Using surveys from the massive National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, they found that women reported food intakes of about 1,600 to 2,200 kilocalories per day, while men reported intakes of 2,000 to 3,000. That would leave a rough average for all adults of somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 kilocalories per day. To discourage overconsumption, and to have a nice round number to work with, they rounded down to 2,000, and that’s the number that stuck. Now you know who to blame if you thought that the typical American eats a 2,000-kilocalorie diet.
