Why Americans Got Fatter

The interactive chart is at Civileats (HT: Yglesias), but the snapshot is pretty informative:


On the left is what we ate in 1970.


On the right is what we ate in 2007.




The differences are: 200 calories of added fats, 200 calories of grains, 50 of added sugars, and 20 more calories each in meat and fruit. Getting rid of rounding, that’s more than 500 calories every day, or a pound a week. Now, granted, that’s available calories (production – trade – non-restaurant waste) rather than actual consumption. Still quite the picture
Almost half of that change happened between 1980-1990 and more than half since 1990. The real change I want to figure out is what happened in the data between 1999 and 2000. Between those two years we added 100 calories of added fat alone.