8 ms·

What Americans ate on an average day, for the past several decades

112 points by hokkos 10y ago

maxxxxx 10y ago
The visualization makes no sense. You can't go back or forward in time to check out a trend a little closer. It looks good on the surface but in my view it's totally useless to get real information.
- jeffwass 10y ago
  It's also very hard to see patterns since they live sort each tick in time and are constantly swapping graphs around.
- cwal37 10y ago
  Yeah, it feels like one of those immediately neat things that falls apart when you look a little closer. The data behind it is quite easy to work with though, and I think there's some better (more interactive, a bit more control) visualizations someone could come up with. I used it myself last year when I was wondering about the emissions associated with different diets (specifically I was curious about what was more effective from a reduction standpoint: being a vegetarian at different points of time vs. owning an electric car. Since the disposition of electricity has changed pretty significantly since the early 90s in some places it varied pretty widely [the informal lit review of food-based emissions was quite a mess though]).
- CptMauli 10y ago
  if you click on "pause", then you can actually move the time.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    But then it doesn't re-order? That seems to limit the experience.
    - eonw 10y ago
      if it reordered, it would be based on mouse location, as soon as it moved youd be over something else, then it would update... endless loop.
    - avuserow 10y ago
      It does if you click on one of the graphs at that point.
    - jasonjei 10y ago
      What would have been easier to read are snapshots at significant intervals rather than the animation
- oarsinsync 10y ago
  Pause and mouseover on the graphs. It'll give you a different year depending on where you are on the graph.
- nattaylor 10y ago
  The animation makes no sense to me, but I think the visualization is extremely informative.
vgoh1 10y ago
Sugar and corn syrup seem like glaring omissions, given that a lot of recent data suggests that sugar is much more of a leading cause of obesity than we once thought. It would also have been nice to see some indication of the processing involved - for example, wheat is there, but what part of the wheat is consumed by humans
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kzrdude 10y ago
  Would be interesting to know how the composition of the wheat consumed changed over time. (According to paleo foods people, wheat now contains more gluten per gram, more carbohydrates and less fibers.)
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    It's not the composition but the quantity but here is a graph of it. I was trying to find a graph of bread consumption over time, because the decline correlates quite well with the introduction of mass produced factory bread - devoid of flavour imho. http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/wheat/wheats-role-in-the-us-diet.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/wheat/wheats-role-in-th...
projectramo 10y ago
The big surprise for me is how little things have changed when viewed in this manner. The majority of the diet is taken up by the things in the top row, and those haven't changed as dramatically as I had assumed. In my mind there was this exponential explosion in sugar since the 70s, but the big change seems to be the drop in consumption of whole milk.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  The infusion of food as science is not represented in the chart. For example people eating boiled corn 30 years ago vs Doritos 10 years ago.. both would show up as "corn".
  - nacs 10y ago
    Yes I was surprised at the "Potatoes" amount being so high and was thinking people couldn't possibly be consuming that much mashed potatoes at home then realized this probably included French-fries that are included with every meal from the majority of fast-food vendors.
- CompelTechnic 10y ago
  I tend to wonder if the demonization of fat harmed diets more than it did any good. Whole milk getting substituted out means more carbs getting substituted into the average diet.
- ikawe 10y ago
  At first I assumed this meant we were eating significantly less dairy, but it seems most of the loss in whole milk was just cannibalized by lower fat milk, coinciding with the low fat craze. Edit: Actually, on actually doing some math, there is a substantial decrease in overall milk consumption. It's just hard for me to visually account for this since there is so much shuffling between the categories. sum_milk= ->(Whole Milk + 2pct Milk + 1pct Milk + Skim Milk) sum_milk(1970)=.91 cups sum_milk(1990)=.74 cups sum_milk(2013)=.53 cups
- Evgeny 10y ago
  In my mind there was this exponential explosion in sugar since the 70s It was probably not so exponential, it's more like an increased intake of everything. ERS data show that on average, US adults consumed 363 more calories per day in 2009 than we did in 1960. The extra calories are coming from carbohydrate, fat, and protein, and increased intake of all three tightly correlate with increased obesity prevalence. In other words, we're eating more of everything than we did 50 years ago. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2014/04/calorie-intake-and-us-obesity-epidemic.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2014/04/calorie-intake-...
smrtinsert 10y ago
I wish there was only one chart per category.
dudul 10y ago
