Coffee Stats

As a tea drinker, I realize I'm in the minority. Most of the world around me—especially in North America—prefers coffee. And I'd have thought, based on consumption trends among my friends and colleagues, that coffee was still the beverage king. So, it was with some surprise that I read some new statistics in an Agriculture Department newsletter, known as Amber Waves. It reports that U.S. coffee consumption in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, was 24.2 gallons per person—down from a per capita high of 46.4 gallons in 1946.

One likely cause of the post-war downturn, write Jean C. Buzbyand Stephen Haley of USDA's Economic Research Service, "is the increased availability of alternative benverages, particularly soft drinks."

Does Starbucks know this?

Food Security Stat

One of the Agriculture Department's 5-year goals has been to reduce the prevalence of very low food security among low-income households (those having incomes at 130 percent of the nation's poverty line or lower) to no more than 7.4 percent by this year. A new report, released today, suggests that achieving that goal will be next to impossible.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, "the prevalence of very low food security among low-income households stood at 12.6 percent, up from 10.9 percent in 2000."

USDA defines very low food security as being where: "at times during the year, food intake of one or more household members is reduced and normal eating patterns disrupted because the household lacks sufficient money and other resources for food."

Source: Nord, M. 2007. Characteristics of Low-Income Households With Very Low Food Security: An Analysis of the USDA GPRA Food Security Indicator. USDA Economic Research Service Report #EIB-25 (May) Available at: http://
www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib25

Fish Stat

"Aquaculture is the fastest growing segment of world food production, accounting for 43% of seafood consumed globally. This $63 billion global industry will play a crucial role in coming years due to increased demand for seafood."

Source: May 30, 2007, Seafood Choices Newsletter, produced by SeaWeb. Available at: http://www.seafoodchoices.org/secure/newsletter-afishianado.php

Endangered Species Stats

Mention endangered species, and most people think of pandas, black-footed ferrets, or whooping cranes. However, as of March 19, the largest number of endangered species in the Unied States were plants. In all, 598 of them, mostly flowering species, were formally listed as endangered, compared to just 412 animals.

Among animals, families with the most species endangered with extinction: birds with 76 , fish with 74, mammals with 69, and clams with 62.

Source: 2007. Endangered Species Bulletin, 2006 Highlights edition(May):56.

Who's Fattest Stats

The World Health Organization has just published a list ranking 36 nations in order of the share of their populations that have a normal bodyweight. Any guess where the United States falls? Third from the bottom, at 35.13 percent. The rest of Americans had a body mass index--a ratio determined by accounting for an individual's height and weight--above what's considered healthy.

Only Kuwait and the United Kingdom were fatter than the United States. Wealthy Saudia Arabia didn't rank much higher. It has ony 7% more healthy-weight individuals than we do.

Topping the healthy-weight list was the Lao People's Democratic Republic at 77.14 percent, followed by Ghana (72.4%), the Phillippines (69.51%), Japan (68.9%), the Republic of Korea (68.7%), India (62.5%), and Kyrgyzstan (61.25%).

Somewhere in the middle, all with about 50 to 54% of their populations at a healthy weight, were Colombia, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, and Finland.

Of course, it's not a complete list. There are some 200 countries. However, it says something fairly disappointing for America that Morocco, Estonia, Malaysia, and Kyrgyzstan have almost twice the proportion of healthy-weight adults that we and several other wealthy and powerful nations do. Obviously, it suggests a lot about how we spend out wealth--avoiding exercise in our automobiles and chowing down on low-cost fast food.

Source: World Health Organization Global Database on Body Mass Index (http://www.who.int/bmi/index.jsp), which was updated as of May 18, 2007.

Killer Stats

Today, cancer and heart disease are neck-and-neck leaders as the top causes of death throughout the world. Each claims about 8 million lives annually. Although infections and stroke used to kill roughly equal numbers of people each year at the turn of the millennium, their trajectories are veering in very different directions, with stroke rates climbing slowly and infectious diseases other than HIV/AIDS plummeting dramatically.

If the projections indicated by the World Health Organization data hold true through 2030, the fastest climbing disease killer will be HIV/AIDS. Its death toll in 2002 was 2.8 million people. By 2030, WHO projects mortality from this infectious disease will more than double--to 6.5 million. That wouldn't put it far behind stroke, which is projected to claim about 7 million lives a year by then. Both will still be well behind heart disease at more than 9 million deaths a year and cancer at more than 11 million annually.

One of the saddest stats: WHO projects that tobacco related deaths will reach reach about 8.3 million a year by 2030, which would account for about 10 percent of all deaths globally.

Source: World Health Statistics 2007, released May 18, by the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, p. 12.

Food Spending Stats

The average family of four spends nearly $9,000 a year on food.

That's based on federal surveys in 2004--the most recent year for which data are available--showing that the average annual per person spending on food in America was $2,207. Of that total, roughly $1,350 per person was spent for meals consumed at home, another $860 for food eaten in restaurants or elsewhere.

Spending varied substantially by income and family status. For instance, single moms spent some $1,600 per person on food, while married couples without children spent an average of $2,740 per person to eat each year. People living alone spent more than twice as much on their food each year, per capita, than did families of at least six.

Finally, food costs comprised a larger share of income for the poorest families—about 37 percent of household income compared to just 6.6 percent of income for the wealthiest households.

Source: Blisaard, N. and H. Stewart. 2007. Food Spending in American Households, 2003-04. USDA Economic Research Service, Economic Information Bulletin #23(March). Available at: http://www.ers.usda.gov

Doctoral Stats

•U.S. universities awarded more than 1.35 million research doctorates—Ph.D's—between 1920 and 2000.

•Overall, men received 73%, although women were acquiring 41% annually by the end of that period.

•Some 62 percent of the newly minted doctorates were awarded for research in science and engineering fields. However, from the 1960s on, more education doctorates were awarded than in any other single field.

•Since the 1990s, foreign nationals have been receiving one-in-three Ph.D's from U.S. universities.

•Since 1995, the median age at which people have been attaining their doctorates has been almost 34 years old.

Source: Thurgood, L., MJ. Golladay, and S.T. Hill. 2006. U.S. Doctorates in the 20th Century: A Special Report (NSF 06-319), issued by the National Science Foundation's Division of Science Resources Statistics, Arlington, Va. (June).

Youth Porn-Viewing Stat

This troubling statistic emerged from a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,500 Internet users 10 to 17 years old: 42% reported having encountered online pornography in the previous year. Only one-third of the youngsters had deliberately sought out the sexually explicit material.

Source: Wolak, J., K. Mitchell, and D. Finkelhor. 2007. Unwanted and Wanted Exposure to Online Pornography in a National Sample of Youth Internet Users. Pediatrics 119(February):247.

Sleepless Kids Stat

Sleep "is an important but underrecognized component of wellness in children," Columbia University researchers note in a recent supplement to the prestigious journal Pediatrics. That's why it's disturbing that their new nationally representative survey of U.S. children finds that "[a]pproximately 15 million American children are affected by inadequate sleep." Many of these children also had mood disorders--chiefly depression--headaches, and allergies. Moreover, the scientists found, contrary to many smaller studies, this one documented that childhood sleep deprivation "transcends all culture."

Source: Smaldone, A, J.C. Honig, and M.W. Byrne. 2007. Sleepless in America: Inadequate Sleep and Relationships to Health and Well-being of Our Nation's Children. Pediatrics 119, Supplement 1(February):S29.

Weighty Stat

An estimated two-thirds of Americans are deemed overweight or obese. How heavy is that? Astoundingly massive, according to molecular physiologist Ronald M. Evans of the Salk Institute. Sum up all of the excess, he says, and you'll find that the U.S. population is "6.5 billion pounds overweight."

Source: Evans' Fritz Lipmann lecture, this morning, at Experimental Biology '07.

Bittersweet Stat

Fruits are sweet because they're naturally endowed with sugars. Natural sweeteners lace even milk and various vegetable juices. However, most sugar in the diet has been deliberately added, whether it's to sweeten corn flakes or soft drinks. Boys 14 to 18 years old down the most such added sugar--a whopping 142.6 grams per day, FDA scientists reported today.

That's 21 percent of the energy consumed by boys this age. It amounts to some 570 calories per day, and is equivalent to 35.7 teaspoons of table sugar.

Beverages, especially soft drinks, accounted for most of this added dietary sugar.

Source: Kathleen C. Ellwood, et al. of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in College Park, Md., at the Experimental Biology '07 meeting, in Washington, D.C.

Fat Stat

Vegetable oils are a type of dietary fat. Did you know that 16 percent of the oil in the typical American's diet--the most from any source--comes from eating potato chips?

Source: Federal data reported today by Jessica Sieber, Department of Nutrition, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, at the Experimental Biology '07 meeting, in Washington, D.C.