Abstract
Reference budgets (RB) are illustrative priced baskets containing the minimum goods and services necessary for well-described types of families to have adequate social participation. Cross-country comparable food RB with the minimum cost were previously developed in 26 EU countries. However, sustainability was not considered. The aim of this paper is to present the development of healthy and sustainable food baskets for Spanish adults. This work follows the steps proposed in previous European projects to build RB: (1) revision of guidelines on healthy and sustainable eating and expert consultations, (2) translation into a concrete list of foods, (3) pricing. The results indicate that a sustainable diet can be cheaper than current recommendations when only the dietary content is considered, representing monthly savings of about EUR 7.27. This is mainly explained by the shift towards more plant-based proteins. Adding constraints on origin, packaging and seasonality increases the overall cost of the food basket by EUR 12.22/month compared with current recommendations. The Spanish Sustainable Food Reference Budget illustrates the cost of applying different criteria to improve dietary sustainability in the Spanish context, and can be useful to support the ecological transition, since providing different levels of adherence to a sustainable dietary pattern can ease its access across socioeconomic groups.
Highlights
Worldwide, dietary risks are the leading cause of death and their effects on diseases and disability constitute the second cause of DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Year) [1].According to the 2017 Global Burden of Disease study, 11 million deaths and 255 millionDALYs were attributable to dietary risk factors [2]
Because of the sequential nature of the procedure to develop Reference budgets (RB), in which the results of one phase are necessary to comprehend the one, we briefly describe the main findings of each step leaving for the results section only the final composition of the different levels of the SSFRB
The choice of men responds to being the adult type with theoretically the greatest nutritional needs, according to the calorie reference values for European adults set by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) [44], allowing us to assess a higher cost for adults in a household budget
Summary
Dietary risks are the leading cause of death and their effects on diseases and disability constitute the second cause of DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Year) [1].According to the 2017 Global Burden of Disease study, 11 million deaths and 255 millionDALYs were attributable to dietary risk factors [2]. Dietary risks are the leading cause of death and their effects on diseases and disability constitute the second cause of DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Year) [1]. Food access, as one of the dimensions of the construct food insecurity, mediates this relationship through diet cost [10]. By using European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), and comparing the cost of a healthy diet with the level of minimum income schemes for specific household types using microsimulation techniques, Penne and Goedemé [11] show how in 16 out of 24 European countries, at least 10% of the population in (sub)urban areas face
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