The problem with this type of study is that it averages all Americans together. I haven't looked in details at the graphs, but let's assume they show that nothing has really changed in 30 years. What does it mean? Maybe all Americans have kept their diet the same, but maybe some people started making a lot of effort to eat better (the ones with the awareness, the will and the means to do so), while others started eating very un-healthy food.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  It is still a useful metric. If we show Diabetes rate has doubled in the past 30 years, and the consumption of something (Cheese?) has tripled in the past 30 years, it may be worth doing a study on the effects of cheese on health. Note I didn't say immediately blame cheese for obesity like the news would...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Consumption has increased across categories. http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf Oils, grains and sugars are the big ones.
chrisseaton 10y ago
I wonder why Americans eat so little lamb compared to beef, chicken and pork? I once had shepherd’s pie in the US and it was made with beef!!
- brianwawok 10y ago
  American here. I grew up not eating lamb. It is a weird thing to me. If I went to a restaurant and saw 2 options "Beef meatballs" or "Lamb meatballs", I would pick Beef because it is familiar. I think Lamb is a more tasty and more healthful food, but I think it is just not being part of our culture we eat it less. On not being part of our culture, I am sure price has something to do with it. Factory mass produced beef is much cheaper than lamb.. but for example Shrimp is also more expensive than beef, and we eat a lot of shrimp..
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    American midwesterner here. There is really only one food I ever ate that had any lamb in it. That's the Kronos GyroKones, from Chicago. Those come in all-beef, beef/lamb, and all-chicken. The Greek-American restaurant that my family frequented had to drive their own truck to Chicago to get their gyro meat. The US just doesn't raise much sheep for food. We grow corn, soy, wheat, alfalfa, and non-alfalfa hay. Then we feed it to cattle, dairy cows, chickens, pigs, layer hens, and turkeys. (The beef cattle and dairy cows might as well be different species, along with the meat chickens and egg-laying hens.) If you count the heads of cattle in the US, and multiply by 7%, that's about the headcount of sheep. It's all due to the profit margins. If the US really wants wool or lamb, it ships them in from Australia or China. Local farmers can't compete unless they brand as "local" or "free range/organic".
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I think a lot of not that fancy restaurants will have lamb chops. Not Applebee's, but the next tier up will start to.
      - 10y ago
sleepychu 10y ago
Gotta love any article with relevant nerd notes!
Shivetya 10y ago
with regards to dark greens coming up the charts. better farming techniques and especially packaging and timely shipping increased the availability. throw in some heavy marketing from the prepackaged crowd and its easy to see why the increase is there.
reddotX 10y ago
meat + potatoes
- xufi 10y ago
  That's a nice diet to have. Add some junk food in too Ice cream/chips and fries. You got yourself a overweight population
clock_tower 10y ago
I wonder what a "monkey with the charts" diet of lamb, carrots, avocados, rye bread, lard, and ice cream would be like. For the diet to be palatable at all, you'd have to go very easy on the lard, but the rest of it actually sounds pretty appetizing.
nervoustwit 10y ago
Lard puts on a pretty lackluster performance. Very disappointed.
- protomyth 10y ago
  Come to the reservations and let me introduce you to Indian Tacos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frybread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frybread
fencepost 10y ago
edit: Ignore this, I'm an idiot and got hypnotized by the pretty graphs without actually reading the FA. The thing that really jumped out at me was the more than tripled cooking oil consumption over that time, without a corresponding decrease in usage of other oils (cooking oil went from 13g to 44.7g; margarine went from 6.5g to 1.6g). That's an enormous change, and it ramped up fast starting in 2000 (13g to 23g 71-88; flattish 21g to 24g 89-99; 28g to 45g 2000-2008; flattish until 2013 with a dip in 2009). Putting it in calorie count numbers, that's a change of +230ish calories in oils over that time period ignoring the less-used ones. In terms of decreases there are really only a couple that seem notable - beef dropping from 2.6 oz/day to 1.8 oz/day and whole milk dropping from 0.7c to 0.16c - neither of which is going to have a significant impact on calories consumed. I wonder what changed at the inflection points on the cooking oil (and shortening, which had a bump during 2000-2007) scales - they somewhat correspond with presidencies, but not directly (e.g. Clinton was still in office in 2000 during the first year of the rapid rise period).
- trelltron 10y ago
  It explains the cooking oil rise in the article as: "a change in reporting to the Census Bureau"
dghughes 10y ago
The great beef to chicken switch of 2004/2005.
- arprocter 10y ago
  I guess all those Chick fil A ads worked
vezycash 10y ago
They used different units of measurement for each category. It makes direct comparison unnecessarily difficult, maybe misleading. Meat->Ounces; Vegetable->cups; Fruits->cups; Grains->ounces; Dairy->cups; and finally, Fat->Grams Let's look at 2008. Meat->Chicken->2.10 ounces; Vegetable->Potatoes->0.59cups; Fruits->Apple->0.11cups->Grains->Wheat Flour->4.07ounces; Fat->Cooking Oil->45.10grams; In other words, they ate more cooking oil than every other category combined! To me, it seems like this was cooked up to support the "Fat is BAD" fad.

112 points by hokkos 10y ago

The visualization makes no sense. You can't go back or forward in time to check out a trend a little closer. It looks good on the surface but in my view it's totally useless to get real information.

jeffwass 10y ago
It's also very hard to see patterns since they live sort each tick in time and are constantly swapping graphs around.
cwal37 10y ago
Yeah, it feels like one of those immediately neat things that falls apart when you look a little closer. The data behind it is quite easy to work with though, and I think there's some better (more interactive, a bit more control) visualizations someone could come up with. I used it myself last year when I was wondering about the emissions associated with different diets (specifically I was curious about what was more effective from a reduction standpoint: being a vegetarian at different points of time vs. owning an electric car. Since the disposition of electricity has changed pretty significantly since the early 90s in some places it varied pretty widely [the informal lit review of food-based emissions was quite a mess though]).
CptMauli 10y ago
if you click on "pause", then you can actually move the time.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  But then it doesn't re-order? That seems to limit the experience.
  - eonw 10y ago
    if it reordered, it would be based on mouse location, as soon as it moved youd be over something else, then it would update... endless loop.
  - avuserow 10y ago
    It does if you click on one of the graphs at that point.
  - jasonjei 10y ago
    What would have been easier to read are snapshots at significant intervals rather than the animation
oarsinsync 10y ago
Pause and mouseover on the graphs. It'll give you a different year depending on where you are on the graph.
nattaylor 10y ago
The animation makes no sense to me, but I think the visualization is extremely informative.

vgoh1 10y ago

Sugar and corn syrup seem like glaring omissions, given that a lot of recent data suggests that sugar is much more of a leading cause of obesity than we once thought. It would also have been nice to see some indication of the processing involved - for example, wheat is there, but what part of the wheat is consumed by humans

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kzrdude 10y ago
Would be interesting to know how the composition of the wheat consumed changed over time. (According to paleo foods people, wheat now contains more gluten per gram, more carbohydrates and less fibers.)
- lostlogin 10y ago
  It's not the composition but the quantity but here is a graph of it. I was trying to find a graph of bread consumption over time, because the decline correlates quite well with the introduction of mass produced factory bread - devoid of flavour imho. http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/wheat/wheats-role-in-the-us-diet.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/wheat/wheats-role-in-th...

projectramo 10y ago

The big surprise for me is how little things have changed when viewed in this manner. The majority of the diet is taken up by the things in the top row, and those haven't changed as dramatically as I had assumed. In my mind there was this exponential explosion in sugar since the 70s, but the big change seems to be the drop in consumption of whole milk.

brianwawok 10y ago
The infusion of food as science is not represented in the chart. For example people eating boiled corn 30 years ago vs Doritos 10 years ago.. both would show up as "corn".
- nacs 10y ago
  Yes I was surprised at the "Potatoes" amount being so high and was thinking people couldn't possibly be consuming that much mashed potatoes at home then realized this probably included French-fries that are included with every meal from the majority of fast-food vendors.
CompelTechnic 10y ago
I tend to wonder if the demonization of fat harmed diets more than it did any good. Whole milk getting substituted out means more carbs getting substituted into the average diet.
ikawe 10y ago
At first I assumed this meant we were eating significantly less dairy, but it seems most of the loss in whole milk was just cannibalized by lower fat milk, coinciding with the low fat craze. Edit: Actually, on actually doing some math, there is a substantial decrease in overall milk consumption. It's just hard for me to visually account for this since there is so much shuffling between the categories. sum_milk= ->(Whole Milk + 2pct Milk + 1pct Milk + Skim Milk) sum_milk(1970)=.91 cups sum_milk(1990)=.74 cups sum_milk(2013)=.53 cups
Evgeny 10y ago
In my mind there was this exponential explosion in sugar since the 70s It was probably not so exponential, it's more like an increased intake of everything. ERS data show that on average, US adults consumed 363 more calories per day in 2009 than we did in 1960. The extra calories are coming from carbohydrate, fat, and protein, and increased intake of all three tightly correlate with increased obesity prevalence. In other words, we're eating more of everything than we did 50 years ago. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2014/04/calorie-intake-and-us-obesity-epidemic.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2014/04/calorie-intake-...

smrtinsert 10y ago

I wish there was only one chart per category.

dudul 10y ago

The problem with this type of study is that it averages all Americans together. I haven't looked in details at the graphs, but let's assume they show that nothing has really changed in 30 years. What does it mean? Maybe all Americans have kept their diet the same, but maybe some people started making a lot of effort to eat better (the ones with the awareness, the will and the means to do so), while others started eating very un-healthy food.

brianwawok 10y ago
It is still a useful metric. If we show Diabetes rate has doubled in the past 30 years, and the consumption of something (Cheese?) has tripled in the past 30 years, it may be worth doing a study on the effects of cheese on health. Note I didn't say immediately blame cheese for obesity like the news would...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Consumption has increased across categories. http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf Oils, grains and sugars are the big ones.

chrisseaton 10y ago

I wonder why Americans eat so little lamb compared to beef, chicken and pork? I once had shepherd’s pie in the US and it was made with beef!!

brianwawok 10y ago
American here. I grew up not eating lamb. It is a weird thing to me. If I went to a restaurant and saw 2 options "Beef meatballs" or "Lamb meatballs", I would pick Beef because it is familiar. I think Lamb is a more tasty and more healthful food, but I think it is just not being part of our culture we eat it less. On not being part of our culture, I am sure price has something to do with it. Factory mass produced beef is much cheaper than lamb.. but for example Shrimp is also more expensive than beef, and we eat a lot of shrimp..
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  American midwesterner here. There is really only one food I ever ate that had any lamb in it. That's the Kronos GyroKones, from Chicago. Those come in all-beef, beef/lamb, and all-chicken. The Greek-American restaurant that my family frequented had to drive their own truck to Chicago to get their gyro meat. The US just doesn't raise much sheep for food. We grow corn, soy, wheat, alfalfa, and non-alfalfa hay. Then we feed it to cattle, dairy cows, chickens, pigs, layer hens, and turkeys. (The beef cattle and dairy cows might as well be different species, along with the meat chickens and egg-laying hens.) If you count the heads of cattle in the US, and multiply by 7%, that's about the headcount of sheep. It's all due to the profit margins. If the US really wants wool or lamb, it ships them in from Australia or China. Local farmers can't compete unless they brand as "local" or "free range/organic".
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I think a lot of not that fancy restaurants will have lamb chops. Not Applebee's, but the next tier up will start to.
    - 10y ago

sleepychu 10y ago

Gotta love any article with relevant nerd notes!

Shivetya 10y ago

with regards to dark greens coming up the charts. better farming techniques and especially packaging and timely shipping increased the availability. throw in some heavy marketing from the prepackaged crowd and its easy to see why the increase is there.

reddotX 10y ago

meat + potatoes

xufi 10y ago
That's a nice diet to have. Add some junk food in too Ice cream/chips and fries. You got yourself a overweight population

clock_tower 10y ago

I wonder what a "monkey with the charts" diet of lamb, carrots, avocados, rye bread, lard, and ice cream would be like. For the diet to be palatable at all, you'd have to go very easy on the lard, but the rest of it actually sounds pretty appetizing.

nervoustwit 10y ago

Lard puts on a pretty lackluster performance. Very disappointed.

protomyth 10y ago
Come to the reservations and let me introduce you to Indian Tacos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frybread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frybread

fencepost 10y ago

edit: Ignore this, I'm an idiot and got hypnotized by the pretty graphs without actually reading the FA. The thing that really jumped out at me was the more than tripled cooking oil consumption over that time, without a corresponding decrease in usage of other oils (cooking oil went from 13g to 44.7g; margarine went from 6.5g to 1.6g). That's an enormous change, and it ramped up fast starting in 2000 (13g to 23g 71-88; flattish 21g to 24g 89-99; 28g to 45g 2000-2008; flattish until 2013 with a dip in 2009). Putting it in calorie count numbers, that's a change of +230ish calories in oils over that time period ignoring the less-used ones. In terms of decreases there are really only a couple that seem notable - beef dropping from 2.6 oz/day to 1.8 oz/day and whole milk dropping from 0.7c to 0.16c - neither of which is going to have a significant impact on calories consumed. I wonder what changed at the inflection points on the cooking oil (and shortening, which had a bump during 2000-2007) scales - they somewhat correspond with presidencies, but not directly (e.g. Clinton was still in office in 2000 during the first year of the rapid rise period).

trelltron 10y ago
It explains the cooking oil rise in the article as: "a change in reporting to the Census Bureau"

dghughes 10y ago

The great beef to chicken switch of 2004/2005.

arprocter 10y ago
I guess all those Chick fil A ads worked

vezycash 10y ago

They used different units of measurement for each category. It makes direct comparison unnecessarily difficult, maybe misleading. Meat->Ounces; Vegetable->cups; Fruits->cups; Grains->ounces; Dairy->cups; and finally, Fat->Grams Let's look at 2008. Meat->Chicken->2.10 ounces; Vegetable->Potatoes->0.59cups; Fruits->Apple->0.11cups->Grains->Wheat Flour->4.07ounces; Fat->Cooking Oil->45.10grams; In other words, they ate more cooking oil than every other category combined! To me, it seems like this was cooked up to support the "Fat is BAD" fad.