Our Nutrition Has Been Hijacked By Price Digitization & Big Food

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The US Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of US economy-wide inflation, for all food increased 0.2% from July, 2023 to August, 2023, and food prices were 4.3% higher than in August, 2022. Food production is a major producer of GHG emissions, also known as climate pollution. Its overall impact on agriculture reduces food supplies, raises food prices, and affects nutrition across demographics. Research indicates that demand-side reductions through dietary changes are needed to significantly minimize total food system emissions.

Yet food systems struggle to provide healthy, sustainable, and affordable foods. It’s clear that public health efforts need to consider the impact of dietary choices much more intensely, not only in terms of nutritional quality but also in terms of environmental and economic impact.

So what’s getting in the way of shrinking food emissions in the US and across the globe? What’s the interconnection among rising food prices, weakened nutritional intake, and a cycle of producing more emissions?

Food Pricing: A Competition Law Issue

Food prices are a daily concern in many households’ decision making and have a significant nutritional health effect. The affordability of healthy diets is impacted by both the cost of food and drinks and the household financial resources available. Food systems of all types are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all.

After hearing Austria’s labor minister say that the government would build a new database that will help people find the cheapest milk, eggs, and other supermarket products to help fight soaring food prices, game developer Mario Zechner was curious. He felt confident he could create a much more comprehensive system — one that would be available for use a lot sooner than the one the government had begun. In fact, it was only 2 hours later that Zechner had his first prototype. As described in a Wired exposé, the system was able to segregate 22,000 items from the websites of Austria’s biggest two supermarket chains and review a series of pricing dynamics.

The system is called Heisse Preise, or Hot Prices. Zechner has open-sourced the project on GitHub.

While it’s really cool that one person was able to construct such an in-depth pricing analysis tool in such a short period of time, there’s a lot more to this story. The Hot Prices program uncovers supermarket price changes, and it turns out that there are really very few price differences among major supermarkets.

What does that mean for the average consumer? Grocery chains are surfing websites of competitors and using that information to set their own prices. Within days of an item changing price in one grocery store chain, a competitor’s pricing is switched to a very similar price.

“This data is enormously useful for anyone interested in serious competition policies,” Leonhard Dobusch, the academic director at the Momentum Institute, an Austrian progressive think tank, told Wired. “It really allows a peek into pricing strategies [and] price coordination tactics.” Artificially inflated food prices contribute to food insecurity, healthcare costs, and health insurance premiums. Maintaining a healthy diet while spending less money can help a person to overcome challenges and prevent various health-related issues — but too many people are sacrificing good nutrition in order to keep grocery expenditures low.

Shouldn’t Nutrition Guidelines Be Conflict-Free?

Price is a considerable factor that influences dietary choices. Other aspects of the food environment that drive food choices include the constant availability and promotion of unhealthy food and drinks and convenience. The responsibility for eating lower on the food chain falls most heavily on countries like the US with the highest per capita consumption of meat and dairy.

For example, do you feel it’s appropriate for Big Food and Big Pharma to influence US government dietary nutrition guidelines?

Is it a conflict of interest for Coca-Cola, the Nestlé Nutrition Institute, National Dairy Council, Weight Watchers International, Beyond Meat, the California Walnut Commission, and the National Egg Board to have explicit ties to the experts who implement nutrition standards?

And what about Pfizer, Abbott, Novo Nordisk, or Eli Lilly? Would you want them whispering in the ears of the nutrition experts on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC)?

Nearly half the members of the US government panel that helps draft dietary nutrition guidelines for people in the US have ties to the food, pharmaceutical, or weight loss industry, a report released by the US Right to Know revealed earlier this month. They compiled publicly available data related to each of the 20 DGAC members. The aim of the report was to provide fuller disclosure of conflicts of interest of the members of the 2025 DGAC. They looked at the financial and other ties during the last 5 years to the food, pharmaceutical, grocery, and other industries with a stake in the outcome of the dietary guidelines.

They found that 13 of 20 DGAC members had high-risk, medium-risk or possible conflicts of interest with industry actors.

Their findings include:

• 9 of 20 members had high-risk (8) or medium-risk (1) conflicts of interest with food (8), pharmaceutical (3), and weight loss (2) companies or industry groups, most often in the form of research support and consultancy
• 4 of 20 members had possible conflicts of interest with food and pharmaceutical companies or organizations that have a history of corporate sponsorship and lobbying in the development of the guidelines
• Particular actors had ties to two or more members, including Abbott (4), Novo Nordisk (3), National Dairy Council (3), Eli Lilly (2), and Weight Watchers (WW) International (2).
• Leading professional nutrition organizations in the US — the American Society for Nutrition and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which both have a history of corporate sponsorship and lobbying in the development of the guidelines — have wide ranging ties to DGAC members.

This year, for the first time, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) released partial public disclosures of conflicts of interest of the 2025 DGAC, which showed that DGAC members have ties to large food and pharmaceutical companies and industry groups. However, these disclosures were voluntary, aggregated across all DGAC members, did not identify each individual member’s conflicts, and only covered the last year.

The report’s authors offer the following recommendations:

• Not appointing DGAC members with high-risk conflicts of interest
• Disclosing individual members’ conflicts during the last 5 years
• Using a better disclosure form
• Publishing a list of provisional appointees prior to appointment, open for public comment
• Including leadership roles or paid roles at conflicted nutrition organizations in disclosures of potential conflicts of interest

It’s bad enough that frequent food crises with spiking prices have become the new normal in the 21st century, bringing urgency to the task of understanding their nutritional impacts. Many products made by Big Food are made from heavily processed ingredients, which reduce the nutritional value of the raw ingredients. Distinct connections have been made among ultra-processed foods and obesity as well as chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

Questionable substances such as carcinogens and trans fats have been added to the list by industry without any oversight. Many products made by Big Food are made from heavily processed ingredients. Processing foods can reduce the nutritional value of the raw ingredients, and links have been suggested between ultra-processed foods and obesity as well as chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.