It is now well accepted among nutritionists that excessive consumption of cereals is actually harmful to to health and can lead to problems such as high cholesterol, triglycerides, diabetes and fatness. In response to this, we have a number of new-fad diets such as the paleo and the keto and the Atkins which restrict intake of cereals. Even though the number of people practicing such diets might be low, in general there seems to be a trend away from cereal consumption.
Anyway, yesterday Mint put out a set of charts on malnutrition in India and the relative success of the Public Distribution System (in terms of prices for the end-consumer and nutrition only – not in terms of efficiency). What caught my attention was the last chart – the one on per capita cereal consumption in rural and urban areas.
I wasn’t comfortable with the dynamic chart on the Mint website (they have a slightly better multiple-column chart in the paper this morning), so I redrew it using lines. I’m still not sure if drawing it using lines (since the X-axis is deciles which is ordered but strictly not numerical) is the most appropriate but haven’t been able to find a better way to draw it so here goes.
The Mint piece talks only about the ratio of consumption of top and bottom deciles in rural and urban areas and stop by saying that in urban areas the poorest consume more cereal than the richest. The “trends” in the above two lines tells me a different story, though.
As you see, as we go towards the right (i.e. richer people), consumption of cereal in urban areas (the red line) actually drops! I would put this down to greater health-consciousness among the richer people of urban areas who are cutting down on cereals (either voluntarily or following the discovery of a lifestyle disease such as diabetes or cholesterol).
The blue rural line doesn’t show the same effect though – in fact, the richer you get the more cereal you consume if you are in a rural area. It either means that rural people are immune to lifestyle diseases (unlikely), or their lifestyles means that they aren’t as affected by lifestyle diseases as urban people (rather more likely) or that their lifestyle diseases go undiagnosed (perhaps even more likely) or that they have no choice but to eat cereals (unlikely again) or non-cereal sources of nutrition are too expensive for even the rich in the rural areas because of which they just consume more cereal.
Nevertheless, the trend shown in this graph is extremely interesting, and definitely shows among other things the power of aggregation when it comes to analysing data!