American Annual Food Consumption

According to a report by the USDA, Americans are eating a lot. The aggregate food supply in 2000 (the total produced and imported less exported) averaged to 3,800 calories per day per person. As I've written on, a substantial amount of this not actually eaten, but thrown away. The USDA estimates that 1100 calories per person per day are wasted, leaving 2,700 as actually consumed (recall the "based on a 2,000 calorie-diet" nutrition labels). This is 800 calories above the average in the '50s and 500 above that in the '70s. The composition has changed over time too.

We are eating a lot more oil -- 60% more than in the '50s.  An average household of four is eating 40 gallons of added oil each year, which doesn't count fats found naturally in foods such as whole meat, nuts, and dairy.

Annual consumption of added oils for a family of four.

Added sugars are also on the rise: a 40% increase over five decades.  Cane and beet sugars consumption dropped by a third, but were more than compensated by a 8-fold increase in corn syrup.  A household consumes on average 600 lb. of added sugars each year, with 22% of it from soda. This is nearly a thousand 12-oz bottles of pop.

Fruits and even vegetables are also eaten more now than in the '50s, but just by 20%.  This reflects the overall trend of more everything rather than healthier foods.  Meat consumption increased by 40%, which is driven largely by a more-than-tripling of chicken.  Each family consumes 1 + 1/3 pig and 3/5 of a cow each year, as

well as over 100 chickens.

When adding the fish to the total, each household consumes 780 lb of meat each year.  Assuming the same meat-vs-total-weight ratios of pork and beef, this corresponds to an equivalent of eight people.

As Fat Knowledge has mentioned several times, the whole Food Miles idea is overblown.  The report also shows that its cost low.  It average 4% of the total cost of the food -- the same amount as advertising.  The largest costs are labor (38%) and farm value (19%).

Wasted Food

Science Friday recently had an episode about Americans' eating habits. For one, we don't eat enough fruit and vegetables. But also, we waste a lot of food: 27% by the estimate of one of the guests. This is similar to the third of food thrown away by Britons; the difference is probably largely in the methods of estimation and definitions. Since food production take no small amount of fuel, the SciFri guest estimates that 2% of all energy use in the U.S. goes to food that is thrown out. This not may seem like a lot, but there being 50 states, it is equivalent to the entire energy consumption of the "average state." Or as they say on SciFri, more energy than the output of the whole ethanol industry.

Cane Toads

Cane toads, also known as Giant Neotropical Toad, are five-inch long creatures with poisonous skin glands, originally from Latin America. Until 1935, they were not found in Australia. That year, they were introduced to control a beetle infestation, and have themselves become a plague. You can see this all, in stunning clarity, in Cane Toads: The Conquest (in 3D!). In the documentary, they cover a variety of methods the Australians are trying to control the toads.

However, some people think that the toads are a resource. As covered in the Outback edition of Bizarre Foods, there are clubs that go out at night and cook frog legs, taking care not to put any poison in the food. A game meat processor is even hoping to export the frog legs to the Chinese.

The frogs are not only a possible source of food, but also of drugs. The venom can be extracted, dried, and then smoked. The frogs can also be simply licked, although the effect is not as pronounced. The cane toads are not alone in their ability to create "sense of wonder and well-being". Many poisonous amphibians, including several found in the US, can produce similar effects, and "a healthy toad can fetch up to $8" in California. However, one should be careful about entering this trade, as a proposed law in South Carolina would "sentence violators [of amphibian trafficking] to 60 hours of public service in a local zoo."

And interestingly, humans are not the only species to use toads as a drug. There is at least one story about a dog repeatedly licking frogs, and then wandering about, all "disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed." The toads are incredibly tough, as evidenced by cane toad that was swallowed by a dog and hung out in its stomach for 40 minutes. It now lives in the animal hospital where the dog was taken and given an injection to vomit it up.

Indestructible, poisonous, and everywhere. Clearly the only way to get rid of the plague of frogs is to tell Moses that we'll let his people go.

I'll have ham — hold the pig.

Fat Knowledge has written about PETA's competition to grow lab meat that doesn't use animals. Well, there has been some serious progress now. As reported in the Sphere, scientists in the Netherlands have used cells from a live pig to grow pork muscle tissue in a Petri dish. This fixes the usual vegetarian's ethical issue, plus a bonus on sustainability because the meat can be grown more efficiently in a lab than on an animal. Unfortunately, they don't know if it hold up to bacon or ribs, since

the scientists had to admit to reporters that they don't know if their creation is flavorsome, because laboratory regulations forbid them from tasting anything they create.

So who knows if it's just going to taste like spam from a lab, or if it will be a revolution in gastronomy.

Losing Weight by Eating Less

The New York Times writes about a study on weight loss. The results: a diet soda is better than a treadmill. Researchers worked with several groups of people and monitored calories burned and weight loss, and found that lots of exercise did not reduce weight by much. The far-more-important factor was the amount of calories consumed.

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

There was also an interesting point made about what form the calories you burn come from, depending on the level of exertion.

While high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat... “Heart rates of between 105 and 134” beats per minute, Carey said, represent the fat-burning zone.

The article does go out to tell about all the other benefits exercise brings, so even if one doesn't lose weight, it's still healthy:

Most [subjects] became notably healthier, increasing their aerobic capacity, decreasing their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and, the authors write, achieving “an acute exercise-induced increase inpositive mo od,” leading the authors to conclude that, “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower than expected exercise-induced weight loss.”

Population Control

The Columbia University magazine has an interesting article about overpopulation in this season's issue. On the one hand, population control seems like a good thing:

Now, after decades of unprecedented population growth, the land is running out. In southern Uganda, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, farm communities are bumping up against one another and against dry lands, mountains, and rain forests... Other farmers are subdividing their parents’ land, reducing the typical-sized farm plot in some parts of Africa to half an acre.

“That’s too small to feed a family,” says economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who directs Columbia’s Earth Institute. The only way to break this cycle of overpopulation and misery, Sachs writes in Common Wealth, is for wealthy nations to provide birth control to the world’s poor.

However, any mention of population control is immediately going to bring up memories of the last time large-scale birth control was attempted, during the '60s and '70s. China's "one-child" policy was one of the most innocuous methods used.

Western family planners in the 1960s and 1970s, in their zeal to slow population growth and to spur development in Asia, supported forced sterilizations, slum demolitions, and other abuses.

The article has a lot of details the sudden population increase in Africa and Asia, the history of the birth control agencies and processes, and how more kindly methods of birth control (for the purpose of slowing population growth rather than focusing only women's rights) may become a major issue again.

In a different news story, India is looking into an untried birth control idea: having Indians watch more television.

In rural India where birthrates are high, many people live in homes without electricity. Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has called the country to redouble its efforts to bring electricity to the rural population so these people can plug in TV sets and watch late-night soap operas rather than have sex.