Nutrition and calculation: how much should we eat per day? In kg…

I’m always seeking for the “perfect” healthy diet. So I surfed a bit on the net. In France the government has dedicated an entire website to this topic. Another website LaNutrition.fr goes against these advices and put forward similar but more precise recommendations.
As I’m a bit curious (and love doing useless calculations), I wanted to know how much food (in kg!) we should be eating in an entire day.
First the recommendations are in servings. So what weighs a serving for each type of food?
There are two weights:

• a nutritional value: what you should supposedly eat (e.g 100g of a 125g yoghurt),
• a consumed or eaten value: what you actually eat (e.g. the whole yoghurt!).

Moreover each type of staple has a particular value, so to ease the thing, I did an average of all the listed items. For example for the weight of a serving in fruits (consumed value = 109g) I did the average of all the consumed value of each fruit : apricot (100g), apple (140g), strawberry (65g),… The result of my calculations are the following.

The average weight (g) of a serving is:

	Average weight
	Eaten	Nutritional	Average
Vegetables	118,85	78,13	98,49
Fruits	109,98	94,98	102,48
Meat	100	50	75
Fish	90	80	85
Starch	163,5	82	122,75
Dairy product	83,39	88,26	85,83
Confectionery	54,08	53,69	53,88

The result are not quite exact (for example for the vegetables there were a portion of garlic, or basilic…).
Then there is a minimum of servings you should eat (only five serving of vegetables and fruits, all the rest it seems you can just throw away! Just kidding!But its written…) and the maximum you should eat. So I considered the average.

And therefore this is how much we should eat:

	Daily average intake
	Eaten	Nutritional	Average
Fruits and vegetables	972,5	735,7	854,1
Meat and fish	95	65	80
Starch	490,5	246	368,25
Dairy product	83,39	88,26	85,83
Confectionery/week	81,12	80,54	80,83
Total	1652,98	1146,46	1399,72

Note that the weight of the confectionery is for a week not a day! If you are interested can give you the numbers of servings etc…

Therefore, we should be eating something like 1,5 kg per day.

I don’t know for you but this seems quite a lot to me. I think I will start weighing my bentos to have an approximate idea of the weight of food I do eat per day (and I’ll post it here).

So had you imagined that?

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