Food Inflation and Health: What Skipping Fruit and Veg Can Do

When the weekly shop gets dearer, fruit and veg are often the first things to go back on the shelf. A longevity expert is warning that this quiet change could carry a real cost to the nation’s health, one that may take years to appear in NHS figures.

The link between food inflation and health is easy to miss, so here is what is going on and what he says is at stake.

The numbers behind food inflation and health worries

The Food Foundation reports that food inflation reached 3.7% in the year to March 2026, with some items, olive oil among them, more than doubling in price. Its latest food prices tracker also found that more than half of UK households had cut back on fruit and vegetables in the previous month alone.

Ralph Montague, author and founder of The Longevity Clinic, says the effects of that will not be obvious straight away. Instead, he describes a slow run-down of vitamins and minerals. It is not clinical malnutrition that would show on a blood test, but a shortfall in things like zinc, magnesium, B vitamins and vitamin C that the body relies on every day.

Those nutrients help with immune regulation, brain function, heart health and the body’s ability to repair cell damage, so running low on them matters even when you feel fine.

Ralph is asking health journalists, policymakers and the public to help spread the word about what happens when people cut out essential vitamins and eat far worse than they did six months earlier. The damage, he says, is often invisible from the outside but very real inside.

What he says can happen inside the body

• A weaker immune system. Low levels of vitamins C and D and zinc can blunt the body’s defences, making infections more likely and recovery slower.
• Faster biological ageing. Fruit and veg are rich in antioxidants. Without them, ongoing oxidative stress can shorten telomeres and hamper cell repair, which is the biological equivalent of ageing faster. He recommends plenty of organic food, protein and good fats.
• More inflammation. A diet short on plant-based antioxidants lets low-grade chronic inflammation build up. That is a major driver of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cognitive decline.
• A disrupted gut. Food with less fibre and goodness can reduce the variety and stability of gut bacteria within days, with knock-on effects for mood, stress, immunity and metabolism.

The wider policy picture

Ralph is particularly worried about food prices rising at the same time as the government’s welfare reforms, which reduce support for some of the most vulnerable households.

He wants the government’s 10 Year Health Plan, which aims to move the NHS from treating sickness to preventing it, to treat food security as part of health infrastructure rather than just a question of what shoppers can afford. In his view, a prevention-first health service cannot work while the conditions that create avoidable illness are being made worse by global events and domestic policy at once.

Keeping the basics on the table

None of this is a reason to panic, and the expert’s comments are about trends across the country rather than any one family’s shopping basket. But they are a useful nudge to protect the basics where you can.

• Protect your fruit and veg budget before cutting elsewhere.
• Keep an eye on fibre, since your gut notices a drop quickly.
• Look after protein and healthy fats alongside your greens.

Food, as Ralph puts it, is medicine, and he fears that millions are being priced out of it. Whether or not policy catches up, it is worth knowing what is at stake when the shopping list gets shorter.