Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
A grocery store in Los Angeles. The government says each American consumes about 80 pounds of sugar a year, not nearly 100.
It was repeated so often it was accepted as true: the typical American consumed 95 to 100 pounds of sugar each year. Health experts said that consumption was surely contributing to a nationwide crisis of obesity.
U.S.D.A. Tables on Sweetener Consumption (Excel)
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Estimating sugar consumption is a tricky proposition, based loosely on an educated guess at how often sweet foods are actually eaten, versus thrown away.
But in a move that has largely gone unnoticed, the Agriculture Department, keeper of the statistics on America's sweet tooth, has employed new methodology that overnight shaved 20 pounds off its estimate and brought the number down to a precise 76.7 pounds. The decision raises questions about the entire notion of per-capita consumption just as the battles over sugar and sweeteners reach a peak.
"There's such an implication of precision and accuracy in that decimal point — boy, we've got this nailed now," said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "But when you take a good look, it's built on a foundation of sand."
Jean C. Buzby, the agricultural economist who headed the department's team responsible for the data that led to the revision in sugar consumption, agreed that it was far from perfect but said it was better than what was used in the past.
She pointed to the note on each page of the government's data that labeled them "first estimates" that "are intended to serve as a starting point for additional research and discussion."
Few people are aware of the change, which quietly occurred two months ago. Dr. Jacobson stumbled across it recently while working on a project on sugar consumption. He takes issue with the new methodology and contends it could be a setback in the push for healthy eating. Suggestions that sugar consumption is down, or dropping, could take some pressure off companies that make sugary foods, for example.
In e-mails the center obtained through a Freedom of Information request, officials at sugar industry trade groups discussed the benefits of the lower estimate and how they might persuade the U.S.D.A. to make a change that would reduce it even more.
"We perceive it to be in our interest to see as low a per-capita sweetener consumption estimate as possible," Jack Roney, director of economics and policy analysis at the American Sugar Alliance, wrote in an e-mail on March 30, 2011.
Mr. Roney said in a telephone interview that he was pleased to have "more accurate" information about sugar consumption available. "The extent to which caloric sweeteners are in the public's eye as a possible source or cause of increasing obesity in this country is huge," he said. "If folks are assuming there is much greater consumption than there really is, then we are misleading the public unnecessarily."
Estimating sugar consumption is a tricky proposition, fraught with potential for misjudgments. It is based loosely on an educated guess at how much of various sweetener-laden foods that consumers buy is actually eaten, versus how much is thrown away. "It is difficult to obtain nationally representative estimates of consumer-level food loss," Dr. Buzby wrote in an e-mail.
There had long been a sense that the estimates the department was using failed to capture all of the loss that was occurring, Dr. Buzby said. Five years ago, just as debate over sugar use was heating up, the U.S.D.A. began an overhaul of what it called "consumer-level food-loss estimates." It hired RTI International, a nonprofit consulting firm, to help it come up with new loss estimates more firmly anchored in data.
Mary K. Muth, director of food and nutrition policy research at RTI, said she had used data from the Nielsen Company's Homescan surveys of consumer food purchases and interviews done for the Centers for Disease Control's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to come up with the new loss estimates for sugar and sweeteners.
"It's an improvement over how it was done before but an incremental one, and surely more work can be done," Dr. Muth said.
In all, RTI's revisions called for higher loss estimates for 84 foods and lower losses of 54, while leaving a handful unchanged.
In some cases, the change in loss estimates was drastic. RTI estimated, for example that 69 percent of fresh pumpkins are lost at the consumer level compared with the old estimate of 20 percent.
A report on the changes written by Dr. Muth, Dr. Buzby and others concluded more pumpkins were being used for decorations and subsequently discarded.
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