Visualizing The World’s Calorie Consumption [Infographic]
by admin • November 10, 2011 • Industry News, Infographics • 10 Comments
When we were building out our competitive eating infographic, we dealt a lot with calorie consumption. One of the prominent features of that infographic was the average daily recommended calorie consumption. In In our research, we loved the way this differed amongst different types of people. This included weight, gender, activity level, and finally, geography.
Thus, our next study was born. We wanted to create an interactive display of daily calorie consumption for the extreme 20 countries in the world, and so we did. But, we wanted to add another dimension altogether to see if we can make this data even more interesting. This is where the average percent of income spent on food came in. By mashing these two data pieces together, we believe we’ve created a really interesting comparison.
Click below to launch our study, or read below for some highlights, source information, and an easy way to embed it.
Visualizing the World’s Calorie Consumption
Source: Food Service Warehouse
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Some Interesting Highlights
Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that of the countries that are on the low-end of calorie consumption, nearly all spend more than half of their income. And conversely, the high calorie consumption countries almost all spend less than 25% of their income, with the top 5 all under 15%.
Some other highlights:
- Romania is a big outlier for the high-consumption countries, spending almost 35% of their income on food.
- 14 of the 20 lowest-consumption countries are located in Africa.
- Not one of the lowest-consumption countries is located in Europe.
- Angola spends a whopping 80% of their income on food.
- Conversely, The United States of America spends just 6.9% of their income on food.
Our Data
The calories consumed by country (per capita) data comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). The percent income spent on food comes from various household expenditure surveys (conducted independently by country by various research bodies) which are the most useful and reliable measure of this type of countrywide statistic.
Calories consumed by country
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Income Percentage
Most countries from this study
Sierra Leone
Palestinian Territories
Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Philippeans
Eritrea
Tajikistan
Burundi
Mozambique
Rwanda
Tanzania
Timor Leste
Yemen
Angola
Ethiopia
Zambia
Malta
Luxembourg
Chad
Why isn’t Spain included?
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I have always wondered if the “income spent on food” for the U.S. includes money spent eating out (vs groceries). With Americans eating so much of their food “out” this would really affect the number. Do the sources indicate what it includes? Thank you for the great graph.
Is this truly consumption data or food disappearance data? It looks suspiciously like the numbers seen for food produced in the US, not necessarily “consumed”. Americans are thought to waste about 25% of our food supply.
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Hi. This is a great graphic but please be true to the data source:
The data for the US, and probably for many countries included, reflect food availability, not food consumed. There are survey data on food consumption in the USA that indicate actual intake, available from the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC. Overall, US men eat closer to 2400 kcal/d and women a bit less. THis is a bit dated now but
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhanes/databriefs/calories.pdf
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Hello,
I am citing your infographic in a paper of mine. Thus, I am wondering who is the Author of this? I know FSW created it, however is there an author?
Thanks
i think this nice but i was wondering if you couldgive this in kilograms thx ^_^
Hi Annie,
Unfortunately we do not have that data