Vargas, C., Backholer, K., Bennett, R., Maganti, R., Lewis, M., Marshall, J., Sacks, G., Alston, L., Gupta, A., Needham, C., Huse, O., Ng, S. W. & Zorbas, C.
Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
Cambridge
4 July 2025
Abstract: Healthy diets are unaffordable for billions of people worldwide, with food prices rising in high-, middle- and low-income nations in recent times. Despite widespread attention to this issue, recent actions taken to inform policy prioritisation and government responses to high food inflation have not been comprehensively synthesised. Our review summarises (i) innovative efforts to monitor national food and healthy diet price, ii) new policy responses adopted by governments to address food inflation and (iii) future research directions to inform new evidence. We describe how timely food and beverage pricing data can provide transparency in the food industry and identify key areas for intervention. However, government policies that improve food affordability are often short-lived and lack sustained commitment. Achieving meaningful impact will require long-term, cross-sectoral actions that are led by governments to support food security, healthy diets and resilient sustainable food systems. This will necessitate a better understanding of how the political economy enables (or hinders) policy implementation, including through coherent problem framing, mitigating conflicts of interest in policymaking, working together as coalitions and developing and utilising evidence on the food security and related impacts of food pricing and affordability policies. Diverse actors must be better equipped with robust data platforms and actionable policy solutions that improve the affordability of healthy and sustainable diets, including by lowering food prices and addressing the broader socio-political determinants of food insecurity.
