PROVIDENCE – Research conducted by The Miriam Hospital and The Rhode Island Community Food Bank demonstrated that – contrary to popular belief – healthy diets rich in fruits and vegetables are affordable. In fact, the study found that a plant-based, extra-virgin olive oil diet is cheaper than the most economical recommendations for healthy eating coming from the United States Department of Agriculture. The comparison to the USDA diet showed an annual savings of nearly $750 per person, while also providing significantly more servings of vegetables, fruits and whole grains.
“We did this analysis because it is commonly said that healthy diets are expensive and that it is the fruits and vegetables that make them too expensive,” said Mary Flynn, Ph.D., a research dietitian at The Miriam Hospital and the lead researcher on the study. “Extra-virgin olive oil is also thought to be expensive, but we suspected it was meat that made a diet expensive, and extra-virgin olive oil is cheaper than even small amounts of meat. We expected the two diets to be similar in fruit and vegetable content, but our plant-based diet was substantially cheaper, and featured a lot more fruits and vegetables and whole grains.”
The study published recently in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition compared the costs over seven days of the plant-based, olive oil diet developed by Flynn to the lowest cost version of the USDA’s MyPlate diet – a combination of fruits and vegetables that make up half the dinner plate, and requires half of all grains consumed be whole grains. Flynn’s plant-based diet includes frozen and canned produce, as they have comparable nutrient content to the retail fresh version, and studies show frozen and canned produce have a higher content of some of the cancer-fighting components found in fresh produce. The plant-based diet includes four tablespoons a day of olive oil.
The recent study found that including vegetables and fruits daily was inexpensive, even at fairly high amounts. Educating consumers to include some weekly meals that do not contain meat, poultry or seafood but do include extra virgin olive oil, vegetables and a starch will decrease food costs and improve food access and body weight.
Andrew Schiff, CEO, Rhode Island Community Food Bank, a researcher on the study, said, “Even using extra-virgin olive oil, a plant-based diet is far less expensive and features so many more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.”
