Our figure of the month at Christmas 2017: Roast or biscuits – what's the favourite for X-mas?

19.12.2017

Men and women prefer different kinds of food, as can be seen on the figure below. According to the national food monitor provided by the German Federal Ministry for Food and Agriculture (BMEL) based on a survey from 2014, men like consuming bread and meat in particular, whereas women prefer fruit and vegetables.

However, milk and milk products hold the highest share of consumption with both sexes. Women ingest 184 g and men 205 g of this product group per day. Amongst women, fruit, fruit products and dried fruit are in second (158 g per day) and vegetables, funghi and pulse (142 g per day) in third place on the menu. With men, bread and bread rolls (156 g per day) and meat and meat products come in second and third place.

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Further differences between the food preferences become obvious when looking at different age groups: Interestingly, younger women (aged 22 to 50) consume less of the food groups mentioned above compared with elder ones (aged 51 to 80). With younger men, the average consumption level is by far higher than in the group with men aged 50 years and older. Elder men eat especially less milk products (-25%) than younger ones, whereas men’s consumption of potatoes and potato products as well as fruit and fruit products / dried fruit rise with age. Besides, both women and men aged 50 plus consume less cereals and grain products (except for bread and bread rolls) than the younger age groups. Whilst younger women eat more meat than older ones, the meat consumption per capita remains the same with men irrespective of their age. The same applies to the consumption of confectionery and sweets of women, which does nocht change with age. However, elder men eat less confectionery and sweets compared with younger ones.

source: results from the national food monitoring, survey 2014, MRI, BMEL (213, 123), own graphics

Other figures can be found here.

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