Boston’s Museum of Science exhibition compares 25 diets from around the world

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff

You can learn quite a bit about your eating habits from perusing photos of 25 diets from around the world in a new exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston. Perhaps your diet resembles the 8,400 calories a day consumed by the orange soda-chugging Namibian truck driver. Or maybe you’re eating like the guy who troubleshoots your computer glitches over at a call center in Bangalore: He grabs what he can from the fast-food chains in the basement of his building.

The photo essay exhibit which runs through February 26th at the Museum of Science contains images showing a complete accounting of every morsel of food consumed by a particular subject in a given day with calorie counts ranging from 800 a day -- a tribal chief’s wife in the middle of a Kenyan famine -- up to 12,300 calories a day, a binge eater in Britain on the day of a binge.

It’s based on the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, by photo journalist Peter Menzel and his wife, writer Faith D’Aluisio that was published last fall. In a phone interview from his California home, Menzel told me the book cost more than $1 million -- for travel expenses, interpreters, and dietitians to analyze calorie counts -- and took over four years to complete.

The authors’ intent? “We were hoping people would see our photos and come away with a much better understanding of their own eating habits,” Menzel said, “what they’re doing right and wrong.”

To gather the photos for the book, Menzel and his wife followed some subjects for days getting a feel for how much they typically ate and exercised; he said they were dismayed to see how many foreign cities had embraced America’s fast-food lifestyle and sedentary habits.

“In China, three new Kentucky Fried Chicken chains opened every week ten years ago,” Menzel said, “now a new one opens every day.” The largest country in the world -- once hailed for its vegetarian lifestyle -- now consumes more meat per capita than a typical European country, he contends.

Thankfully, the Japanese and Okinawans, who live on a island off Japan, are still largely maintaining their traditional diet rich in fish, soy, rice, and vegetables. “The Japanese have just as stressful a lifestyle as ours, yet they surpass us in longevity,” said Menzel.

The Okinawans, whom Menzel photographed in his previous book called Hungry Planet, live even longer and that may be attributed to their 80 percent philosophy: “They stop eating when they feel 80 percent full because they understand that there’s a lag time between your stomach and brain: when you feel full you have actually surpassed that point.” That realization, he said, leads them to eat less and possibly live longer.

Deborah Kotz can be reached at dkotz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @debkotz2.