Junk food is widely assumed to be kinder to our wallet than nutritional food, despite its obvious health downfalls. Pete Bromhead from Jerrabomberra always searches for the cheapest produce because eating healthily can be expensive.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But are people who mostly eat pre-packaged and processed meals actually spending less than healthy eaters?
Not necessarily, research from the Queensland University of Technology, soon to be applied in the ACT, has revealed.
In the pilot study, professor Amanda Lee analysed fortnightly baskets of five different household diets. Some reflected the healthy National Health and Medical Research Council Foundation Diets and others mirrored common unhealthy food choices based on the early nutrition results of the Australian Health Survey 2011-12.
It found takeaway food cost more than eating healthy.
ACT chief health officer, professor Paul Kelly, admitted unhealthy food costs less than healthy food on a per calorie basis, but said people were spending and eating too much.
"The total amount of energy that you need for your health can be gained from healthy options and it would actually end up being cheaper [than what most household baskets cost]," he said.
"People think they can't afford to be healthy because they'll go bankrupt, but if you just stop buying all this rubbish that you don't need, you've got plenty of money to spend."
Up to 58 per cent of the food dollar some participants spent went towards discretionary choices, such as takeaway food and alcohol.
The most recent Australian Health Survey found the ACT spends too much on these products, despite it being less than the national average. More people in the ACT and in Australia meet the daily recommended intake of fruit than of vegetables.
Assistant professor in nutrition and dietetics at the University of Canberra, Gabrielle O'Kane, said improving these figures was about much more than price, saying desirability, convenience and advertising were important.
"Maybe we need to develop people's cooking skills more in schools and the community so they don't always go for what they currently think is convenient, because not many people know quick and convenient meals which take as long as going down to the takeaway store," she said.
She believed Australia needed a cultural shift in the way food was viewed.
"We would value food more if we changed the mindset around food from a burden to a positive, and spent more time shopping and preparing it like other cultures do. So being attracted to takeaway foods could go away," she said.
The study is still being submitted for peer review, but ANU's professor of health equity and director of the Regulatory Institutions Network, Sharon Friel, said it was one of the few tests that actually compared the cost of various diets.
Further research was most crucial for lower-income households, she explained. While the income of higher-earners has increased relatively with the rise in unhealthy food prices over the past 15 years, the gap is widening between who can and can't afford certain diets.
But rather than viewing this as a black-and-white debate of good-versus-bad food, she suggested higher health standards for pre-packaged food.
"We need to think about reformulating the processed food to be less salty, less sugary or less fatty, so that healthy diets aren't always about preparation form the primary ingredients, but just about preparing processed food that doesn't take everything healthy out," she said.
"And we want these foods to be available more cheaply than other highly processed foods."
She also called for more education in the ACT about which healthy food was available at a reasonable cost.
"It really has to be a combination of things for food to be made more healthy, more desirable and physically more accessible," she said.
