A new study shows that healthier diets are associated with higher amounts of food waste.

Here's an nugget of information for you to chew on the next time you're scraping plates or cleaning out the fridge: The average person living in the United States wastes nearly a pound of food every day, which works out to around 30 percent of the average American's daily calories. Perhaps most curiously, it's the people who eat the healthiest that throw away the most food.

In a way, it's not surprising. A healthy diet contains more fruits and vegetables, which are prone to spoil faster than processed or pre-packaged foods. But it does suggest an unfortunate disconnect between what we choose to put into our bodies and our awareness of its effect on the environment, because every time we throw away food, we're also throwing away the resources that went into growing and making it.

This finding comes from an open-access study published last month in PLOS. Its authors wanted to investigate the relationship between consumer food waste, diet quality, nutrient waste, and embodied agricultural resources, something that hasn't really been done before. The authors compiled data from the 2015 Healthy Eating Index, the US Department of Agriculture's What We Eat in America database, and food waste data. The food waste amounts were self-reported by individuals and do not include restaurants. From the study: