The big game is nearly upon us! To celebrate this most snack-tastic of sporting events, we took a look at MyFitnessPal’s database to see who’s eating (and drinking) what. In the spirit of friendly competition, we broke the numbers down by gender and age — see how your demographic teams stack up.
Booze By Numbers
Right behind July 4th, Super Bowl Sunday was the second biggest beer day of the year in 2014. With all of this guzzling going down, the question is: who drank the most beer, Team Men or Team Women? Drum roll please…Team Men. By a lot.
Men drank 144% more beer — almost two and a half times more — than women. With an eye toward playing fair, we also examined wine consumption on the big day. Here, the tables were turned, with women drinking 25% more wine than men, though men still drank more booze overall. I’m not sure who I’d say is winning in this scenario — we’ll leave that judgement call up to you, dear readers.
Now, let’s break this down by age. What age group would you guess drinks the most beer on game day? If, like me, you guessed Team Twenties, you’re in for a surprise: despite their reputation for being the party decade, MyFitnessPal members aged 21-30 drank 18% less beer than members aged 31-60.
Curious, like very cute cats, we also looked into whether Super Bowl winners or losers drink more. Interestingly, last year, MyFitnessPal members in the winning city of the Seattle Seahawks drank 12% more beer than those in the losing city of the Denver Broncos. However, looking at the year before, the trend doesn’t hold: members in the losing city of San Francisco drank 6% more than the winners in Baltimore. No clear answer to this one.
The Pizza Playoffs
With the drinking disputes settled, let’s take a time-out to talk about snacks. Breaking it down by gender, Team Men showed a clear lead: men ate 15% more pizza and 37% more wings than women on Super Bowl Sunday last year.
The numbers also tell an interesting story when we look at pizza consumption by age: the older you are, the less pizza you eat. Indeed, comparing the two ends of the spectrum, MyFitnessPal members aged 18-20 eat more than two and half times as much pizza as members over 70 years old. Maybe with wisdom and time, I, too, will be able to resist the gooey temptation of mozzarella.
If all this snack talk has made you hungry, check out these 15 Favorite Game Day Food Recipes, which are all under 300 calories!
Methodology: All of the data reported here is in terms of percentage of foods logged on MyFitnessPal. For example, we counted up how many food entries on Super Sunday last year contained the word “pizza” and put that over the overall number of food entries for that day. Voila! You have a measure of how popular that food was, relative to all of the other foods logged on that day. To drill down further, we calculated that number separately for all of the groups of interest (e.g., men, women, different age ranges, etc.). All data used was de-identified and completely anonymous.
