ArticleAmerican journal of agricultural economics2018
Measuring the Affordability of Nutritious Diets in Africa: Price Indexes for Diet Diversity and the Cost of Nutrient Adequacy.
Article in American journal of agricultural economics, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Home gardening improves dietary diversity, a cluster-randomized controlled trial among Tanzanian women.Maternal & child nutrition · 2021Trial
- Cost and affordability of three levels of diet quality for urban households in Colombia.Public health nutrition · 2025Article
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- Measuring food access using least-cost diets: Results for global monitoring and targeting of interventions to improve food security, nutrition and health.Global food security · 2024Article
- Nutrient adequacy for poor households in Africa would improve with higher income but not necessarily with lower food prices.Nature food · 2024Article
- Cost and affordability of a healthy diet for urban populations in Thailand and the Philippines before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Healthy Eating for All? The Challenge of Adhering to Dietary Guidelines for Low-Income Groups in China.Nutrients · 2023Article
- COVID-19 mobility restrictions and stay-at-home behaviour in 2020 were associated with higher retail food prices worldwide.Global food security · 2023Article
- Dietary inadequacy in Tanzania is linked to the rising cost of nutritious foods and consumption of food-away-from-home.Global food security · 2023Article
- Cost of Recommended Diet (CoRD) and Its Affordability in Bangladesh.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Seasonality and nutrition-sensitive farming in rural Northern Ghana.Food security · 2023Article
- Nationally representative estimates of the cost of adequate diets, nutrient level drivers, and policy options for households in rural Malawi.Food policy · 2022Article
- Climatic conditions and household food security: Evidence from Tanzania.Food policy · 2022Article
- Article
- The role of food preferences in determining diet quality for Tanzanian consumers.Journal of development economics · 2022Article
- Between the city and the farm: food environments in artisanal mining communities in Upper Guinea.Public health nutrition · 2022Article
- The cost of diversity in livestock feed rations.PloS one · 2022Article
- Global variation in the cost of a nutrient-adequate diet by population group: an observational study.The Lancet. Planetary health · 2022Observational
- Assessing Diet Quality Where Families Share Their Meals: Evidence from Malawi.The Journal of nutrition · 2021Article
- Suitability of Data-Collection Methods, Tools, and Metrics for Evaluating Market Food Environments in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Policies and programs often aim to improve the affordability of nutritious diets, but existing food price indexes are based on observed quantities that may not meet nutritional goals. To measure changes in the cost of reaching international standards of diet quality, we introduce a new cost of diet diversity index based on the lowest-cost way to include at least five different food groups as defined by the widely used minimum dietary diversity for women (MDD-W) indicator and compare that to a Cost of Nutrient Adequacy indicator for the lowest-cost way to meet estimated average requirements of essential nutrients and dietary energy. We demonstrate application of both indexes using national average monthly prices from two very different sources: an agricultural market information system in Ghana (2009-14) and the data used for national consumer price indexes in Tanzania (2011-15). We find that the cost of diet diversity index for Ghana fluctuated seasonally and since mid-2010 rose about 10% per year faster than national inflation, due to rising relative prices for fruit, which also drove up the cost of nutrient adequacy. In Tanzania there were much smaller changes in total daily costs, but more adjustment in the mix of food groups used for the least-cost diet. These methods can show where and when nutritious diets are increasingly (un)affordable, and which nutritional criteria account for the change. These results are based on monthly national average prices, but the method is generalizable to other contexts for monitoring, evaluation, and assessment of changing food environments.
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