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<\/p>\nFor decades, policy analysts in developed countries have been trying to determine why waistlines in their country continue to grow.\u00a0 In the United Kingdom, many believe that physical inactivity, not unhealthy diets, are the primary culprit.\u00a0 According to the Living Costs and Food Survey (LCFS), a long-running study that tracks shopping in the United Kingdom, average daily calorie purchases fell from 2,534 in 1974 to 2,192 in 2013.\u00a0 Another official survey based on reported food consumption found a similar pattern.\u00a0 These surveys led to the widely held belief that sloth, not gluttony, is the reason for obesity in the country.<\/p>\n
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A report from the Behavioural Insights Team, a research group spun out of government, rejects this idea.\u00a0 The researchers compared LCFS data with those from other sources: a private survey and measures of actual calorie consumption.\u00a0 The comparison suggests that the participants in the LCFS are dramatically under-reporting their intakes.\u00a0 The authors estimate that England consumes 30% to 50% more calories than declared in the LCFS.\u00a0 The researchers also argue that if the daily calorie purchases did actually decrease in the last 40 years, it would need to have been akin to every adult jogging for 56 minutes less per day than in the 1970s, which is unlikely.<\/p>\n
There are two reasons why people may have underreported their calorie consumption. \u00a0The first rationale is that this data is difficult to track, especially with snacking and eating out becoming more common. \u00a0The second rationale is that people who say they want to lose weight are more likely to underestimate how much they eat, and since overweight people are more likely to say they want to lose weight, the rise of obesity has led to a growing tendency to underreport.<\/p>\n