Data Mechanics

People who cannot afford a healthy diet

The share of people whose income cannot pay for the cheapest healthy diet and basic needs.

This is the share of people who cannot afford the cheapest healthy diet in their country: the lowest-cost set of foods that meets the dietary guidelines of governments and public health agencies. A diet counts as unaffordable when its cost, plus basic non-food needs such as housing and transport, is more than daily income. FAO and the World Bank compute it with methods from Bai et al. (2024), and Our World in Data republishes it.

World map · Cannot afford a healthy diet

Source: FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Bai et al. (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-08-04) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Over time · Cannot afford a healthy diet

Source: FAO and World Bank (2025), using data and methods from Bai et al. (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-08-04) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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