Global Patterns of Food, Nutrition and Health

Human health and nutrition are unevenly distributed across the globe, and geographers use a battery of quantitative indicators to map and explain these differences. Three of the most widely used measures are daily calorie (energy) intake, health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), and infant mortality. Together they capture not only how long people live but how much of that life is lived in good health, and how vulnerable the youngest members of a population are.

Daily calorie supply measures the food energy available per person, usually expressed in kilocalories per day. The Food and Agriculture Organization suggests that an average adult requires roughly 2,000 to 2,500 kcal per day depending on age, sex, body size, and activity. In high-income countries the average supply often exceeds 3,40