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Food and Health Fact #99
Fact #99: The U.S. food system's external costs
By Matthew Rees
Food and Health Fact #99: The U.S. food system's external costs
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Americans spent an estimated $1.1 trillion on food in 2019. But this figure does not capture the externalized costs linked to food consumption. The largest such external cost is associated with human health, according to a new report by the Rockefeller Foundation. The report estimates that in 2019 there were $604 billion in costs (a mix of direct health expenses and productivity losses) triggered by the U.S. food system – a product of diseases such as hypertension, cancer, and diabetes that are often a product of an unhealthy diet. And there were an additional $359 billion in costs linked to being overweight or obese. “We created the food system with a particular objective — low-cost and abundant calories — and we didn’t understand what that impact was going to be,” one of the report’s authors told the Washington Post.
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