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Comment by eisen_matrix | Hacker News Reader

2400 calories is very rational number, considering that Americans eat around 3800 on average.

The 3800 number was from the media misunderstanding/misrepresenting the data. The 3800 is calorie availability, not consumption. With calorie availability you take absolutely all food produced/imported and then divide by the population size. There's no reduction for waste, spoilage, inedibility, etc. [1]

Americans aren't eating anywhere near 3800 calories on average. 2400 calories is already a massive amount of food. That's 15 100g servings of chicken breast (cooked weight) for some baseline of what it means in terms of healthy food. Obviously lots of people are eating lots of junk that makes it easy to bring up the consumption, but it's still nowhere near 3800 on average.

[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per...

Using unseasoned cooked chicken breast as your proxy for healthy food is...less absurd than using grapefruit would be, but not as much as you might think.

At least add like a quarter teaspoon of olive oil, an eighth of a cup of whole grain rice, and a side of like some sweet potatoes with its own seasoning or something.

Straight chicken breasts is like the meme level of what celebrities have to eat to maintain their figure, not what a reasonable human diet looks like. Chicken thighs with the skin on are reasonably healthy.

2400 is a massive amount of food ... for some people. This is why averages are pointless as recommendations.

I'm 6'3", 200 lbs, I lift and I run - I would be in a caloric deficit at 2400 calories.

My wife would be in a huge surplus.

I thought you were pulling numbers out of your magic hat.

It seems true. Sorry for doubting you.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/10/14/weight...

I guess the 2400 for middle aged people is not that far off if in the 60s the average was right around there and people were healthier.

I'm about to say something that is easy to dismiss as bullshit, so feel free to, but you're right, people were healthier in terms of weight in the 60s, and right around that is when we changed dietary guidance to be carb-focused, low fat, etc. Since then, obesity has skyrocketed. The book Obesity Code covers this.

As sibling comments have pointed out, 3800 is availability, not consumption, so it's not an indicator of how much people do eat, just how much they could eat.

You can see it if you watch any US documentary filmed before the late 70s that shows ordinary people in the street. They're much fitter, and exercise for weight loss wasn't really a thing yet; people didn't jog. That's not far enough back that everyone was a farmer or laborer; there were plenty of fairly sedentary office workers. They also weren't starving; it was a prosperous time. They were generally eating meat-and-potatoes diets with plenty of animals fats (I have a 1960s barbeque cookbook that tells you to put a pat of butter on pretty much everything). And obesity wasn't a problem.

And since we started letting the government tell us how to eat healthy, not only has obesity skyrocketed, but so have diseases connected with it.

My parents were vegetarians in the 80s, also no weight issues. I don't believe it's carbs or seed oils or any of the modern scapegoats. Since they were eating plenty of that. They even had cake.

I think it doesn't matter what you eat as long as it isn't super processed. The one thing that's changed a lot in the 90s is more and more convenience food.

"processed" is also a modern scapegoat, unfortunately.

But all three are correct, I think: Food has gotten more laden with sugar, seed oils, and carbs because it's processed to be that way after we tried to go Low Fat for so long.

A conscientious vegetarian is probably eating damn near an ideal diet by avoiding all that.

But they were eating plenty of seed oils, and sugar in cake, and loads of bread.

So mostly carbs, but with a lot of fiber. It just goes counter to the current trend in major ways. I looked through the old cookbooks. The biggest difference is no processed foods. And maybe less microplastics.

It's hard to really appreciate how many calories are added to things like bread, just by virtue of changing the recipe to be more "USA tasty" (e.g., sugary). My EU friends always commented on how sweet everything is in USA, even store-bought bread. If we didn't do that, when we started reducing fat, everything would taste like hardtack. But 200 extra sneaky calories a day + insulin spikes from the refined carbs, and here we are - all fat.

That's true, "bread" in the US is atrocious. I recommend flour, water, salt, yeast. Amazing book if you want to get into home baking.

3800 on average?! What the hell. Makes me wonder why Americans aren't even more overweight than they already are.

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