According to a new scientific study on the eating habits that citizens in the United States exhibit, nearly 40 percent of the food supply in the country goes to the trash can after purchase, rather than being consumed. This waste only seem to be getting worse as the years go by, experts say and argue that measures should be taken to curb this phenomenon, which may have deep repercussions on the economy and the social wellbeing of the people themselves. The work was conducted by experts at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), in Bethesda, Maryland.

The team was conducted by scientist and quantitative physiologist Kevin Hall, ScienceNow reports. “The numbers are pretty shocking,” Hall says of the new research results. He explains that such studies are usually conducted either through direct interviews with samples of the population, or through garbage inspection. However, both methods are plagued with the possibility of error, the former because they are highly inaccurate, and the latter because it is geographically unrepresentative. So the NIDDK researchers took another approach, and created a model of the human metabolic system.

For a time frame spanning between 1974 to 2003, the team analyzed the average weight of Americans, and, based on this mean, they calculated the amount of food that the general population consumed. Then, they used data transmitted by the US government to the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and subtracted the difference between consumption and purchased/available products. This difference is nothing but wasted food, the group argues. “We called it the missing mass of American food,” NIDDK mathematician Carson Chow, a study coauthor, says.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) previously estimated that approximately 27 percent of the food mass went to waste, but the new numbers far exceed these calculations. A more detailed explanation of the study appears in the November issue of the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE. Chow and Hall have basically demonstrated that the percentage of wasted food has been increasingly rising over the past three and a half decades, and that the trend is accelerating as we speak. The main reason, experts say, is the low price of food. “If it was more expensive, waste would be reduced,” they conclude.