Calories on Menus Don't Cut Calorie Counts
Uh, duh! Not sure that was the point of the calories-on-menus laws, enacted by many states and cities, including New York City and California.
Slapping calories on menus was intended to help people make healthier choices, not compel fast food chains to slim down their offerings.
So, it should be no surprise that even with calories printed on menus, many restaurant foods are still packed with calories, and salt.
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest CSPI, requiring restaurants to post calories on their menus hasn't influenced them to make their food any healthier. We still have bacon cheeseburgers with 920 calories, and noodle dishes with 1,820 calories and 7,690 milligrams of salt. Shocking!
CSPI officials hoped places like Outback Steakhouse, The Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang's, and California Pizza Kitchen might want to improve the nutrition of their food when the calories-on-menus laws were enacted, but they didn't, and are now being accused of "caloric extremism."
The CSPI appears to be hoping for some measure of social responsibility, i.e. companies doing the right thing without having to be told to do so. Sorry, that concept only exists in business class textbooks.
Lawmakers and public health advocates can scheme all they want, but initiatives like calories-on-menus will always fail - not to say we shouldn't give new ideas a try - Americans love bad food and big chain restaurants are more than happy to feed us what we want - nom, nom, nom.
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Created / Updated: July 20, 2010
QUOTE:
"Lawmakers and public health advocates can scheme all they want, but initiatives like calories-on-menus will always fail "
No, they are not failures. They succeed in giving information to people. What we do with that information is up to us, as it should be.
ReplyI agree. Success and failure depends on what you're measuring. If you look only at how the restaurants change their menu, that' one outcome.
But you'd be ignoring how people change their selections based on the calorie info. contained therein.
The ultimate goal is better food choices and better health outcomes. Whether that happens because the food industry changes the menu or the consumers change what they eat doesn't matter as much.
ReplyI love having the count on the menu and use them all the time. If enough people order the lower calorie items, the restaurants will add more to their menus.
ReplyWhile I think it's good that consumers can now see how many calories they are about to consume, it really does come down to personal responsibility. Despite these laws, there are still people who continue to order as before and that is their choice even though we are already seeing the effects of our obese society. Creating new laws designed to force restaurants to create healthier alternatives to their menu is draconian but that's the next step if the CSPI has their way.
Like they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
ReplyI don't believe the law is a failure because it gives ME as the consumer what I want: information about what they are serving. It's up to ME to make the better choices or to halve or third servings in order to stay on my calorie plan, not the restaurant's.
It would, indeed, be great if restaurants found ways, like spa chefs do, to make great tasting food that is diet-friendly. But they're in business to make money, not to make me slim.
So, I really hope ALL restaurants are required to continue to offer caloric and nutrient breakdowns/estimates.
ReplyI agree with Jim & all of the above. I live in CA and as a fitness person, yes, I like having the info there. People can choose to read it or ignore it. That is their choice but for me, anything that may help bring awareness is good.
ReplyNo one's forcing anyone to eat fast food as it is; having the nutritional info is at least giving people a fair shot. I am slightly fascinated by how many calories restaurants are able to pack into their food items, actually. I mean, look at that 2K calorie shake that Cold Stone has...you could get your entire daily calorie needs in one milkshake. Yet there are people out there that order the shake, figuring: "Well, it's only a milkshake. It probably only has 200 or 300 calories, max". And then they wonder why they are fat or having trouble losing weight. So yeah, it's nice that they are putting the calorie counts on the menus.
Replyi'm surprised the CSPI would even expect to see a change in restaurant menus. at the end of the day, and i don't mean to sound cynical, but business is business. successful companies give their customers what they want (of course) and if people continue to buy Big Macs and don't care about the calories, McDonalds has no reason to change the recipe.
if we really want change, the public needs to proves they want healthy food through their wallets. money speaks louder than words, unfortunately.
Reply*sirens going off*
ReplyPlease.. we are not stupid, we know what's healthy to eat and what's bad for us. Please ease up on the food police routine.
I don't see this as "the food police" telling us what to eat. I see it as information *I* can use to make *my* decision. What may SEEM like a "healthy" choice quite often isn't. A salad packed with sodium and mega-calories? Maybe a sandwich is a better choice...and how would I know that WITHOUT the nutritional information?
ReplyThis is not the food police. That would be them telling a restaurant what they can and can't serve. This is just making the restaurants be responsible and provide us, the consumers, the info we need to make informed decisions.
I used to go out to restaurants several times a week and eat what I thought was healthy food. Then I got a restaurant nutritionals program for my palm and saw what I was eating and just about had a heart attack from the knowledge! I now go out to eat about once a month and even then only eat something at least kinda healthy and take half of that home! That is how unhealthy these meals are and I had no clue. The majority of people out there are just like I used to be and don't realize just how bad this stuff is. Restaurants are also constantly changing their menus, so that it is almost impossible for us to access accurate nutritionals. I bought this program for my palm last year and very few of the items are even available anymore. They are playing games with our health and this measure just allows us to know what we are eating when we make our decision on what we will be eating.
Power to the people!
ReplyIt's about high time to ban fast-food joints, period.
ReplyHow exactly do you plan to legislate this. How do you define a fast food joint? One which serves food in less than 5 minutes? How will that make food healthier?
ReplyYou can't ban fast food, but this measure could have more of them start providing some healthier choices. Did you know that McDonalds has more healthier choices available than most full service restaurant chains?
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RE: Arrowsmith - we need LESS regulation, not more. We need to take responsibility for our own decisions and actions. It's not the governments responsibility to tell us what to eat and what not to eat. We're not sheep!!
ReplyThis isn't the government telling you what to do. This is the government making large restaurants provide us, the consumers, the information we need to make informed decisions. This is something they should do on their own, but since they are not going to and since restaurant food has gone off the charts in terms of calories and fat, then this measure just might help reverse this dangerous tread and in the process give us the info we need. We were sheep before... eating what the restaurants fed us with no idea of the dangerous amount of calories in their healthy sounding choices.
This law allows me to make an informed decision about what I am putting in my body! This law allows me to more easily take my diabetic son out to eat. Til now we were very limited on where we could eat, as we had no idea of the carbohydrates in food and he needs insulin for every gram of carb he takes in. Not knowing this could result in a diabetic coma that could kill him, so this information is literally a matter of life and death to some! There are millions more just like him out there. Kids who can finally safely go out and eat. This is a good thing and any person that tries to turn it into a bad thing is drinking too much koolaid.
ReplyI think this is an important measure. How many women get a salad thinking it is healthy? This ensures the person that wants to eat healthy can. That woman will now see that her salad is over 1200 calories and look at healthier alternatives! I also think that when demand for the high calorie items starts dropping and the lower calorie ones start growing, that they will start developing healthier items. After all, the restaurant that provides healthier great tasting alternatives will be the one getting the customers that care about this. Most women care and who usually makes the decisions on where the family is eating out?
My main reason for wanting this so desperately is that my son is a Type 1 diabetic and we need to know carbohydrates and fiber of EVERYTHING he eats. His health depends on it and until now this has been hard to come by and has made eating out to be almost impossible.
ReplyThe more information given to the public, the better. It'll be interesting to see what other new measures are enacted in the future to try to help address the obesity that's running rampant in the US. Thirty years ago it was difficult at best to find places to purchase foods grown without hormones, antibiotics and harmful pesticides, and now you can even buy them right in your local big chain grocery store. Rome wasn't built in a day adn teh ball has started roling in regard to improving the health of Americans. You have to start somewhere. I think it'll also be very interesting to see what happens to the obesity rate in America another thirty years form now.
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