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 About 30 to 40 percent of food produced in the United States is
wasted - the equivalent of 1,250 to 1,400 calories per person per
day. Also being tossed out is the equivalent of one quarter of the
recommended daily fiber intake for most women, for example, or
enough fiber to meet the full requirement for 74 million women, the
authors point out.
“When we discard food, we’re also discarding a lot of healthy
nutrients. And many of these are nutrients lacking in the average
American diet,” lead author Marie Spiker told Reuters Health in an
email.
“The most perishable foods, and the ones that we’re most likely to
throw away - vegetables, fruits and seafood - are also some of the
most nutritious,” said Spiker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
Spiker and her colleagues used U.S. Department of agriculture data
to calculate the nutritional value of foods in 213 categories that
were wasted, both at the retail level and in homes, during 2012.
They found that nationwide, wasted food contained an estimated 1,200
calories, as well as 146 grams of carbohydrate, 33 g of protein, 6 g
of fiber, 286 milligrams of calcium, 2 mg of vitamin D and 900 mg of
potassium per person per day, among other nutrients.
Using dietary fiber as an example, the authors point out that 6 g is
23 percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for women,
adding that U.S. women tend to fall short of their recommended fiber
intake by 8.9 g a day.
Men have an even bigger fiber shortfall of 17.7 g daily, so the
fiber in wasted food would fill that gap for 205 million women or
106 million men, according to the report in the Journal of the
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
“Food recovery programs, which save food from being wasted and make
it available through purchase or donation, are an important piece of
the solution. But it’s also important to remember that only a
portion of food that’s currently discarded can realistically be
recovered, due to food safety concerns and logistical constraints,”
Spiker said.
So strategies that work at multiple levels, especially strategies
that prevent food from being wasted in the first place, are needed,
she said. “Efforts like standardized date labeling and consumer
education can go a long ways toward preventing food waste in the
first place.”
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Consumers also shouldn’t underestimate the impact of wasting less
food at home, she said. “One way of reducing household food waste is
to get familiar with your refrigerator: know what’s in the fridge
before you go shopping, move older items to the front and center so
you’ll remember to incorporate them into meals, and remember that
many items can be frozen.”
The results provide “a very useful reminder of just the sheer
magnitude of food wastage in the United States,” said John Hoddinott,
a food and nutrition economics and policy researcher at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York.
They remind us that not only is there calorie loss, but there is
loss of really high quality food, said Hoddinott, who wasn’t
involved in the study.
The authors are right in saying that if some of this food could be
made available to food insecure households, that might potentially
go a long way in terms of reducing hunger and food insecurity in the
United States, he said.
“Doing so, however, is enormously difficult in terms of the
logistics in actually making such food available and ensuring it’s
of a suitable quality for people to consume,” Hoddinott said.
Even so, reductions in food wastage could be one way to bring down
the costs associated with these foods, which typically tend to be
higher in price and often outside the reach of very poor consumers,
he said.
“So, efforts to reduce food wastage can have both direct effects, in
terms of making these foods available, and also indirect effects to
making them more affordable,” he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2r1Jc0X Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online May 15, 2017.
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