At a recent visit to a chain restaurant, I noticed that the description of each menu item included information about calories and fat. I immediately lost my appetite, but eventually relented and ordered a salad. On the way out, I asked the manager whether the new nutritional information had changed what customers were ordering.
“Not in the least,” he said. “Nobody seems to care.”
If you haven’t already seen it, fat and calorie information is now required for all restaurants with 20 or more locations (and on vending machines owned by companies that operate 20 or more machines). The FDA’s goal is pretty clear: Stem the tide of the rising obesity epidemic—the same goal they’ve had since 1994, when they required labels on packaged food that list a product’s calories, serving size, number of servings per package, and more.
Unfortunately, those well-intentioned labels didn’t work in ’94 (In fact, over the last 20 years, obesity rates for both adults and children have roughly doubled) and they’re not going to work now. That restaurant manager was absolutely right: Nobody cares. The problem is that most of us don’t really understand what all that info on fat and calories actually means.
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