The true price of external health effects from food consumption

  • Although global food consumption costs more in terms of impact on human life than money is spent on it, health costs have not been consistently quantified or included in food prices to date. In this paper, a method to determine the external health costs of nutrition and dietetics is developed by employing the cost-of-illness (COI) and true cost accounting (TCA) approaches. This is done exemplarily for the reference country Germany. The results show that 601.50 € per capita and 50.38 billion € in total external health costs are incurred annually due to nutrition. Overall, most costs are accrued through excessive meat consumption (32.56% of costs), deficient whole grain intake (15.42% of costs), and insufficient uptake of legumes (10.19% of costs). Comparing the external health costs with the external environmental costs in Germany, it can be seen that of the total annual costs of around 153.86 billion €, 67.26% originate from environmental impacts and 32.74% from impacts on human life.Although global food consumption costs more in terms of impact on human life than money is spent on it, health costs have not been consistently quantified or included in food prices to date. In this paper, a method to determine the external health costs of nutrition and dietetics is developed by employing the cost-of-illness (COI) and true cost accounting (TCA) approaches. This is done exemplarily for the reference country Germany. The results show that 601.50 € per capita and 50.38 billion € in total external health costs are incurred annually due to nutrition. Overall, most costs are accrued through excessive meat consumption (32.56% of costs), deficient whole grain intake (15.42% of costs), and insufficient uptake of legumes (10.19% of costs). Comparing the external health costs with the external environmental costs in Germany, it can be seen that of the total annual costs of around 153.86 billion €, 67.26% originate from environmental impacts and 32.74% from impacts on human life. In order to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and to increase family as well as public health, there is a need to internalise these external costs into actual food prices.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author:Felix Seidel, Benjamin Oebel, Lennart Stein, Amelie MichalkeORCiDGND, Tobias GauglerORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-opus4-1074601
Frontdoor URLhttps://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/107460
ISSN:2072-6643OPAC
Parent Title (English):Nutrients
Publisher:MDPI AG
Type:Article
Language:English
Date of first Publication:2023/07/30
Publishing Institution:Universität Augsburg
Release Date:2023/09/15
Tag:Food Science; Nutrition and Dietetics
Volume:15
Issue:15
First Page:3386
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15153386
Institutes:Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlich-Technische Fakultät
Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre
Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlich-Technische Fakultät / Institut für Materials Resource Management
Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Betriebswirtschaftslehre / Lehrstuhl für Production & Supply Chain Management
Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlich-Technische Fakultät / Institut für Materials Resource Management / Professur für Applied Data Analysis
Nachhaltigkeitsziele
Nachhaltigkeitsziele / Ziel 8 - Menschenwürdige Arbeit und Wirtschaftswachstum
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
Licence (German):CC-BY 4.0: Creative Commons: Namensnennung (mit Print on Demand)