Americans Ate a TON of Food Last Year!

So in case you haven't noticed, Americans are overweight.

Now clearly this isn’t breaking news, considering the CDC has informed us plenty of times that at least 33 percent of U.S. adults are obese and roughly 34 percent are overweight. But the latest research from the Economic Research Service may have a good guess as to why our bellies seem to be bulging.

They found that the average American (literally) ate a ton of food in 2011. Yet the real issue here is not how much we eat, but rather how many pounds we’re consuming from each food group. For example, the fact that the average American consumed nearly 53 gallons a soda in 2011—not cool.

Here’s the official breakdown of our 1,996.3-pounds-a-year eating habit: 631.9 pounds came from dairy (31.4 being from cheese and 181 from milk), 415.4 pounds came from vegetables, 273.2 pounds from fruit, 110 pounds from red meat (62.4 being from beef and 46.5  from pork), 192.3 pounds of flour/cereal products, 141.6 pounds from caloric sweeteners, 24 pounds from coffee (as well as cocoa and nuts), 85.5 pounds from fat and oil, 73.6 pounds of poultry, 16.1 pounds came from fish, and  32.7 pounds of eggs.

Yikes.

So how do we compare to Americans in the past? Take a look below.

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