Eating Healthy Costs Extra $550 Every Year: Study

All those diet and health conscious people take a note, eating healthy ups the cost of food by more than $1.50 a day, a recent study shows.

This means that diet freaks spend $550 extra every year over healthy eating. A meta-study of 27 studies in 10 countries show that healthier eating could cost people an average $0.29 more than junk.

The researchers analyzed a set of extremely health conscious people whose diet included one replete with fruits, vegetables and fish with another set of people gorging on junk such as processed foods, meats and grains.  However, the researchers found no significant price difference between healthier food and less healthy soda and juices.

According to the researchers, junk might cost less because food policies focus on the production of "inexpensive, high volume" commodities, which has led to "a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing capabilities that favor sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit."

"This price difference is very small in comparison to the economic costs of diet-related chronic diseases, which would be dramatically reduced by healthy diets," Dr Dariush Mozaffarian, the study's senior author and associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, said in a press release.

The Huffington Post blogger Ellen Gustafson, who is the co-founder of Food Tank, explained the "true" costs of so-called cheap food. "Hidden health costs like our global obesity epidemic and the food-related public health issues of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are certainly not included in the cost of your fast food meal," she wrote.