cost of a healthy diet

The cost of a healthy diet is an indicator compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization with the World Bank Data Group and published through the FAOSTAT database. It does not measure what people actually spend, and it is not the price of an average shopping basket. It is the cost of the least expensive combination of foods available locally that would meet food-based dietary guidelines, worked out from retail food prices, food composition tables and daily requirements for health. For comparisons between countries the calculation applies a common standard called the Healthy Diet Basket: eleven locally available items across six food groups, in quantities that keep energy balance within and between those groups, so that a cheaper local substitute can stand in for a costly one without changing what the diet delivers.

Two things follow from that method. Because the figure is a least-cost one, it is a floor rather than a typical price: almost nobody eats the cheapest qualifying diet, so what it really costs to eat well is usually higher. And because prices are converted at purchasing power parity and reported per person per day, the number can be compared across countries rather than read as a local price tag. A companion indicator, the affordability of a healthy diet, sets that cost against the income people actually have and reports how many cannot cover it. FAO put the global average at 3.66 purchasing power parity dollars a day in 2021, when about 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet.