We are coming up on one year since Hans Rosling's passing. As a small homage, I thought I'd share some animations I made last year using FAO food data.

These little movies tell the story of a remarkably stable, inverse relation between a country's GDP and its intake of carbohydrates. As a country's GDP rises, its population consumes less carbs. This phenomenon is more or less well documented in the literature, but I have never seen a good visual representation of it. Inspired and emboldened by Hans' work at Gapminder, I decided to make some myself.

Movie 1: Carb share of the daily calorie intake per capita plotted against GDP per capita (logged) from 1970 to 2013.

Note China's dramatic movement from an 80% starchy diet to a 60% starchy diet.

But what replaces the carbs in all those people's diets? The only other options are fat and protein. Which do you think it is? I've often heard the opinion that it's protein, based on the argument that rising incomes (assumed to follow naturally from GDP growth) allow consumers to treat themselves to more steak dinners.

Meanwhile, the data say this (Movie 2):

(It's fat.) As GDP per capita rises, diets become less starchy and more fatty, while protein intake remains about the same.

But what's most astonishing (to me, anyway) is just how tight the relationship is--expressible as a simple mathematical equation (left as an exercise for the reader, since Steemit does not yet support mathjax).

Thanks for all the fresh insights, Hans. I shall do my best not to panic.

P.S. - For those curious as to how I produced these animations: I did the graphs for each individual year using ggplot() in R, saved them using ggsave(), and then compiled the 40 or so resulting .png files into a .gif using imagemagick. The imagemagick part must be executed from the command prompt using this code:

convert -delay 30 -loop 0 *.png file_name.gif

You adjust the speed of the animation by changing the number 30.