What We Eat
1,922 pounds of food a year, including:
- 29 pounds of French fries
- 23 pounds of Pizza
- 24 pounds of ice cream
- 53 gallons of soda (about a gallon a week)
- 2,700 calories a day
Full chart courtesy of Sarah Kliff.
Health Care Policy and Reform Insights | NCPA
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Recognition and Awards
How shameful.
This is a real wakeup call.
Wow! That might explain why I’m seeing more people with too much junk in the trunk!
I think I’m below average on ice cream and soda. But, pizza and fries… That’s where things get tricky.
Sounds like what John Belushi consumed in Animal House…food fight?
So, 76 out of 1,922 pounds of annual food consumption (about 4 percent) is the stuff that activists like to rail against, and roughly 4 liters of the recommended 21 liters of weekly fluid intake (20 percent) is soda, probably soda with limited or no calories.
Can we please stop having our attention diverted by people who want to control individual behavior by claiming that it is a health issue because the wrong kind of food can kill?
@Linda
It’s not about the weight of the food that’s being eaten, but rather, the calorie content, amount of unhealthy ingredients, etc. This small percentage of overall food intake has been associated with significant health problems (obesity, diabetes, etc.), so as a matter of public health it makes sense to try to address this problem. One can certainly disagree as to the method of how this is done, but if your answer is personal responsibility, I would ask you why people aren’t being personally responsible now.
The fact is that we as a society are responsible (in our current system) for paying for the high health costs that the obese are likely to incur in their lifetime, so as a matter of policy there is an interest in trying to help these people make healthier choices. I suppose we could make obese people pay a lot more for their health care/insurance, but this doesn’t seem to be a decision that we as a nation are comfortable with.
Honestly, this paranoid ranting about the government trying to control behavior is a little excessive, and instead of making ideological objections, we should work to find the most effective solution to address a major driver of health care spending in the US.