1 June 2021 -

Where do we get protein in our daily diets?

TLDR - I made an app that visualizes how much protein people in different parts of the world get from their diets on a daily basis at https://paulkasemsap.shinyapps.io/DailyProteinSource. Check it out!

Growing up, I started learning about nutrition since kinder garden/elementary school (…well, things get more complex as we age). A balanced diet (according to my Thai school lessons) consists of 5 essential food groups: protein, carbohydrate, minerals, vitamin, and fat. Animal products like meat, eggs, milk, dominate the protein category (I do remember beans also belong here, though). To get enough protein I need every day, animal derivatives are my first go-to options.

I’m not showing data to back up my claim here (because I don’t have it), but I could hypothesize (in simple words: would imagine/make an educated guess) that >5 out of 10 people you ask on a street would agree that

“human get protein primarily from animal products”.

Is that statement really true? - perhaps for high income countries, but not the rest of the world. [citation needed; I read about this before, so I know it exists out there somewhere – but that’s not the major focus here]

Major sources of protein?

When I started working on Wheat (Triticum aestivum) in 2015, growing up eating rice on a daily basis, I must admit I was surprised how much protein and calories these small grains provide in our daily diets at the global scale. Look at the top 10 sources of protein below:

I often come across researchers citing in the research articles’ introduction part to justify the need to work on improving wheat:

Wheat provides 20% of protein and calories in human diets ….(so, please fund us to work on wheat yada yada)

That’s a lot!! - 1 in 5 of all the protein people eat every day globally. –No wonder why my Dutch colleagues who eat a loaf of bread for lunch daily got enough protein!

Many publications cited FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) public database “FAOSTAT” for this piece of information. Yet, entries in the dataset called “Food Balance” on the FAOSTAT pages only provide “gram of protein provided by each food source/commodity that we eat” on a daily basis. (or perhaps I did not look at the right place?)

In the past few years, FAOSTAT updated the database and its user interface significantly. The current version (as of 2020, when I visited the last time) looks amazing and makes data mining super fun!

Let’s visualize the data

To validate the “~20%” contribution of wheat to human diets, I downloaded all the data (which is publically available) and calculated the proportion of protein provided by each food source compared to the total amount of protein human get daily, for each region in the world.

I recently came across “R shiny app” and found it to be a robust way to share/visualize data on a public domain. So, during winter break in 2020, thanks to so many great online resources, I put together an app to visualize this public “Food Balance” dataset. The latest data available is from 2017.

By selecting variables (like the region, the commodity, year range) to focus on, through the menu on the right, this app can help us answer several questions:

How much protein do we get from each food source on a daily basis (gram per day per person, or as a proportion compared to total)? (Tab I and II)
How does the contribution from each food source differ in each region around the world? (Tab I to III)
How has the supply of protein from each food source changed over time? (Tab IV)

(My) key take-home messages:

At a global level, small grains like wheat and rice are key sources of protein in human diets at a global level (together provide 19.3+12.5 = 31.8% of protein on a daily basis worldwide).
For this data set, the dominance of wheat and rice at a global scale comes primarily from high consumption in Asia. Rice does surprise me a lot; I often think of rice as a source of carbohydrate. Perhaps Asians, like me, eat rice a lot that we indeed get considerable amount of protein from rice as well! (See the figure right above for how you can use tab III and its map on the app to explore the data for each region)
Each region indeed relies on different local commodities/food sources to fulfill protein demands. For example, “Maize and products” rank #1, providing 22% for the locals in Eastern Africa.
The contribution of animal products like “Milk” remains pretty considerable ~10% at a global level. Some regions still rely primarily on animal products, like South America, which gets ~15% of protein from “Poutry meat”.
Overall, I see that animals (and animal products) are one of the main, yet not the largest sources of protein for the majority of the world as I used to believe growing up.
(…to be fair, I should’ve also included data on population per region to back up this statement, and don’t forget the fact that amimals do eat plants to get their protein in the first place!).

Codes for the app, as well as credits for all the codes I’ve built upon, are available at https://github.com/paulkasemsap/DailyProteinSource.

category: thoughts
tag: science food plant

Paul Kasemsap

พรพิพัฒน์ เกษมทรัพย์

Where do we get protein in our daily diets?

Major sources of protein?

Let’s visualize the data

(My) key take-home messages:

Read more thoughts: