Current Research Staying Healthy Today Interviews Staying Healthy Today Radio Transcripts 2010-03-04 Jean C. Buzby, PhD - Chronic Disease in the U.S. and A Century of Food Consumption Patterns
2010-03-04 Jean C. Buzby, PhD - Chronic Disease in the U.S. and A Century of Food Consumption Patterns
Century of Food Consumption Patterns
An Interview with USDA Economist Jean C. Buzby, PhD
March 4, 2010, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our mission is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.
Today's show topic is "Guess Who's Turning 100? Tracking a Century of American Eating and It's Connection to Chronic Disease."
Our guest today is Dr. Jean Buzby, an economist for the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Welcome Dr. Buzby and thank you so much for being on the show today.
JEAN C. BUZBY: It's my pleasure to join you.
KIRK HAMILTON: So tell me, I guess we all know what the United States Department of Agriculture is, but what is the Economic Research Service branch or its function?
JEAN C. BUZBY: The Economic Research Service is a primary source of economic information and research in the US Department of Agriculture. With over 350 employees based here in our nation's capitol, the ERS conducts a research program to inform public and private decision making on economic and policy issues involving food, farming, natural resources, and rural development.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well how about then - you're an economist, correct? Is that what you got your PhD in?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yes. Right.
KIRK HAMILTON: So we're talking about food. So why do we have an economist talking about our food supply?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well essentially we are all trained to study the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services including food and how we allocate them among competing uses. And it's also part of our mission area. We have five major areas of research, one of which is the healthy well nourished population.
KIRK HAMILTON: I became involved at your site and I got to give kudos to the government here. There's so much good information about diet and nutrition. I'm working on a book project called "Staying Healthy in the Fast Lane" and one of the things I was trying to find was dietary patterns over the last century, and lo and behold, somehow I get to the food availability programs you have there and then the food consumption for loss and waste. Anyway there's data on meat consumption, dairy consumption, vegetables, fruit, just about everything over the last century. And it was very enlightening for me. And there was two terms when you look on these graphs and charts. One is food availability and the other is food consumption adjusted for waste and loss and I am wondering if you can separate those two for me when you look at it. Like let's say you have so many pounds of grain available per person versus the same thing when you're talking about food consumption adjusted for loss and waste.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Okay. Well actually all of the data in our food availability data system is food availability. That's a per capita amount of food available for human consumption. It's a very popular proxy for human consumption. And each year my colleagues and I add together the production and imports of individual foods and subtract exports and farm and industrial uses of those foods to arrive at approximation of what is the average available for consumption. And so it's a popular proxy for consumption and usually we try and emphasize that it's really food availability data and not actual consumption. But sometimes we use the term consumption after we have fully defined our data series.
KIRK HAMILTON: So then you say food consumption adjusted for loss and waste. That's usually less, correct?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yes. We have three data series within our series. The food availability is the core and the loss adjusted food availability data system is a second series which removes all sorts of losses in the farm, retail and consumer levels.
KIRK HAMILTON: So that's closer to what the person would actually eat, correct?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Exactly. And what we try and do with that loss adjusted data is to estimate daily calories and daily MyPyramid serving equivalents.
KIRK HAMILTON: Why did the government start doing this in 1909?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well actually the food availability data series was first compiled in the 1940s. It started as a check on America's readiness for the second World War. And then it evolved to become a major component of the nation's nutrition monitoring system. In 1941 the USDA published the first comprehensive data system to assess the availability of 18 commodities. And then they kept adding commodities. And so by 1949 information on food availability back to 1909 had been compiled and added to the data series. And today we have our data system cover several hundred commodities.
KIRK HAMILTON: Yeah, well I was intrigued that it was like a century. When I started last year 1909 to 2009 I go, "That's exactly what I want." I wanted to see the food pattern of the United States because I had my philosophical bent, on what might be the problems with chronic diseases. And that's the reason I'm even talking to you today, is that I believe that there's five or six different food consumption patterns that have changed not only in the United States but the world that have set the stage for chronic disease.
So I want to get into one of them and that's calories, because everybody kind of has a feel of what that is. So I took these (facts) off the site. In 1909 the average available calories was about 3500, and then in 1970 it went down to 3200, and now it's come back up, well the last one, close to last one in 2004 was 3900. So that's the available calories.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yes. Actually the data that you just mentioned are from the Nutrient Availability Series which is compiled by our sister agency, the Centers for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, using our food availability data estimates. And that what you just mentioned does suggest a clear upward trend in calories. We also have a second data system or series in our system which I mentioned earlier, the loss adjusted food availability data that more fully accounts for all the different losses along the food marketing and consumption chain, and so the calories there per day are actually lower. With that series, which only goes back to 1970, it shows that the average American consumed 2674 calories per day in 2008, up from 2157 calories per day in 1970.
