Food is in limited supply, but our population keeps booming.
National Geographic is looking at that problem from a few different angles, and one area they researched is what the world eats: How much of our diet, as a country, comes from meat? Dairy? Vegetables? Fat?
The information has meaning for our planet and for our health, and the awesome way NatGeo presents it offers a million different lessons – not to mention some truly shocking information about how we eat.
The U.S. average number of calories in 2011 was 3,641 a day, with nearly 40 percent of it coming from sugar and fat, according to their breakdown. It’s hard not to see why we have an obesity problem with that kind of statistic.
We’re second only to China in meat consumption, and a lot of the fat we consume comes in the form of vegetable oil: We eat nearly two and a half times as much vegetable oil a day as we did 50 years ago.
We’ve got that much fat in our diets, and just 8 percent of our daily calories come from produce.
USDA guidelines recommend you fill half your plate with fruit and vegetables. Doesn’t look like we’re doing that.
Comparatively, the world average number of calories consumed is 2,870 a day, with 1,296 calories of that coming from grain. Sugar and fat makes up 20 percent of the world diet, and 11 percent comes from produce.
The data from other countries is interesting as well, and Vox took a look at some of the results, which you can check out here.
