Technically the graph is of per capita added sugar availability and isn't adjusted for loss (due to spoilage, plate waste, etc.), but it meshes with NHANES survey data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9434277/
>In conclusion, over the 18 year time span, from 2001 to 2018, added sugars intake declined significantly among younger adults (19–50 years) in the U.S., regardless of race and ethnicity (i.e., similar for Black and White individuals), income level, physical activity level or body weight status, and declines were mainly due to reductions in added sugars intake from sweetened beverages (primarily soft drinks and fruit drinks). These trends coincide with the evolving emphasis in the DGA on reducing added sugars intake and the increasing focus on population-level interventions aimed at reducing intakes.
It breaks my brain, but on the "Holy hell, that's a TON of extra calories for the entire population to be consuming."
That graph shows almost 30 pounds of sugar consumption differential between 1970 and 2000. That's roughly 15 pounds of bodyweight per year every year in calories. That's a HUGE amount of body fat packed on that has to be explicitly removed.
In addition, even in 2020, there's a difference of somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of sugar consumption relative to 1970 which is roughly 2.5-5 lbs of extra body fat every year. That's 4-8% more calories consumed by the population every year. That's a LOT.
If there is no corresponding decrease in caloric consumption in some other category (remember: there was a big anti-fat push which switched everything to turbo amounts of sugar) then it's no wonder there is an obesity problem in the US.
Side note: my favorite anecdata on this is iced tea in Austin, TX. In the early 1990s, the default iced tea serving was a 32oz glass of unsweetend iced tea. When I came back in the late 2010s, the default is now a 16oz glass of sweet tea which is actually a hyper dose of sugar. Think of the gigantic amount of extra calories that people eating out are now consuming.
It's an extra 4,300 calories per month. Or 145 calories per day. Or about 35 minutes worth of light walking.
Take an apple or orange juice for example. To eat the equivalent amount of fructose (or calories) that is contained in an orange juice, you will need to eat a lot of fruit, and like feel full before finishing, while the equivalent juice doesn't even register.
Edit: It doesn’t appear to have had much effect per the data on the same website [1]. I suppose there are a number of reasons why it might not have had an effect on the top level numbers, though.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
The idea that all calories are the same is not even held by people who say "everything is just about calories". Ask them what you need to build muscle and they will say protein. Suddenly not all calories are the same.
Fructose is does not stop hunger as much and is more easily stored as fat.
Alcohol is also very caloric, and the human body can process small amounts of it. But replacing cola with alcohol won't have the expected effect either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-total-daily-smo...
Also, I wonder about fiber and other carbohydrates. Fiber moderates carbohydrates of all types and prevents glucose spikes (and crashes). and other processed carbs/starches can be very similar to simple sugars - breads, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, etc.
But people don't become obese overnight. People ate much more sugar in 2000-2010, and those people, if not dead now, are still contributing to the obese rate today.
Also this graph shows people are still eating more sugar in 2021 than in 1970. Just not as much as in 2000.
No one says sugar is the only reason causing obesity. But this graph doesn't debunk the correlation between sugar and obsesity either.
"In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011). In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011). In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972). In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011)."
[Source](http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...)
But two decades of "fat doesn't make you fat" probably didn't help, and neither did the continued trend of increasing empty calories from cheap vegetable oils, especially soybean oil: https://thedietwars.com/why-are-americans-getting-fatter-a-f...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/59529/indicators_goa...
>Added fats and oils provide more calories per day for the average American than any other food group
EDIT: I think most Americans would be shocked to discover that their "favorite" food group is added fat/oil.
The obvious answer for why portion sizes are increasing is that food keeps getting cheaper, in particular relative to other costs in the food service industry. The traditional formula for restaurant pricing is 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 labour and 1/3 overheads; if your food costs have decreased over time but your rent and labour costs continue to increase, it's natural to increase portion sizes to maintain the appearance of value-for-money. The same would apply (to a moderately lesser extent) to convenience foods sold at retail. This has a quite drastic anchoring effect - when you normalise excessively large portions, reasonable portions seem meagre.
So we should expect people to continue to get fatter as we get better at engineering food.
Note that I don't think that engineered food is inherently bad, just that today most food are engineered to be unhealthy because that is better for sales.
You can note that average male height in the US continued increasing up until the late 1980s.
That points to a general caloric deficit up until roughly 1990--which is roughly where we claim the "obesity epidemic" kicks off.
Also, a graph of sugar doesn't include caloric fillers like "soy protein" which now seems to be in everything.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328241/americans-average-weight...
Sugar is much less of a problem if you are also being very active on a daily basis. For example, your work contains physical component or maybe you are walking a lot.
So while the graph is showing dropping amount of sugar consumption, it is not taking account for also falling healthy limit of sugar consumption, ie. the fact that we should be eating even less overall given falling activity levels.
And this is especially true for kids whose activity levels fallen dramatically since smartphones.
I can tell that the same amount of sugar has much less effect on me since I lost weight and started running a lot every day. And I know this because I put on a continuous glucose monitor from time to time and can observe sugar spikes from foods to debug my diet.
You can learn a lot wearing CGM like the fact that my local Starbucks was serving me lactose-free milk regardless of what I ordered. You can tell lactose-free milk on a CGM because of a huge glucose spike. The reason? "Lactose free" is misleading. In reality they don't remove lactose. Lactose-free milk is obtained by adding to milk an enzyme that converts lactose to glucose and galactose which can be easily absorbed by the body and cause blood glucose spikes.
If you want to add that to an article about how "100 pounds of sugar a year with half the activity because people people are playing xbox too much" that's fine - this could be a part of that conversation.
Nothing wrong with the bigger conversations... but also nothing wrong with data points like this for the sake of data points.
Thereby leaving the milk lactose free... Lactase, the enzyme in question, is produced by those who are not lactose intolerant and results in the same quantity of sugar though perhaps without so much "spike".
...how?
Like, seriously how? The graph is about sugar. It doesn't have obese or similar words in it.
If there is a graph of "U.S. citizen's smartphone usage trend from 2010-2021", are you going to say it's misleading a bit because it doesn't take sugar into account...?
The truth is that obesity is more complex problem but sugar definitely one of the important drivers.
One way obesity is a complex problem is that in most people it is delayed by decades. Our bodies can take a lot of punishment for a long time before they become disregulated enough to start gaining weight.
There's a very good reason why sugar is so "addictive" -- it's good for you! It's an obscenely easily digestible source of energy, whose products are used very easily by the cells. In the case of fructose, its consumption is relatively more insulin-friendly than the glucose-heavy starches. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.
Seriously "addictive" sugary foods are psychologically problematic usually for other reasons. Pure cane sugar is not very addictive when consumed alone. Try it.
In reality, sugar is just straight-up bad in anything resembling the quantities we eat it, and we should not. It's addictive because there's very little of it in nature and it's high energy density. Therefore it makes sense to seek out. In our synthetic world, we can make as much as we want and eat it whenever we want.
The reward system exhibits unconstrained positive feedback.
As a counter-example there are tons of things that 'feel good' but are destructive, like opioids and cigarettes. Things that are addictive aren't de facto good for you. In fact they're usually very bad for you because they overload your reward feedback network.
Fat has 2.25x times the energy per gram that sugar does.
Sugar on its own isn't addictive and isn't a necessary nor sufficient ingredient for hyperpalatability. Foods can be hyperpalatable without sugar, and in fact most (~70%) hyperpalatable foods have their hyperpalatability driven by fat and sodium:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9672140/
> The availability of HPF in the US food sysltem has expanded substantially over the past 30 years. The current US food supply is highly saturated with HPF, which our findings indicate comprised almost 70 % of available foods as of 2018. The growing availability of HPF over time, particularly HPF high in fat and Na, may have resulted from the reformulation of existing food products in the food system to be hyper-palatable. Thus, expanding HPF availability may be one key contributor to the obesogenic food environment in the US. Given potential consequences for population health, policy-level action is needed to address the presence of HPF in the food system. Policy may focus on limiting the nutrient thresholds allowed in foods to be below HPF thresholds (e.g. foods should contain <25 % kcal from fat and <0·30 % g from Na).
looks like a decade+ long decline trend abruptly stopped there and miraculously stayed flat for 20+ years
PS. A graph showing the total amount of daily calories from carbs, not just sugar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-caloric-supply-deri...
I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
>I wish we could get a graph of fat intake of the last hundred years.
The data in the chart is sweetener "availability" and not really consumption, though it can be assumed that if less is available per capita, then less is consumed as well (per capita). But, this data doesn't explains the increase in obesity since 1970. this might be because of data being an average. Stats like p90 sugar consumption might show a better correlation with obesity rates and hence may be more meaningful than per capita sweetener availability.
