Calorie Counts On Menus Have Virtually No Impact On What We Eat
I does for me. I don't eat out much because it is hard to find healthy food. Many of the signature meals are over 1100 calories. I suspect it is a lot of added sugar.
Read the rest at the link.As of May last year, all American restaurant chains with 20 or more outlets have been legally obliged to provide calorie counts on their menus in a bid to help people make less fattening choices. So how's that going then?
Not so well if the latest study – the largest to date on how calorie information affects consumer purchases – is anything to go by.
The setting for the study, published in the British Medical Journal was a large franchise of a national fast-food company with three different restaurant chains located in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi (you can do the sleuthing and come up with some theories as to who this might be, but the franchisees who handed over data didn’t get active permission from head office to name the restaurant, so the authors couldn’t divulge).
104 outlets were involved in the analysis, all of which added calorie information to their in-store and drive-thru menus in April 2017. Weekly aggregated sales data was made available to the researchers from the pre-labeling (April 2015 to April 2017) period to up until April 2018 – a year after labeling implementation. That’s a whole lot of data – around 50 million transactions – and a far longer follow-up than most previous evaluations of food labeling interventions.
Virtually no impact…