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Data

Daily cost of a healthy diet

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Food PricesPoverty

What you should know about this indicator

A healthy diet meets nutritional standards set by dietary guidelines, with sufficient diversity and quantity within and between food groups to achieve nutrient adequacy and protect against diet-related diseases.

How is this data described by its producer?

The Cost of a Healthy Diet indicator provides a globally standardized metric to monitor food environments, measuring a population's access to sufficient food for an active and healthy life. For this metric, access to healthy diets is measured using the least expensive locally available items in sufficient quantities to meet national governments' food-based dietary guidelines. For global monitoring, commonalities among those guidelines are represented by a Healthy Diet Basket, specifying a target number and quantity of eleven items balanced across six nutritionally defined food groups. The items selected in each country to meet the global Healthy Diet Basket standard generally also achieve nutrient adequacy, at a similar cost to meeting an individual country's own national dietary guidelines.

Limitations and exceptions

Item prices for the global Cost of a Healthy Diet indicator are reported by each national statistical organization through the International Comparison Program, intending to show the country's annual average cost for commonly consumed foods being sold in multiple countries. Food item availability and price at any one time and place could differ from this average. Also, prices are reported in local currency units, and then adjusted for inflation over time and price levels across countries using national Consumer Price Indexes and Purchasing Power Parity exchange rates that may not exactly match currency values used in any one time and place.

Statistical concept and methodology

The Cost of a Healthy Diet is a new kind of price index developed by the Food Prices for Nutrition project, based on matching item descriptions to food composition data then selecting the lowest cost options to meet dietary requirements. The initial methods were first published as a background paper for the UN agencies' State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report 2020 and revised for the 2022 and 2024 editions of that same report.

Daily cost of a healthy diet
Cost of purchasing the least expensive locally available foods to meet requirements for energy and food-based dietary guidelines, for a representative person within energy balance at 2,330 kcal/day. This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in the cost of living between countries.
Source
FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 4, 2025
Next expected update
August 2026
Date range
2017–2024
Unit
international-$ in 2021 prices per person per day

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank – Food Prices for Nutrition

Food Prices for Nutrition provides indicators on the cost and affordability of healthy diets in each country, showing the population's physical and economic access to sufficient quantities of locally available items for an active and healthy life. It also provides indicators on the cost and affordability of an energy-sufficient diet and of a nutrient-adequate diet. These indicators are explained in detail in the Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub.

Retrieved on
August 4, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databank.worldbank.org/source/food-prices-for-nutrition
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.

Food Prices for Nutrition provides indicators on the cost and affordability of healthy diets in each country, showing the population's physical and economic access to sufficient quantities of locally available items for an active and healthy life. It also provides indicators on the cost and affordability of an energy-sufficient diet and of a nutrient-adequate diet. These indicators are explained in detail in the Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub.

Retrieved on
August 4, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databank.worldbank.org/source/food-prices-for-nutrition
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • Costs have been adjusted for inflation by multiplying the cost for a given year by CPI(BASE_YEAR) / CPI(year), where CPI is the United States' Consumer Price Index and the base year is 2021.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Daily cost of a healthy diet”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Food Prices”. Data adapted from Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Herforth et al. (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Daily cost of a healthy diet” [dataset]. Herforth et al. (2022), adapted by World Bank, “Food Prices for Nutrition 4.0” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-healthy-diet.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear