Americans Waste Food and Eat Too Much
Did you know that at the end o the day, Americans chuck away about 1 400 calories worth of food? Whether it’s because fresh produce has gone bad or because we’ve prepared too much food than we can eat, 1 400 calories is enough to nourish a woman on a low-calorie diet. Now that’s a scary though considering that about 1 billion people in the world go hungry every day.
This figure was derived at by Kevin Hall from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, when he investigated the increase of food waste. Hall’s findings were published in the PLoS One journal.
Hall says that with the recent increase in food prices, many people are beginning to wonder if there’s actually a food shortage in the world. But so far little research has gone into food wastage to determine if there really is a shortage. Since 1974 there was been a gradual increase of food production in the US, but there has also been a gradual increase in body weight over the same period.
“The calculated progressive increase of food waste suggests that the US obesity epidemic has been the result of a ‘push effect’ of increased food availability and marketing with Americans being unable to match their food intake with the increased supply of cheap, readily available food,” the study say. “Thus, addressing the oversupply of food energy in the US may help curb the obesity epidemic as well as decrease food waste, which has profound environmental consequences.”
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