Calorie conversion factors

If you are interested in calorie consumption, you need to convert the amounts of food consumption (collected from household surveys) to obtain the data. Annex 1 of FAO (2001)'s Food Balance Sheets: A Handbook provides the conversion factors (how many kilo calories 100 grams of food contain) for a wide variety of foods for international use.

Another source of data is USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (R25), used by Galor and Özak (2014) to convert FAO-GAEZ potential yields data into calorie yields.

For India, consult Gopalan, Sastri, and Balasubramanian's book entitled Nutritive Value of Indian Foods (Hyderabad: National Institute of Nutrition, 1971), which Subramanian and Deaton (1996) used in their study on the income elasticity of calorie consumption.