KIRK HAMILTON: That exactly correlates. There was just an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition where they studied 1970 estimated caloric intake, and then they compared it to 2000, and there was a 500 calorie increase in adults and that related to about almost 19 pounds of greater weight in the adult of 2000 compared to 1970. And they took children and it was a 350 calorie difference in that range. And they probably, I mean I guess they got the data from you guys.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yeah, actually they probably didn't because we can't break down into different demographic categories. Our estimates are for the average American.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well the way I look at it is if you consume 500 extra calories a day, than let's say somebody in 1970, that's more than a pound a week of excess calories because a pound is 3500 calories, correct?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right.
KIRK HAMILTON: So it's not rocket science to see why we're overweight.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right.
KIRK HAMILTON: So it broken down into certain food groups and I would like you to comment on them because this is really the crux of my - one of the main premises in my book, these four or five dietary changes that I think come from what I call urbanization. Or industrialization is where you move from your agrarian society and you start centering around cities and you have more processed food, etc., etc. And with that comes calories and processed foods and dietary changes that occur. And when I looked at this, alright let's just take from 1970 to 2000. First of all, why did they throw in nuts with eggs and meat?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right. I don't really have a good answer for that. We combined meat, poultry, fish, eggs and nuts together into one group so that our data users can directly compare MyPyramid equivalents from that group against federal dietary recommendations. So in essence the group that we have mirrors the one that's in the 2005 dietary guidelines for Americans so we can see if Americans are meeting or exceeding federal dietary recommendations. I want to just point out that in the custom reports you can obtain data for that group as a whole or for individual subgroups like total meats or individual foods like eggs.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well I've spent hours playing the game. I mean I have - I was going to, in fact I did it last night again because I keep wanting to have the most updated figures. So I warn anybody that gets on their that's kind of an information junkie, it's great information but you can get lost in it.
Well let's take total meats for example. When I looked over the last century, total meat's have gone up, red meat's gone down but poultry's gone up, but still the total amount of this more calorie dense food is still gone up over the last century until about early 2000s.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Uh-huh.
KIRK HAMILTON: And so I guess what I'm getting at is we have these extra calorie sources. Where do you think they come from?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well our data breakdown, all the different calorie sources, and you know I can't just speculate. Our data shows for the meats as you said, chicken is climbing and it's steadily gaining on beef. And it's almost at the same level. So for the meat group, that's one source of where the calorie climb was.
KIRK HAMILTON: So dairy's gone up as well and I know total milk's gone down and I know cheese has skyrocketed.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right. Cheese availability has skyrocketed, growing from 11.4 pounds per person in 1970 to 31 pounds per person in 2008. And much of that growth was the spread of Italian and Mexican eateries in the United States and new packaging in convenient forms such as string cheese for lunch boxes.
KIRK HAMILTON: Right. So things got slid in there and people - I know, I joke. I actually joke with my patients about this but, for example, like when I was younger you had to ask for cheese to be put on your burrito or your salad or whatever it is. Now you have to ask the reverse if you don't want it. I mean it's put on everything. And that's a hidden calorie source. I have here the data that dairy's gone up from 155 calories (in 1970) to 257 calories per day in 2008. So that's one area that's gone up.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Uh-huh.
KIRK HAMILTON: Fruit kind of hung the same, a little higher. Vegetables kind of hung the same between 1970 and 2008. So now we're going to talk about flours and cereals and those are the carbohydrate groups there.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right.
KIRK HAMILTON: And there's obviously a big jump.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right. And you also - I know you were having an extra curiosity about the whole grain consumption and unfortunately our data system does not provide good estimates for whole grains or any sweet-fat calories added to the grain products. But occasionally for selected studies we do estimate the amount of whole grains consumed. For example I wanted to share with you a paper that I published with two colleagues here at the Economic Research Service, Hodan Farah Wells and Gary Vocke. It's titled "Possible Implications for US Agriculture from Adoption of Select Dietary Guidelines" and we looked at what would happen if Americans met the whole grain recommendation. But anyway that paper estimated that the average American consumed 8.2 ounce equivalents per day in 2003 compared to the guidelines of 6 ounce equivalents. So that's over the recommendation for 2000 calorie diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: Now is that of just any grain?
JEAN C. BUZBY: That's total grains for a 2000 calorie diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: Right.
JEAN C. BUZBY: And than an ounce equivalent by the way is like a slice of bread or a half a cup of cooked rice. And then also for the first time the 2005 version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans which comes out every year - every five years, excuse me. They recommended consumption of at least half of the recommended total grain intake as whole grains and we estimated that the average American ate only 0.9 grain equivalents of whole grains per day in 2003. That's less than one-third of the whole grain recommendation for 2000 calorie diet. So in other words, when you follow the dietary guidelines, people were over-consuming total grains and under-consuming whole grains.
KIRK HAMILTON: And it's a good possibility, though you don't have the data, that most of those are refined grains. Because I have one chart, I believe it's from the Economic Research Services that says approximately, I believe it was in 2000, 85% of the grains we consumed are refined grain and only 15% were whole grains. The problem with this is I think we have a carb phobia in this country, and it scares people away even from good carbohydrate because the refined grains are going to have, what I call - you said it - but ‘sweet-fat' calories added to them. They're the confectionary foods. It's hard to find a whole grain, let's say a true whole grain muffin. Or a whole grain piece of bread, you can't eat 20 pieces (whole grain bread). So that's a hard one because to me that says there's too much refined grain being consumed and it gives carbohydrate a bad name unfortunately, but that's my personal opinion.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Luckily industry has responded by making available more whole grain products including white whole wheat which kind of has the mouth feel of white grain.
KIRK HAMILTON: What's white whole wheat?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yeah, it's a kind of grain that is a whole grain. I mean whole grain products are made out of it, but it has the mouth feel and appeal of a regular white bread.
KIRK HAMILTON: A white piece of bread. Yeah, oh gosh!
JEAN C. BUZBY: And I see those as hamburger rolls, for example.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well you know what's interesting is I was looking for the definition of whole grain in some of your - and I want to say your work. I'm saying Economic Research Service, USDA, and one of the definitions by the chemists. They had a chemic - like some American Chemical Society (American Association of Cereal Chemists), said it only had to be I think like 51 parts of a whole grain - to say it was. In other words, I'm not sure everything we say is a whole grain is 100% whole grain. It only has to be a part of a whole grain. Is that correct?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yeah, and I don't want to go out on a limb on that one. There has been done, articles done on that, and one I would recommend on our ERS website is "Will 2005 Be The Year Of Whole Grains?" and so I would recommend readers to check that out.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. Well let's get off the grain topic here and the other area that looks like there was a jump in was fats and oils in the calories from 1970 to 2008 and this was adjusted for loss. There was like almost a 230 per day calorie increase in fats and oils. Now where did those come from?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well first of all let me start out that overall availability of added fats and oils more than doubled between 1909 to 2008. And when we say added fats I just want to clarify this. It is those that are directly used by consumers such as butter on bread or shortenings and oils used in commercially prepared cookies. They don't include the fats that are naturally present in foods like milk and meat. But Americans - there was a push in the mid 1990s to cut dietary fat and that did show up with a modest decline between 1993 and ‘97 in per capita consumption of added fats from 71 pounds per person to 65 pounds, but then most of the rise in the last decade in added fats and oils has been from increases in salad and cooking oils. However, part of that increase in salad and cooking oils really is in artifact of data. It can be explained by the number of farms reporting vegetable oil to the census bureau increased in 2000. So there was a little jump right there and so part of that is just an artifact of the data as I just said. I wanted to share with you, though, in 2008 the average American consumed 54.3 gallons of salad and cooking oils and 18 pounds of shortening.
KIRK HAMILTON: That's a lot. Especially when fat is two and a half times the calories of a carbohydrate or protein.
And tell me about sweeteners. They've gone up somewhat. Is part of that due to high fructose corn syrup or what's put in carbonated soft drinks or what?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well most of our added caloric sweeteners come from refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Starting in the 1960s food manufacturers began using the cheaper corn sweeteners in place of sugar. They especially used high fructose corn syrup in an ever-expanding array of processed products ranging from soft drinks and breakfast cereals to soups and even spaghetti sauce. And then in 2008 high fructose corn syrup accounts for 39% of the 136.3 pounds per person of sweeteners available for consumption and refined sugar accounted for 48%. So those are the two big players.
KIRK HAMILTON: Do you have any data on how much we're eating away from home? In other words, to me this looks like, if we were eating at home we'd have more control of these added types of extra calories than if we're eating away from home. And we're eating more processed foods - then we give away that control. So one question, "Are we eating more away from home?"
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yes we are. We have a briefing room on our Economic Research Service website that provides all sorts of tables and information on food expenditures. And the data show that Americans are eating out more. In 1953 per capita expenditures on food away from home totaled $96, compared to $1859 in 2008.
KIRK HAMILTON: Run that by me again. Wait a minute, you lost me.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Okay. In 1953 per capita expenditures on food away from home totaled $96 compared to $1859 in 2008. That comes from one of the many tables on this food expenditures briefing room that you can check out on our Economic Research Service website.
KIRK HAMILTON: So being an economist can you tell me how much $95 in 1953 would equate in 2008.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Actually that is all in current dollars.
(***Correction: When both dollar figures from 1953 ($96) and from 2008 ($1859) are adjusted to 1988 dollars, they were $508 (1953) and $1078 (2008) respectively. Therefore, in equivalent dollars, we spent more than twice the amount on food away from home, per capita, in 2008 than we did in 1953. This data can be found at: www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/Expenditures_tables/table13.htm%5C)
KIRK HAMILTON: Oh, really?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yeah.
KIRK HAMILTON: Oh, you've gotta be kidding!
JEAN C. BUZBY: Yeah.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well that's part of the answer there. You know you eat away from home and you give away your power and then "they" slide sweet-fat calories in your food.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Uh-huh. I have another statistic for you.
KIRK HAMILTON: Fire away.
KIRK HAMILTON: Wow! Well, I'm going to ask you - I am going to email you to guide me to those because I want to put those in my book because I didn't have those. I've been going through these things until I'm blue in the face and it gets a little crazy.
We're talking to Dr. Jean Buzby, an economist for the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Department of Agriculture is celebrating "Guess Who's Turning 100? Tracking a Century of American Eating and It's Connection to Chronic Diseases." Now, your title. You have a little video on the website. Can you tell people how to get there?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Well on our website which is www.ers.usda.gov and then backslash the word data and backslash foodconsumption as one word (www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption), you can find the main page for our new newly designed food availability data system. And actually if you just look over to the right side you can see the link to the multimedia presentation that you just mentioned. And that link will take you to an audiovisual presentation that demonstrates some of the examples of what you can do with this unique data system. For example, one chart shows that the variant in per capita consumption of fruit tends to be narrow. Tree fruits, oranges, apples and bananas made up over half of total fruit consumption in 2008.
KIRK HAMILTON: So if I was kind of putting this all together, because I have, but it's my own bias on how to put this information together. We have excess calories obviously that have gone up over the last century especially since 1970. We have epidemics of obesity anywhere from, you know doubling and tripling in different age groups in children and adults. We have 500 more calories than we did in 1970, and we have these diet changes such as total meat consumption has gone up somewhat, flours and cereals has gone up. But I've gotta say one thing there was more flour available in 1900, so I always had this question that I could never find out. It was 300 pounds per person in 1909, the calorie availability. And now it's around close to 200. And then it dipped in the 70's, 50's and 70's. Now my question was in 1909 were they eating more whole grains or were they refined grains?
JEAN C. BUZBY: Gosh, I wish I had the answer to that question. But I think part of the reason why it dropped from the early years in the data series is as incomes increased for the American population, people had the advantage of being able to buy more diverse foods and more expensive products as well. So they had more variety in their diet.
KIRK HAMILTON: See, I wish I knew. Because here's the reason why whether they were refined carbohydrates or they were more processed food or where they just more simple grains. Because I have a graph that you have, that I got from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it shows you know these developing countries, that calories are increasing. And what they show is that between 1970 and 2005 their grain consumption actually goes down which would parlay ours in 1909 going down until the 50s and 70s, and then fats and oils increase, and added sweeteners increase, and animal foods increase, which is exactly the same pattern that's happened over our 100 years.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Actually, if I may, I'd like to direct you to some other research on our ERS website. There's a bunch of studies by a colleague here called Anita Regmi and it's on the conversions in the global food demand and delivery, and there are several articles that I will send you the links. But they kind of discuss just what you're talking about.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well I got the graph out of your other excellent magazine, AmberWaves. That's where I got it in the first place and it just bent my head. And that's what made me connect between industrialization of societies, moving more to processed foods and then the developing countries are having these same problems as well. And the same thing happens. And you know we have India and China having epidemics of obesity and heart disease as well. So that's the big connection that I am trying to make.
Well do you have any more parting things you'd like to say about how to improve American's health?
JEAN C. BUZBY: I just want to encourage everybody to go ahead and check out our website and try the multimedia presentation and also check out our custom reports. We've newly redesigned all of them for both food availability and for the first time ever we have a new custom reports feature for the loss adjusted food availability, so I hope people find it useful and easy to access.
KIRK HAMILTON: Yeah, the loss adjusted for people out there is closer to what we're actually consuming.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Right. And the beauty of that series is it provides daily calories and daily MyPyramid equivalents and that's how we can compare what people eat with the dietary recommendations.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well we've been taking with Dr. Jean Buzby, an economist for the Economic Research Service at the United States Department of Agriculture, and Jean I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us.
JEAN C. BUZBY: Oh it's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank you, the audience, for listening to this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And until next time, Stay and Be Well.
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