CIA 1983: American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious.

It's difficult to compare diets across countries like this because of differences in lifestyle and genetics. I am actually a nutritionist but it's like 2 am here, I'll run some numbers tomorrow and double check this but I suspect it's probably right.

So it turns out this is actually super hard to analyse by modern standards (I am also coming at it from another country with different guidelines again, which complicates it a bit) so take all of what I'm saying with a pretty hefty grain of salt.

We don't group foods together like this any more, but it seems to have been the done thing back in the '80s-'90s so I'm a bit out of my depth. These days potatoes wouldn't be lumped in with grain / carbohydrates, they'd count as vegetables. Likewise eggs wouldn't go with dairy, they'd go with meat and fish as protein.

Calorie intake depends heavily on demographics; age, sex, physical activity level, etc, so it's really hard to assess for huge populations like this and there's fuck all information about the USSR in that area from this time. Generally speaking though, NHS recommends 2000cal/day for women and 2500 for men. So, they're both way over on that, but the USA is over by more. WHO recommends no more than 10% daily energy from sugar. Again, they're both over on that, but the USA is over by a lot more. Fats are recommended to be 20%-35% of daily energy; this article doesn't account for fats from dairy or meat so the numbers quoted here are low, and impossible to separate out. I did, however, find a journal article from 1985 while trying to work all this out. This one puts men aged 40-59 at 2567cal/day in the USSR and 2554cal/day in USA; a 13 calorie difference (that's about half an ounce of apple) with USSR higher, but a lot closer to modern NHS guidelines for both. For the USSR; 38% from fat vs. 40% from fat in USA. Again, both over, but USA over by more.

In conclusion, this data is badly categorised, way too high-level, and too over-generalised to really draw much of value from, but speaking really broadly, yeah. About the same amount of food. Neither is ideal, but the Soviet diet is probably slightly better. I'd really, really like to see the sources they used.
- Interesting, thank you!

Those numbers seem way high. I wonder if the individuals studied were soldiers. I would have a hard time eating 3500 calories in a day and I'm 6'2"

Permanently Deleted
that's about 2 large sized big mac combos w refills from mcdonalds, it's only difficult if you're live somewhere without fast food or have your own dietary restrictions or your a observing jewish soviet russian living in siberia in the 1970's
Yeah, it is very high. Other sources place intake a shade above 2500cal/day for their selected demographic. I really wonder where they're getting their data from.

Okay, it wasn't socialist though.

Also why are MLoids always putting up these desperate defensive posts about the USSR or Stalin when they aren't relevent politically anymore and nobody asked about or gives a shit about your favorite state-capitalist model.

something that looks like Trotskyism, sounds like Trotskyism, smells like Trotskyism...

Anyway answering your question, the reason behind such post is just defense against misleading info about ussr that is still actively spreading despite ussr is dead for 30 years.
- Are the Trotskyists in the room with us right now?
  
  Lmao Trotsky didn't call the USSR capitalist. He called it a "degenerated worker's state" (a category he made up) and thought all that was necessary was for the bureaucracy to be overthrown and for him to be put in charge. The trajectory of the USSR wouldn't have turned out much different.
  
  Of course you're probably learning this for the first time and you're just using Trotskyism as some kind of weird insult lol.

Does this take into consideration they were washing it down with vodka?

Due to evolution, people will generally prefer to eat more calorically dense foods like meat, fat, and sugar whenever it's an option. In the west people could afford more meat, fat, and sugar, while people in the USSR could only afford a smaller amount of that, so they had no choice but to consume cheaper food like grain and eggs.

The difference in their diets wasn't intentional, it was merely the result of westerners having more ability to acquire what they wanted, while soviets were stuck with what they could get.

Additionally, every part of the world has different regional cuisines that are based on what ingredients were historically available and cultural norms. So even if you compare the diets of two societies that are otherwise equal in most ways (like UK vs. US) there will always be significant differences in what they eat.

Nothing about the aims of socialism can be inferred from this report.

If you take into account the effects of subsidies (which are social programs) on the availability of certain types of foods and how lobbying efforts form which subsidies make their way into law and practice, the aims of different forms of social programs definitely can be inferred. Further, the dollars spent on lobbying efforts come indirectly from the profitability of certain industries under given subsidy programs, so that sort of magnifies the effects of those dollars, based on where and what industries they are focused on.

These are all choices made by societies, indirectly or directly, at some level. None of them are just given. There's definitely an influence from differing environmental factors (land use, suitability and availability, differing climates, soil types, etc across the globe), but none of them have to be the way they ended up.

All of that may be outside the scope of this report, but they are definitely contributing factors. Summed up, they speak to the aims of a given social structure.

The separation of per cent like looks really weird. I knew that was the origin, but I never thought it was used like that recently.

Also meat is actually very nutritious. Lots of vitamins and minerals in meat.

Honestly , I still think the soviet union was bad and restricted human rights. True communism will look much different.

I always say, true communism isn't possible without true democracy. Leaders must be elected in elections that actually matter.

It's likely not something that is possible with first past the post voting, or any ordinal voting system. A cardinal voting system could do it. My current favorite is STAR.
- it's baffling to me that voting (or democracy for that matter) for a lot of people means, electing a person every 4-5 years and expecting them to be "good" leaders.
  
  if the process isn't directly tied to accountability at all times, how is that democracy? you elect lesser of many evils (in most places you won't even have more than 2 "eligible" candidates) and that's it?
  
  whatever voting system you have, it will not solve this systemic problem.
- No election should be anything other than proportional. Even better is sortition. However you need an apparatus very different from a liberal democracy to make it work, which is good, we need to stop making governments that look like liberalism. Which is a core part of the failure of the soviet union and communism to date, that saying you're doing socialism isn't enough, we need novel organization of people.
- Pedantry corner: Communism's goal is to achieve a communist society, which is defined by being stateless. In a true communist society there would be no need for elections nor government. Now, how to actually get there... is where people disagree, especially anarchists and marxists.
  
  Back on topic, I think the electoral system Cuba and Vietnam use are already a better starting point. There are no parties (parties are allowed to exist but they don't run in elections, not even the Communist Party), every candidate is independent and they cannot self-nomimate or be placed by someone higher-up, they must be nominated by their community, and everyone gets an equal opportunity to run their campaign.
  
  Here's a video about Vietnamese elections
  
  And here's one about Cuba
Why tf where you downvoted... The Soviet Union was a bastardized autocraty masquerading as a worker's State.
true communist (like true anything else) is only possible if there are no people involved.
- The phrasing may be poor, but it remains that communism historically has pursued lateral and decentralized power distribution.

IS that why there were bread lines in Soviet Russia, because of all the plentiful nutritious calories freely on offer, lol, fuck off

It depends on the timeframe, in the 1980s, there were no bread lines because food was plentiful.

During the main timeframe where there were bread lines, the US had soup lines.

Life under the Soviets was a marked improvement for the Russian people compared to life under the Tsars (not so much for the satellite states of the Soviet Union, those people were often actively harmed by being part of the union.)
- SNAP is america's invisible breadline
- American media and government would never represent soup lines as a systematic failure, instead of poverty being deserved.
  
  How easily the narrative emerges that the same situation in one case reflects repression and in the other generosity.
- We get soup, we win!

Yeah, all that people in Holodomor were so well fed.

do you think cia was hyping up ussr? do you think this report dated 1983 is talking about the situation in 1932?