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Presentation Info

Since 2017, a series of global and national studies have linked millions of retail consumer prices with nutritional data to track food access using the least expensive locally available foods that would achieve nutrient adequacy and meet national dietary guidelines. In 2022, the use of these least cost healthy diets was adopted by the World Bank and FAO as a new way of monitoring global food security.  

Measuring food access using this Cost and Affordability of Healthy Diets (CoAHD) approach reveals that about 3 billion people worldwide cannot afford even the least-cost items needed to meet commonalities among national dietary guidelines, with significant spatial and seasonal variation within countries. The CoAHD approach is useful primarily as a diagnostic tool, to distinguish between three possible causes of an unhealthy diet: (a) unusually high prices or unavailability of items in all food groups needed for a healthy diet, (b) insufficient income to buy enough of even the least expensive items in each food group, or (c) displacement of healthy foods by less nutritious items, thereby revealing the need to address food choice among available options whose health effects may be unknown or misleading, as well as costs of meal preparation or other factors that affect food choice.

Using modeled diets to track the cost and affordability of healthy foods can help guide many kinds of intervention to improve diet quality, identifying the least expensive healthy options so as to understand why people so often consume unhealthy foods instead.

Presenter Bio

William A. Masters, PhD

• Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy, Tufts University
• Professor, Department of Economics, Tufts University

Will Masters is a Professor in the Friedman School, with a secondary appointment in Tufts University’s Department of Economics. From 2011 to 2014 he served as chair of the Friedman School’s Department of Food and Nutrition Policy, and before coming to Tufts was a faculty member in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University (1991-2010), and also at the University of Zimbabwe (1989-90), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (2000) and Columbia University (2003-04). He is the co-author of an undergraduate textbook, Economics of Agricultural Development: World Food Systems and Resource Use  (Routledge, 3rd ed. 2014), and former editor of the journal Agricultural Economics (2006-2011). He was named an International Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists (2010), been awarded the Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis (2013), the Publication of Enduring Quality Award (2014) and the Quality of Research Discovery Award (2019) all from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and is an elected Fellow of the AAEA (2020).

About the New Frontiers Webinar Series

As a part of the New Frontiers webinar series, leaders in the field will provide the latest perspectives on public health opportunities to inform the prevention of diabetes and malnutrition (including obesity and undernutrition).

The series will encompass a range of topics, including socioeconomic factors affecting nutritional status and diabetes risk across the lifespan; novel interventions across health and non-health care settings; and emerging areas in policy approaches to address these challenges.

Sponsors

The New Frontiers webinar series is co-sponsored by the Center for Diabetes Translation Research and the E3 Nutrition Lab at Washington University in St. Louis.