Assessing the Cost of Healthy and Unhealthy Diets: A Systematic Review of Methods

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Poor diets are a leading risk factor for chronic disease globally. Research suggests healthy foods are often harder to access, more expensive, and of a lower quality in rural/remote or low-income/high minority areas. Food pricing studies are frequently undertaken to explore food affordability. We aimed to capture and summarise food environment costing methodologies used in both urban and rural settings. RECENT FINDINGS: Our systematic review of high-income countries between 2006 and 2021 found 100 relevant food pricing studies. Most were conducted in the USA (n = 47) and Australia (n = 24), predominantly in urban areas (n = 74) and cross-sectional in design (n = 76). All described a data collection methodology, with just over half (n = 57) using a named instrument. The main purpose for studies was to monitor food pricing, predominantly using the ‘food basket’, followed by the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey for Stores (NEMS-S). Comparatively, the Healthy Diets Australian Standardised Affordability and Price (ASAP) instrument supplied data on relative affordability to household incomes. SUMMARY: Future research would benefit from a universal instrument reflecting geographic and socio-cultural context and collecting longitudinal data to inform and evaluate initiatives targeting food affordability, availability, and accessibility. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13668-022-00428-x.