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© Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg NewsEnriched, and ingrained.
If you took a little bit of dairy, added a slightly larger serving of vegetables, fruits and proteins, and then piled on as many superfluous oils, fats, and grains as possible, you'd have a mock, but also a reasonably accurate picture of the modern American diet.

The Americans on average eat nearly 2,600 calories a day, almost 500 more than they did thirty years ago, according to the USDA, which uses food production data, along with spoilage and waste estimates, to approximate per capita consumption.

That increase alone should be enough to raise an eyebrow (or three hundred million), but what's most troubling isn't the increase in our caloric intake, so much as its make-up. Over 92% of the uptick in per capita caloric intake since 1970 is attributable to oils, fats, and grains. Thirty years ago, the combination was responsible for roughly 37% of our daily calories; today, it makes up closer to 47% of our diet.

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What exactly we should glean from that reality isn't entirely clear. Oils, fats, and grains, aren't inherently bad. In fact, there's good reason to believe that many fats and oils are actually just the opposite. And grains, despite a growing narrative about their potential harms, come in all shapes and sizes - some are protein-rich, like quinoa, while others offer little, if any, nutritional value, such as enriched white flour.


Comment: Grains - A summary of some problems:The food pyramid over the last 30 years has placed grains as the foundation of a "healthy diet". The only science that this is based on is the "science of economics".... An oxymoron if ever there was one. Here are some facts:
  • Whole grains are very low in Vitamin C and beta carotene. Vitamin B6 is poorly absorbed
  • Grains contain low levels of essential fats, having too much Omega 6 and too little Omega 3 fatty acids, and so are pro-inflammatory.
  • Phytate levels in grain reduces the absorption of many minerals, including zinc, iron
  • Exorphins -It is known that these foods contain exorphins, which are molecules that have opioid (morphine-like) activity. The authors speculate that early humans started to eat these foods because of these exorphins, that is, by eating these foods, it made them feel good. They write "The fact that overall health declined when they [i.e. grains] were incorporated into the diet suggests that their rapid, almost total replacement of other foods was due more to chemical reward than to nutritional reasons." They go on to say "Civilisation arose because reliable, on-demand availability of dietary opioids to individuals changed their behaviour, reducing aggression, and allowed them to become tolerant of sedentary life in crowded groups, to perform regular work and to be more easily subjugated by rulers." (Journal of the Australasian College of Nutrition and Environmental Medicine G. Wadley and A Martin, Dept of Zoology, University of Melbourne, Vol 19 No 1 April 2000)
  • Zonulin - is protein that separates tight junctions between cells of the wall of the digestive tract leading to "leaky gut". Increased levels of zonulin are a contributing factor to the development of celiac disease and other autoimmune disorders such as insulin dependent diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. (The Lancet, Vol 355 Issue 9214,pp1518 - 1519, 29 April 2000 "Zonulin, a newly discovered modulator of intestinal permeability, and its expression in coeliac disease." Fasano et al )
  • Gluten - is a natural protein found in certain grains such as wheat (including spelt), rye, barley and oats. Gluten makes up 80 percent of all proteins found in wheat, and is responsible for giving dough its elastic quality. There are 12 fractions of gliadin in gluten, which are polypeptides of varying length. Alpha-gliadin is the longest and the only one tested for sensitivity to determine whether people are actually sensitive to gluten. So if you are not sensitive to that one fraction or protein and the villi in your gut are not completely denuded, you may be diagnosed as not having a problem with gluten. And yet grains and gluten may be a problem.

But to call a calorie a calorie is misguided - especially if one is highly processed, or refined - and it's easy enough to conjecture about the kind of calories we're consuming more of nowadays. It's likely of little coincidence, for instance, that the two food groups Americans are eating more and more of - added fats and oils, and flour and cereal products - are the same ones that are found in most processed and fast foods.

"It's hard to pinpoint why exactly it's increased," Jeanine Bentley, the social science analyst responsible for the USDA's food availability database, said in an interview.
"But it probably comes from an increase in processed and fast foods."
Bentley isn't blindly holding her finger to the wind. A 2013 study by USDA's Economic Research Service seems to confirm her suspicion. Fast food is a much more integral part of the American diet than it was in the 1970s. Between 1977 and 1978, fast food accounted for just over 3% of calories in the US diet; between 2005 and 2008, that share skyrocketed to over 13%.

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Americans are also spending almost three times the recommended amount on refined grains, and many times more than the recommended amount on frozen and refrigerated entrees, according to the same study.

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The sum of all those calories, which appear to largely be the wrong kind of calories, is an ever-expanding American waistline. Americans aged 20 and older are now almost three times as likely to be obese as they were only 30 years ago - the increase is enough to afford the U.S. the unenviable distinction of being the most obese major country in the world.

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That distinction is that its more than merely a health conundrum; it's a full-fledged economic problem, too. As of 2008, the annual medical costs alone of obesity amounted to almost $150 billion, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Some, including food journalist Mark Bittman, believe the total annual costs of the epidemic in the US could now exceed $1 trillion.

About the author

Roberto A. Ferdman is a reporter for Wonkblog covering food policy, consumer business, and Latin American economics. He was previously a staff writer at Quartz. He's half Argentine, half Iranian, was born in Boston, but raised in Puerto Rico.