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What percentage of the American diet is meat, what percentage chicken, what percentage fish, what percentage is vegetables?
Hello, and thanks for your question asking what percentage of the American diet is meat, what percentage is chicken, what percentage is fish, and what percentage is vegetables? I have found that 5.04% of the American diet is meat, 7.09% is chicken, 1.05% is fish and 8.9% is vegetables. Below you will find a deep dive into my research, along with all the details as to how I came to this conclusion.
OVERVIEW
In order to answer your question I first searched through online articles, academic papers and industry reports for pre-compiled figures. However, I quickly found that this wasn't available. Therefore, for each food type I have used the information I found on the amount of food eaten per year per person on average, to calculate an estimate of what percentage this represents. You'll find my calculations below.
FINDINGS
American adults eat on average 3,770 calories per day. This equates to 1,376,050 annually. Below I have found out how much meat, chicken, fish and vegetables Americans eat on average annually, what this converts to in calories, and what this works out to as a percentage of total calorie intake. To find out how many calories per pound for each food type I used the converter available on Google, which uses data from the US Department of Agriculture.
MEAT
In 2016 Americans ate an average of 106.9 pounds of meat. There are 649 calories per pound of meat. This means that the average American is eating 69,378.1 calories a year in the form of meat. This equates to 5.04% of their diet.
CHICKEN
In 2016 Americans ate an average of 90.1 pounds of chicken. There are 1,084 calories per pound of chicken. This means that the average American is eating 97,668.4 calories a year in the form of meat. This equates to 7.09% of their diet.
FISH
In 2015 (most recent data is available for) Americans ate an average of 15.5 pounds of fish. There are 934 calories per pound of fish. This means that the average American is eating 14,477 calories a year in the form of meat. This equates to 1.05% of their diet. The fact that fish makes up such a small percentage of the American diet is no surprise. This source tells us that just 10% of US adults eat enough fish. It is recommended that actually fish accounts for 20% of the US diet, so on average Americans are way off this. In 2014 all seafood only accounted for 5% of total protein consumption.
VEGETABLES
Americans eat on average 415.4lbs of vegetables each year. There are 295 calories per pound of veg. This means that the average American is eating 122,543 calories a year in the form of vegetables. This equates to 8.9% of their diet. This is below what is recommended, only 8.9% of Americans actually report eating enough vegetables to meet the daily recommendation.
CONCLUSION
Overall I have been able to calculate that 5.04% of the American diet is meat, 7.09% is chicken, 1.05% is fish and 8.9% is vegetables. Americans are generally not eating enough in terms of fish and vegetables.
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