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Visualizing The World’s Calorie Consumption [Infographic]

November 10th, 2011 |

Author: Admin

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.

Love it? Embed it!

<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.foodservicewarehouse.com/calorie-viz/"><img src="http://blog.foodservicewarehouse.com/files/2011/11/launch-infographic.jpg" alt="A visualization of the 20 highest and lowest calorie consuming countries compared with those same countries’ percent of income spent on food. Built by Food Service Warehouse." title="Click to launch" width="350" height="350" /></a><br />Source: <a href="http://www.foodservicewarehouse.com">Food Service Warehouse</a></p>

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.