Five billion calories
by Denise Hampson Monday 25th August 2024
The UK Department of Health published a strategic report in 2011 on combating England’s obesity problem1. According to the people with calculators and spreadsheets, the people of England were collectively eating a whopping five billion calories a day too many. This number reverberated around the newsrooms and in print. “Five Billion Calories” was the bold headline on the front pages of several of the UK’s national papers, but as impressive as it sounds it's just a very big number that none of us can really get our heads around.
So how much is five billion calories? What does it actually look like?
To put this number into context - it’s about 1,290,000 x 1kg bags of granulated white sugar. Now let’s visualise it so you can appreciate better how much sugar that actually is. We all know what the Empire State Building in New York City looks like. Even if you’ve not been there personally, you’ve surely seen it on the TV, in movies and magazines. It’s 86 floors high, widest at the bottom and narrows in stages going up. If we filled it up with 1,290,000 bags of sugar, how high up the 86 floors do you think five billion calories worth of sugar would go? For fun, the answer is at the bottom of the page.
Knowing what it would look like as a big pile of sugar still doesn’t bring the message home because the number is impersonal. How much are each of us individually expected to contribute to fixing the five billion calorie problem? What does it mean on a personal level? Telling us we collectively eat five billion calories a day too many hasn’t made (and won’t make) one bit of difference to us because it doesn't make us feel anything.
Five billion calories a day is about one chocolate digestive biscuit per day per person in England. You may not change your eating habits but at least you’ll understand better what the number means at an individual level. And maybe, maybe, if you have found you have a habit of eating a chocolate digestive with your afternoon cuppa each day, you might pause for a micro-second before you eat your next one.
If you want to persuade people to change behaviour, any information you give has to be as personalised, individual and easy to conceptualise as possible. Build a story around it too if you can. Staggeringly big-sounding data may look great in print and on powerpoint slides, but it won't make a difference to what we do.
How high up the Empire State Building?
The answer is 0 floors. The sugar pile would only be 3m high. Yep, it’s a rubbish visual, and will win you no new admirers if you share it as a fact at your next party. But you were still curious, weren’t you?
