The American diet in one chart, with lots of fats and sugars

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-05-american-diet-one-chart-lots-of-fats-sugars



Over on Civil Eats, Andrea Jezovit has put together a terrific interactive chart on the U.S. diet. Using USDA data for "average daily calories available per capita, adjusted for spoilage and waste," it tracks our eating habits since 1970, separating our foodstuffs into basic categories: grains, dairy, vegetables, fruits, proteins ("meat, eggs, and nuts"), added sugars, and added fats.

For me, the most interesting categories are the latter two. They represent what could be called the "value added" by the food-processing industry. The other categories mainly represent whole foods; the added fats and sugars are what the food industry uses to tart up whole foods to make them more appealing in marketing to consumers. (The one exception to that description is soda, which is essentially pure "added sugars" without any whole foods, suspended in a water medium along with a few synthetic flavoring agents and dyes. It is bizarre how much chemical-laced sugar water we consume.)

At any rate, I decided to crunch a few numbers from Jezovit's great chart to shine a light on the centrality of added fats and sugars to our diets. In 1970, the U.S. food system churned out 2,168 calories per day per person, of which 402 came from added sugar and 410 from added fat. Combined, that's 812 calories from additives, or about 37 percent of the total.

Jump forward to 2008 (the last year for which there are figures), and you find that the food system cranked out 2,673 calories per person. That's an impressive 23 percent jump from the 1970 number -- even more impressive when you recall that it's a per capita number and U.S. population rose significantly over that period. This is powerful evidence that the cheap-food policy instituted by Nixon-era USDA chief Earl Butz succeeded dramatically. In an age of maximum production of corn and soy, the U.S. food system became a calorie-generating juggernaut.

More at the link --

[Glassunion]

1. Holy Crap!

[dkf]

2. Added fat? Exactly what does that mean?

[GOTV]

3. Adding butter or oil to a product to make it taste better

[Cassandra]

6. Actually, I think added cheese is more significant...

than butter or oil.

[GOTV]

7. Wouldn't that already be in the Dairy category?

[dkf]

10. Adding real butter is too much to hope for.

It's probably some cheap stuff.

[WatsonT]

4. Maybe if we got out of the ag-subsidy business. . .

[Donnachaidh]

9. +1000000 n/t

[FLPanhandle]

5. Those added sugars & fats are a big problem

People are eating the same amount of food, but suddenly they are getting twice the calories. No wonder the nation is putting on weight.

[Matariki]

8. That's by calorie, I'm not sure the alarm is quite worth it.

You could eat buckets of fresh vegetables with olive oil and some brown rice and if you charted the calories like the example - naturally most of the calories will come from the olive oil and rice.