Thanks to Tony Timm from Kingswood College in Grahamstown for sharing this fantastic article
Australians are spending more than half of their food budget on junk foods, despite a healthier diet being more affordable.
These are the findings of research being presented by public health expert and dietitian Professor Amanda Lee at the Dietitians Association of Australia’s National Conference in Hobart this week.
Lee and her team from the Queensland University of Technology found that Australians spend, on average, 58 per cent of their food and drink budget on discretionary foods.
“I was very surprised,” Lee says. “We know that Australian adults have about 35 per cent of their energy intake that comes from what we call discretionary foods and drinks – so foods and drinks that are high in sat fat, sugar, salt or alcohol that aren’t needed for a healthy diet. For kids it’s up to 40 per cent, and those foods displace the healthy foods.
“But the rhetoric is that healthy food is more expensive, so we were expecting that there would be a lesser figure spent on the unhealthy food. But what our research found was that it’s actually cheaper to eat a healthy diet.”
A “healthy diet” means eating basic healthy foods in line with the dietary guidelines, recommendations that less than 4 per cent of the Australian population currently follow.
“They’re not necessarily organic, but basic healthy supermarket foods, nothing special, no ‘superfoods’,” Lee explains. “Basic fruit and vegetables and wholegrain cereals et cetera.”
Eating in this way was found to cost households 15 per cent less than the unhealthy diets.
She says the confusion about unhealthy foods costing less may be down to comparing individual foods, rather than the diet as a whole.
“They might advertise single items of food that look cheap for one person but to feed a whole family on takeaway foods – by the time they buy extra drinks, by the time they buy extra chips, by the time the man says one Big Mac doesn’t fill me up I’m going to buy two – it can mount up,” Lee says.
She adds that, in Australia, basic healthy foods are exempt from GST but unhealthy foods are not. “We’ve got a bit of a fat tax happening because the discretionary foods, the unhealthy foods are charged GST.”
If eating healthier is more affordable, why are people choosing unhealthy options?
“The belief is that the price is a key determinant to what people choose, but what this research shows is that other factors, such as convenience, availability or advertising of foods are as important factors as price,” Lee says.
She adds that many people are using food as entertainment, not sustenance.
“Australians who are doing it tough are not going to be going away on holidays, they’re not going to be buying a new car, they’re not going to be getting a new house – it could be that going for a takeaway meal is an affordable luxury,” Lee suggests. “These unhealthy diets are more desired by Australians. Our kids have one of the highest rates of exposure to junk food ads in the world and we’ve got all our sporting events sponsored by fast-food companies.”
She would like the Australian government to fund and implement a new National Nutrition Policy – the current one was last updated 25 years ago – to make healthy foods more accessible and affordable for everyone.
“Poor diet is now the No.1 contributor to burden of disease in Australia and globally,” she says. In fact, with about 63 per cent of the population overweight or obese, obesity costs the nation $58 billion a year. Something needs to change, Lee says.
“Currently, the people who develop and sell and market the junk foods are calling all the shots in Australia,” she says. “We need a nutrition policy to implement effective, evidence-based policy actions to make it easier for families to eat healthily.”
In the meantime: “It’s really important to think about the foods we’re buying. We’re having a high amount of our diet coming from discretionary junk foods and drinks but we’re spending a disproportionate amount of our money on it, which is why the people with a vested interest just want us to keep doing it.”
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