American businesses have been required to spend billions of dollars over the past few years to comply with federal regulations requiring calorie information on all menus.
Despite all that effort, Americans are still fat and getting fatter.
California, in 2008, became the first state to pass mandatory menu labeling laws. Like many nanny state ideas that begin on our left coast, other states began to follow the example. In 2010, as part of the Affordable Care Act, Congress made calorie labeling mandatory for all chain restaurants with at least 20 locations, though businesses were given until 2014 to comply with the new mandate.
HAVE YOU HAD YOUR 4,000 CALORIES TODAY? most people don’t really understand what a calorie actually is. For the record, it’s equal to 4.1814 joules – or the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Health advocates and others who pushed for that provision’s inclusion in the ACA said it would help Americans to better understand what they are eating (and why we keep getting fatter).
But what if most Americans don’t care?
As FiveThirtyEight pointed out more than a year ago, people who dopay attention to calorie information tend to eat fewer calories.
The problem is, most people don’t pay attention — even when it’s required to be on the menu.
And even if you are paying attention, most people don’t really understand what a calorie actually is. For the record, it’s equal to 4.1814 joules — or the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Sara Bleich, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that instead of numbers that people don’t understand, menus should instead come with a listing of how much physical activity would be necessary to burn off that amount of food.
It’s a novel idea, perhaps one that can be made mandatory in the next package of health care regulations that pass through Congress.
In the meantime, the existing menu-labeling rule is more than 500 pages long and requires a team of lawyers to understand. As Cato points out, the rules are anything but simple and straightforward — no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the ACA, of course — and are full of exceptions.
Daily specials aren’t required to list calorie totals, unless they recur on a weekly or monthly basis. A made-to-order sandwich doesn’t have to be labeled (although all the potential ingredients do), while a premade sandwich does.
The new requirement has cost businesses as much as $1.5 billion, according to the Obama administration. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, believes the actual cost is significantly higher.
On a per-business level, Cato says the labeling mandate costs between $49,000 and $77,000, according to HHS. But since the average food service employee costs his or her employer about $22,000 annually, those fancy calorie-labeled menus have set every food service business in America back by two to three employees while not doing a damn thing to increase productivity or profit.
What have consumers gotten for all that expense? Not a whole lot. Americans are still fat, and getting fatter.
In fact, nearly half of all consumers don’t even recall seeing the calorie information that is posted on those glossy menus in fast food joints, according to a recent study by Arizona State University. Only 16 percent of people in the study said they registered the information and used it when making their selections.
We’re willing to concede that putting calorie information on menus is a good idea — perhaps even an idea that businesses should voluntarily embrace in order to better inform their customers. Certainly some businesses would gain a market advantage byproviding that information to caloric-conscious consumers.
But in the world of the nanny staters, everything good is mandatory and all bad ideas are banned — no matter the costs of benefits involved.
Source: Watchdog.org
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