can simultaneously reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, improve health outcomes, and remain affordable.
The third article (Knudsen et al., 2025) examines whether three well-known healthy eating patterns—the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate, the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet—are affordable for individuals receiving benefits through the United States’ Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP benefit levels are based on the cost of a national reference food basket and on the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan,” which aims to identify the minimum cost of a nutritious and palatable diet. The analysis shows that these dietary patterns, within the framework of the economic model used, can generally be achieved within the maximum SNAP benefit. However, several limitations of the Thrifty Food Plan model are highlighted, raising questions about the actual ability of beneficiaries to access a balanced diet with the amount of these benefits.
These three articles are precious contributions about some economic effects, despite limitations including, notably, the absence of price adjustments following the demand changes resulting from the compliance with guidelines. Together, the evidence underscores a crucial point: improving diets is not only a matter of nutritional science or environmental ambition, but also a question of economic feasibility and political willingness. Ensuring that healthy and sustainable diets are accessible to all will require coordinated actions such as combining dietary guidance, agricultural and food policies, along with targeted economic measures such as taxes and subsidies. All these regulatory measures should make nutritious foods both available and affordable.
Stephan Marette is a Research Director at INRAE. He is an economist at the joint research unit (UMR) INRAE–AgroParisTech, Paris-Saclay Applied Economics (PSAE), based in Palaiseau. His work focuses on sensory analysis, experimental economics, and public economics. His recent research examines consumer acceptance of new foods based on single-cell proteins, fermented products, and genetically edited plants.