US Healthcare Bill Requires Restaurants to Display Calories, But Will it Help?
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Once again, that's just me, and it doesn't really speak to the accuracy of the figures.
I don't lead a particularly healthy lifestyle. I smoke & I drink, but the warning labels on those products never really altered my behavior, but for some reason the fast food calorie ones have.
Personally, I would take this as further condemnation of the calorie counting approach to health in the first place. Our ancestors did not need it, and there's nowhere in the human body to input raw calorie counts into our satiety mechanism. This is the classic hacks piled on hacks pattern, instead of fixing the root problem.
* Do you get enough of the necessary nutrients? * Do you eat so little that your body starts to reduce it's metabolism? * Do you have exercise program that continues after you stop a reduced calorie diet to rebuild the lost muscle tissue (your body burns both muscle and fat tissue when compensating for the missing calories)? * After the diet do you return to normal eating habits, or eat a diet that is balanced against your physical activity?
I'm not 100% confident about the "low carb" or "paleo" diets, but I am quite confident the standard line about fat and calorie counting being the key to losing weight is false. Science has abundantly demonstrated this. I recommend "Good Calories, Bad Calories" for a long discussion. In this case I particularly recommend the discussion about how equality symbols do not imply a causal direction.
I'm a little strident here because having dug into the issue I feel downright betrayed by people pushing "calories in/out" as if it's, well, truth. Because while the raw thermodynamics is true, everything else built on top of it is basically false.
Do you really need nutritional information hitting you in the face to realize that deep fried chicken that you're going to eat is bad for you?
It's not as if they use this information to decide between a hoagie and a salad. They use it to decide if they should get the huge hoagie or the one a couple of inches smaller.
On the other hand, having that information displayed prior to ordering not only makes it readily apparent, but it also removes the burden of forcing the consumer to be constantly carrying around past nutritional information in their head.
Also, you're making the assumption that people can make a proper choice after reading a nutritional label. I could show someone that is less informed the nutritional data for various pieces of fish (that hasn't been breaded or deep fried) and they would think the fat and cholesterol content means that it's horrible for you when in fact fish has been shown to be beneficial.
No, not necessarily.
You're comparing two poor choices ...
Of which one is most certainly less poor. Granted, neither might be optimal, but if you've reached the point that you're reading the nutrition information, chances are you've already chosen where you're going to eat. Are you saying that making the slightly healthier choice would somehow be sub-optimal given the situation?
Also, you're making the assumption that people can make a proper choice after reading a nutritional label.
Yes, and that might be the wrong assumption when given the choice between apples and oranges; however, when contemplating a large fry vs. a medium fry (or a large anything vs. a smaller version of the same thing), the proper choice should most definitely be clear.
Unfortunately the government is in the business of creating illusions. As long as we slap a label on something we create the illusion that we are making progress.
This is along the same lines that the government thinks they are making school lunches healthier by adding a fruit cup with their food but pay no attention to that fruit cup being loaded with sugar because of the heavy syrup in the container.
It just creates the illusion that we are doing something healthy, but not actually fixing the problem.
I do not believe that there is much we can do about the majority of adult Americans, but we could start shaping the future for the children and foster proper eating habits from the beginning.
I don't disagree with most of your points, but at the same time I don't see why there's any reason this law should not exist; it's easy to implement and does help some people. This law is not the health care solution; it's one tiny part of it.
I think that the article is arguing that since this law will not have a major impact on Americans' health, it should not be implemented. I'm arguing that it's a good law because it makes sense to provide basic information on food, and it's not an unreasonable hassle to do so.
First, do you think that a health conscious person really needs that label to make a choice? Chances are they are conscious enough to make the proper choice to begin with. They are also probably making choices between items that are healthier than what an average person eats from a typical fast food joint.
Second, if they are already health conscious, I would go so far as to say they, on average, use the healthcare system the least in terms of ailments caused by poor food choices. So if you take a slightly healthy person and possibly make them marginally healthier, are they really using the healthcare system less, as a whole, to make a difference?