Which of the following sentences is correct?
1) My rice consumption has been slowly reduced, as I am on a diet plan.
2) My rice intake has been slowly reduced, as I am on a diet plan.
I am not clear about the use of consumption. Can anyone clarify it?
As far as I understand it, "consumption" simply means you "used something and now it's gone", while "intake" directly means you "put something in you".
For example, you say "my gas consumption" because you used the gas to fuel your car, but you don't use "my gas intake" because you don't actually drink the gas, your car does.
In your particular case, "intake" conveys the meaning a bit better. You may consume the same amount of rice (in a sense that you're a cook and your specialty uses rice) but your rice intake is reduced (that is, you eat less rice)
HOWEVER
"consume", when used in food and beverages context, generally carries with it the connotation of eating and drinking, not merely using, therefore using "consumption" is still okay, although a clever person could weasel and intentionally misinterpret the word (as I just did)
Consumption appears after: 1. words like gas, oil, water, fuel, food, sugar, fat, energy, etc. These are things that can be consumed and are generally regularly consumed in mass quantities. 2. words like human, public, domestic, etc. These are things that can consume other things. They are high order nouns. 3. words like mass, or over/under
For your original question, either wording would be correct. However, looking at corpus data rice consumption is more frequent. That being said, the construction "my BLANK intake" is more frequent than "my BLANK consumption."
