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.
