is anyone else a bit skeptical at the number of countries averaging over 3,000 calories/day? wouldn't such a person consistently gain a pound or two a month, every month?
>wouldn't such a person consistently gain a pound or two a month, every month?
Looking around [Bay Area, smart people filling up gyms on weekdays and trails on weekends] there are a lot of people with 30-50+ pounds of extra weight - it just looks so typical, that it became a new normal (I myself being in relatively good physical shape is 190lb at 6' height - this is about 30lb heavier than when i was 20 years ago a student back in Russia and 40lb lighter than what i became after the first year in the US before i got back in shape.)
For those that do not want to open the sources spreadsheet, Short answer, the do not compensate for food waste. Interestingly, they also do not account for the food your pets eat.
"The food consumption refers to the amount of food available for human consumption as estimated by the FAO Food Balance Sheets. However the actual food consumption may be lower than the quantity shown as food availability depending on the magnitude of wastage and losses of food in the household, e.g. during storage, in preparation and cooking, as plate-waste or quantities fed to domestic animals and pets, thrown or given away."
I was thinking the same thing. They probably divided calories_produced/num_people (calories_produced being derived from agricultural output).
I suspect it's a mix of undercounting people and WASTED food being counted as eaten.
I read an estimate somewhere that 25% of food in the US is wasted (it's not that high in my house, my shamefully it's too high, and I have absolutely no problem believing that number).
>I suspect it's a mix of undercounting people and WASTED food being counted as eaten.
no, it is what left after the wasted amount is taken out.
>I read an estimate somewhere that 25% of food in the US is wasted (it's not that high in my house, my shamefully it's too high, and I have absolutely no problem believing that number).
"In 2004, the U.S. food supply provided 3,900 calories per
person per day. Accounting for waste, the average
American consumed 2,775 calories per day in 2007– an
increase of 28% from 1970"
3,000 is not hard to reach if you eat 3 times a day, especially if it's "healthy home cooking". Paradoxically, if you skip breakfast and eat 2 middle-of-the-road fast food meals a day, it's hard to hit 3,000 calories.
All sounds like such luxury to me though... 1,200 calories a day to just to remain forever 50 pounds overweight... ugh...
It's not hard to reach, but as an average over the entire population?
Is there any explanation of the methodology by which these numbers were derived? I don't think it's possible to accurately measure this kind of thing -- heck, I have enough trouble keeping track of how many calories I, personally, am consuming, so I have no idea how you could average it over the entire population. You could measure food production, but we don't know exactly how much is wasted.
I don't understand why this is being downvoted. I also would like to see how they arrive at these numbers, because while they don't seem like they'd be insane, they do seem somewhat high to me.
It seems plausible to me that they don't count waste.
a) It still doesn't say precisely how food consumption is estimated.
b) However it does say this: "The food consumption refers to the amount of food available for human consumption as estimated by the FAO Food Balance Sheets. However the actual food consumption may be lower than the quantity shown as food availability depending on the magnitude of wastage and losses of food in the household, e.g. during storage, in preparation and cooking, as plate-waste or quantities fed to domestic animals and pets, thrown or given away."
-- which explains the implausibly high numbers for some of the western countries; not every calorie bought is a calorie consumed (I know a lot of my food goes off before I get a chance to eat it).
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-di...
It all depends on where the calories go/spent on.
>wouldn't such a person consistently gain a pound or two a month, every month?
Looking around [Bay Area, smart people filling up gyms on weekdays and trails on weekends] there are a lot of people with 30-50+ pounds of extra weight - it just looks so typical, that it became a new normal (I myself being in relatively good physical shape is 190lb at 6' height - this is about 30lb heavier than when i was 20 years ago a student back in Russia and 40lb lighter than what i became after the first year in the US before i got back in shape.)