10 Surprising Facts To Know For National Food Day
Today is Food Day 2013, a grassroots campaign that’s about one thing: helping people eat real food.
National Food Day is an annual event that brings together some of the nation’s leading voices on food, all working together to plot a way forward that ensures “food that is healthy, affordable, and produced with care for the environment, farm animals, and the people who grow, harvest, and serve it.”
In celebration of Food Day, here are 10 important facts about public health, farming and how we eat, all intended to get you thinking about our current food system.
1. More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese. [Source]
2. Low wage earning fast food workers cost the US $7 billion in public benefits. [Source]
3. Food manufacturers now spend nearly twice as much money on advertising breakfast cereals as they purchasing the ingredients that go into them. [Source]
4. 13 percent of calories in the American diet come from added sugars. [Source]
5. McDonald’s sells more than 75 hamburgers every second. [Source]
6. GMOs now make up more than 11 percent of all cropland in the world. [Source]
7. You would have to walk for seven hours straight to burn off a Super Sized Coke, fry and Big Mac. [Source]
8. 23.5 million Americans don’t have a supermarket within one mile of their home. [Source]
9. By 2030, medical costs for treating preventable obesity-related diseases will increase $66 billion per year in the United States. [Source]
10. About 60 percent of farmers in the United States are 55 years or older, and fewer than 1 in 4 of the farms in the US earn gross revenues in excess of $50,000. [Source]
Related on Organic Authority:
Obesity and Poor Nutrition Cost World Economy $1.4 Trillion a Year
Waterborne Disease Costs the U.S. $539 Million a Year
Organic Food Expanding Eight Times Faster Than Conventional
