Menu Labeling Controversy Reaches Congress
California and New York City already require chains to display calorie counts alongside menu items, but if two Members of Congress have their way, menu labeling legislation will soon apply to chains and fast food restaurants throughout the nation. The Menu Education and Labeling (MEAL) Act introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) would go even farther than existing state and local regulations by requiring chains to disclose fat, carbohydrate and salt content on their printed menus. The food industry, of course, is supporting a more palatable bill with an equally snappy acronym...
Health advocates believe that when people see the amount of calories, fat and salt in meals before they order them, they will gravitate to more healthful selections.
"Consumers play an impossible guessing game trying to make healthier choices in restaurants," said Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Who would guess that a large chocolate shake at McDonald's has more calories than two Big Macs or that a multigrain bagel at Dunkin' Donuts has 140 more calories than a jelly doughnut?"
The restaurant industry is pushing a competing bill. The Labeling Education and Nutrition Act, nicknamed the LEAN Act, would require chains with more than 20 units to post calorie counts. It also would nullify state and local measures now in effect and preempt future regional measures.
The bill, H.R. 2426, has already attracted 34 cosponsors in the House and is awaiting consideration by the Energy and Commerce Committee.
H.R. 2426—The Menu Education and Labeling Act [THOMAS]
Menu labeling bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers [The Los Angeles Times]
(Photo: menu calories)
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Comments:
I hope this plays out where I can still read my menu selections as McDonald's, because when I'm looking up at that menu, I'll only be looking for the price, as I'll still be ordering a large chocolate shake to go with my two Big-macs.
@Quatre707: Agreed. If your going to McDonald's in the first place, your goal probably isn't to eat healthy.
Why does this only apply to chains and fast food joints? Any legislation should apply to everyone selling prepared food.
@HIV 2 Elway:
and just how should the small mom & pop store afford to get all their menu items evaluated for nutritional content each time they make a menu change?
@HIV 2 Elway: because non-chains actually have things like chefs. The food is not standard but is adjusted regularly, and often individual dishes will have variations to make them taste good.
@Adam Stewart: I don't see how that's Congress' concern... If you want to sell food to the general public, you should have to make it compliant. It's just another cost of doing business.
Most chain restaurants will give this information on request anyways, or even already have it posted somewhere in the store. Combine that with the fact that most people already know that eating out isn't healthy, this bill is just plain dumb and useless. This will just clutter up the menus and provide an inaccurate health content, where people will associate low calories and fat as being healthy.
Why stop at calories? Why not list every ingredient next to menu item?
Put it all in a pamplet and have a big sign pointing to them and be done with it.
Get out of my life, government!
@supercereal: Anyone serious about eating healthy probably would not go to one of these restaurants. If they did, I'm sure they will have enough info to determine what they want before they get there.
@supercereal: It is congresses concern when doing so would put independent restaurants out of business! It's easy to comply with a labeling law when you have dozens of locations serving the same except portions of the same bland food every day. Not so easy for the small indepedent and gourmet restaurants serving real food...
My favorite restaurant is owned by the chef, and employs his entire family -- congress made an exception to the child labor law for exactly this sort of situation.
The restaurant has no fixed menu, the chef makes what he feels like each day, and writes it on a large chalkboard. Tell me how he is supposed to comply with a nutritional labeling law?
@HiPwr: Write to your legislators. If you don't want the government interfeering with you life, you need to tell them. Otherwise they will just keep stopping by. Just remember one written letter equalls 500 people, so it's better to write then email.
@ChicagoKev: If the law is in the interest of protecting consumers, it should apply to all food vendors. Rather this seems like some PR bullshit in an effort to pander for votes or a way to stick it to the deep pockets of fast food restaurants. The notion that only chain restaurants sell unhealthy food is laughable.
i'm all in favor of labelling. if i don't know the carb count i have to guess my insulin dose. most of the time i just eat somewhere with nutritional labelling already in place rather than mess up my blood sugar.
now if restaurants did what HiPwr suggested and listed ALL their ingredients i wouldn't have to worry about my allergies as much.
While they're at it, they should provide a "calories per gram" stat, because serving sizes are utterly retarded.
Cookie in a snack pack (containing 4 cookies), serving size == 4 cookies (1 per container)
Cookie in a big pack (containing 30 cookies), serving size == 6 cookies (5 per container, I guess 7.5 servings per container was too wacky for them).
/snack pack should be increased to 6 cookies :D
I think this is a waste of money. I also have a hard time imagining any adult not understanding what is and is not healthy for you. Is it really that trivial when you go to Wendy's to decide which is healthier, a Baconator or the Grilled Chicken Sandwhich?
@MichClay: Its a little hard when the salads billed as "healthy: actually have more calories than a fried sandwich. I live on Long Island, and so whenever I go into the city I see the menus with the calorie counts on them - and I'm routinely shocked by what seemingly healthy foods are actually packed with more calories than their less-healthy-appearing counterparts. (For instance, a bran muffin have 110 more calories than a blueberry muffin).
Its not always obvious, and I find it very helpful for those situations when I'm grabbing something quick. It doesn't crowd the menu like some of you suggest, and people's decision making times aren't longer or anything like that.
I really don't see why so many of you are against MORE information!
Not really a fan, especially in places like Dunkin Donuts, where it lists "Donuts 200 -800 Calories"
Plus there is the fact, that others have stated above, you shouldn't be focusing solely on caloric content when making eating decisions
It worked for me. On a recent visit to a Tully's coffee in Seattle, I learned that my favorite large Intense Chocolate beverage has 720 calories. I picked the medium chai latte at 220 instead. Yikes.
I'm all for this. Granted there is more to health than simply calories, but this will at least apply to the obesity epidemic. You will have people who dont care about the numbers and will eat a 2000 calorie meal anyway, true, but countless others may think twice and order something a little less bad. I can't see how that's a bad thing. You probably stand a better chance of getting people thinner like this than preaching something more proactive like going to the gym 4-5x a week and working out for an hour. That's an investment. Having calorie counts renders it a choice...something most people have a much easier time doing.
@ChicagoKev: If you know the nutritional content of all the items in the kitchen, then the nutritional content of a meal should be, somewhat roughly, the sum of its parts. If this chef can count or actually made an effort, he should be able to be compliant.
Frankly, I don't care how your favorite restaurant would go about complying with such a (theoretical) law. Should all independent restaurants also be exempt from health codes because "it's too hard and costly to comply?" If you serve food to the public, you have a certain set of business regulations you have to follow.
As HIV 2 Elway pointed out, make it all or nothing when it comes to labeling. It's completely irrational (though typical around here) to claim that independent restaurants are automatically and unquestionably "better" and "healthier" than all chain and fast food restaurants.
Why are ignorant people complaining about the government on this? Anyone who sells food should be mandated to provide Fat, Calorie, etc, count on each item just like buying prepacked food at the Supermarket. And don't give me this "The Restaurant like McDonalds will provide this infomation to you" when infact I have asked about such a paper in McDonalds and was told that they didn't have any papers with this info and that I should check their website for nutrional information, so that's that for accountablity from the chains.
@HiPwr: I'm not for the government regulating everything either, but this is honestly for people's own good. If you're healthy, you can probably deal with the 500 calorie fribble once in a while. If you are overweight, it may not make you choose a salad, but maybe you wont get the burger with everything and will choose something slightly healthier. Of course only eating right AND exercise will get you truly healthier, but more people eat than work out in earnest, so this isnt as bad as it seems. And the government isnt telling you what to eat..simply what the cost of it is heathwise to eat unhealthy food. If you want to eat it, eat it, but you've been notified.
@bigd7387: I dont trust the restuarant to give me the accurate info anyway. There is no way this is a bad thing. Whether it actually helps out at all only time will tell. They should probably also post the carb content as well since that factors into weight gain too.
@bigd7387: You can't be serious about this, right? So you expect the local hotdog vendor to provide you with calorie count, fat, and salt content? Hopefully, that's just the way you worded it.
@skizsrodt: So those who go to these establishments (once, twice, or everyday, doesn't matter) should be kept ignorant of the content of their meals simply because other people assume they must not care in the first place?
@HiPwr: Sorry to tell you, but this is not an instance of the gub'mint being "in your life."
This legislation does not remove items from the food supply nor does it tell you how much of what you can eat and at what intervals. It simply requires that information be provided in an accessible, consumer-friendly location.
So maybe.. calm down.
At this risk of sounding too insider-trading, from what I'm told by people fairly familiar with the situation, this is actually what the chains want. The big companies, like McDonald's, don't actually care about having to provide the information or put it on menus; they just don't want every state, county, city, and town to have their own, different, set of requirements. That's exactly how it's been playing out, with some governments requiring just calories, some calories/fat/carbs, some requiring particular placement and font size, etc. A national, uniform menu labeling act is much, much preferable.
@HIV 2 Elway: This is a state issue at most. More federal government poking their head in where they have no business.
@veg-o-matic: Federal government has no business being in this. This is a state issue at best. Perhaps not even that.
This is NOT enough. The Government needs to BAN CALORIES!!
@supercereal: Right, so lets include the carbs, protein, fat, and sodium content up on the menu, too.
Heck, why not the ingredients for every single item?
@hedonia: The information is already on each restaurant's website.
That aside, calories don't make something "unhealthy". Fat and sodium does. But people should be making their own decisions.
@bigd7387: Supermarkets aren't the ones required to post nutritional info. The product manufacturers are.
@hedonia: I love it how someone on a diet orders a salad and puts tons of dressing all over it like just because they are eating a salad its healthy.
@MooseOfReason: That aside, calories don't make something "unhealthy". Fat and sodium does.
Actually, none of the above make something "unhealthy".
Healthy and unhealthy should only be applied to a person's entire diet over time, not to individual foods within said diet.
IE, I can eat a tasty pulled pork sandwich, high in fat and sodium. But, I will be fine because I don't eat that every day of my life. On another day, I might have a simple grilled chicken salad with vinaigrette dressing. Which is low in calories (well it is the way I make it, I use more vinegar than oil about 6 parts V to 1 part oil. OTOH, I have seen some recipes call for a 1V to 3O ratio).
People need to move away from the concept that a given food is "bad". Everything is bad for you in excess, even drinking too much water can be fatal to you (it dilutes the sodium in your system and makes your brain swell, you know sodium, that stuff that's supposed to be bad for you).
Soon Congress will consider the Lunch And Regular Dinner bill requiring disclosure of the fat content of each Member of Congress. Seriously people, if nutritional information is valuable, and the average American cannot (or won't) bother to obtain that information, why should fast food chains be subject but the sandwich shop down the street, which serves the same menu 365 days a year, is exempt? I can understand that the chef-driven restaurants which vary their ingredients daily would probably be driven nuts by such a law, and their prices probably limit their clientele anyway, but making a chain post information solely because it is a chain is just not right.
@supercereal: Food changes when you cook it. That's, you know, why we cook it. If your position is that the science involved is simply "adding," your position has some indefensibly weak foundations.
This kind of regulation is graduated out of necessity and practicality. The world doesn't conform to simple, uniform absolute dictum and if that is something you don't care about then, respectfully, that's your problem. Everyone else will continue to try to deal with the reality you choose to ignore.
This has nothing to do with healthy food. Elitist BS. I don't see how you can have a double standard for chain restaurants and not for "mom and pop" joints. Food is food right?
@supercereal: Actually, s study recently said that it didn't matter whether your diet was low fat, low carb, or high protein. What really mattered was that you ate less total calories. Now, that would be great if casual dining and fast food places didn't put such an excessive amount of salt in their products. I think calories is a good place to start though.
@catastrophegirl - manic first time home buyer: Heh. You don't WANT to know what some of these places are putting in their food.
I wonder how much money a year the guy who comes up with these snappy acronyms makes?
TARP, MEAL, LEAN, ETC...
That's got to be a cherry gig!
You want to pony up the $ to get every dish tested for the non-chain restaurants? And every time they change their menu, which for many such restaurants is daily?
If you assume that position, we must assume you are anti-non-chain-restaurant, because they would all instantly be out of business.
@YouDidWhatNow?: No, I just think that laws should apply to all and not specific sub groups. Personally, I think mandating this is bullshit but if legislation is needed all sellers of food should have to comply.
Simply posting calorie counts next to menu items is borderline useless, and, if anything, can mistakenly lead people to believe they're eating something that's more healthy than it actually is. Anyone serious about actually eating healthy will look for, as MEAL seems to propose, the fat, sodium, carb, protein, etc. content of a dish.