2 percent of America has celiac disease but over 20 percent of Americans say they are concerned about buying gluten-free foods - and marketing departments are happy to charge 230 percent more to make them feel better.
Across the spectrum, the price gap between "healthy" and less healthy foods has grown since 1992. Organic food is, unsurprisingly, the store of choice for wealthy elites, and prices have grown far more than they have for regular supermarket fare, where margins remain razor thin.
In the UK, a hotbed of anti-science beliefs about food, the trend is the same. More healthy foods are consistently more expensive and have risen more sharply in price over time: healthier foods increased £1.84 per 1000 kilocalories while foods considered less healthy only £0.73 - a difference of 252 percent.
It's a progressive tax on food. And it means organic and other specialty marketing groups are intentionally creating food ghettos for poor people. In the past, you had to be rich to be fat, now you have to be rich to be thinner and healthier and prettier and all of the other things marketing gurus like Vani Hari promote with their diets.
The party for elite food marketing may be over: Though the Dow Jones is doing well, the Whole Foods stock price has dropped 34% in 2014.
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In 2002, 1000 kcal of more healthy foods – as defined by criteria devised for the UK government – cost an average of £5.65, compared to purchasing the same quantity of energy from less healthy food at £1.77. By 2012 this cost had changed to £7.49 for more healthy and £2.50 for less healthy foods.
Researchers from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge who conducted the study say that this trend could result in people increasingly turning to less healthy food.
"Food poverty and the rise of food banks have recently been an issue of public concern in the UK, but as well as making sure people don't go hungry it is also important that a healthy diet is affordable," said lead author Nicholas Jones.
"The increase in the price difference between more and less healthy foods is a factor that may contribute towards growing food insecurity, increasing health inequalities, and a deterioration in the health of the population." The cost of diet-related ill health to the National Health Service has been estimated to be £5.8 billion annually.
The 94 foods and beverages in the study were taken from the Office of National Statistics' Consumer Price Index 'basket': the list of items used to measure inflation in the UK. The items included in the study were those which remained in the 'basket' for every year of the decade analysed.
To match nationwide food prices to nutrient content for each of the foods, the researchers combined datasets from the Consumer Price Index and from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. This novel link allowed them to establish which foods were either more or less healthy using an objective assessment of the foods' nutrient content, as defined by the UK Food Standards Agency's FSA-Ofcom nutrient profiling model.
"The finding shows that there could well be merit in public health bodies monitoring food prices in relation to nutrient content, hopefully taking into account a broader selection of foods than we were able to in this study," said Nicholas Jones.
The study's authors say their finding that more healthy food is more expensive tallies with work from similar high income nations. They point to other studies indicating that the EU's Common Agricultural Policy - which subsidises production of certain goods such as dairy, oil and sugar - has the potential to affect public health by influencing the availability and price of foods.
"To help achieve long-term improvements in eating habits, we need to address the high and rising prices of healthier foods, which is likely to be influenced by a number of factors including agricultural policy and production, food distribution, and retail pricing strategies," said senior author Dr Pablo Monsivais from CEDAR in Cambridge.
"Additionally, there is growing evidence that targeted subsidies can promote healthy eating for people on low incomes."
